Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day’s chalking.
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.
Lord, I believe; help my unbelief’ is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.
Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.
It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God’s presence.
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.
It hardly matters how the body of Jesus came to be missing because in the last analysis what convinced the people that he had risen from the dead was not the absence of his corpse but his living presence. And so it has been ever since.
And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him the only life?
Our father. We have killed him, and we will kill him again, and our world will kill him. And yet he is there. It is he who listens at the door. It is he who is coming. It is our father who is about to be born. Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer mixture of the three.
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.
For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning – not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.
If you have never known the power of God’s love, then maybe it is because you have never asked to know it – I mean really asked, expecting an answer.
A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.
The contradiction is resolved when you realize that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love. -p83
It is within the bonds of marriage that I, for one, found a greater freedom to be and to become and to share myself thatn I can imaine ever having found in any other kind of relationship.
You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.
Unbelief is as much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn’t require much of anything at all.
I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real.
If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths.
It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around…
Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.
Once we have seen Him in a stable, we can never be sure where He will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation He will descend in His wild pursuit of men.
Matthew lists Rahab as one of the ancestresses of the Lord Jesus Christ (Matthew 1:5), and that may be one reason why there was something about free-wheeling ladies with warm and generous hearts that he was never quite able to resist.
The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a boy is born to a couple of hick Jews.
… the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both…
Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It’s the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.
The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.
To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.
Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.
God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible.
[W]e are none of us very good at silence. It says too much.
To confess your sins to God is not to tell God anything God doesn’t already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the Golden Gate Bridge.
Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical.
The sadness was I’d lost a father I had never fully found. It’s like a tune that ends before you’ve heard it out. Your whole life through you search to catch the strain, and seek the face you’ve lost in strangers’ faces.
With words as valueless as poker chips, we play games whose object it is to keep us from seeing each other’s cards.
The fatted calf, the best Scotch, the hoedown could all have been his too, any time he asked for them except that he never thought to ask for them because he was too busy trying cheerlessly and religiously to earn them.
I hold my plush monkey over the bannister and let it drop. Its eyes light up when you squeeze its kidneys as whose eyes, I suppose, would not.
You use your real voice with those you love, and you cannot be phony with those who know you well.
Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.
Compassion is sometimes the fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too.
Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness. A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death.