I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him or have Him brush your face in a breeze.
I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me
Today I wonder why it is God refers to Himself as ‘Father’ at all. This, to me, in light of the earthly representation of the role, seems a marketing mistake.
Christian spirituality was not a children’s story. It wasn’t cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment.
When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.
Relationships unlock certain parts of who we are supposed to be.
…more than a half million books, all of them smelling like dust and ink, two terrible smells that blend mystically to make something beautiful. Powells is another church to me, a paperback sort of heaven.
Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.
I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy’s notion of his father.
All this beauty exists so you and I can see His glory, His artwork. It’s like an invitation to worship Him, to know Him.
It was a haunting feeling, the sort of sensation you get when you wonder whether you are two people, the other of which does things you can’t explain, bad and terrible things.
…burying themselves in his arm was more about feeling his love in the confusion, in the difficulty, than it was about having moved past it.
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless.
To know there is a better story for your life and to choose something other is like choosing to die.
Reality is like a fine wine,” he said to me. “It will not appeal to children.
Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good…The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.
You can’t memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning to it.
A person could read the Bible, not to become smart, but rather to feel that they are not alone, that somebody understands them and love them enough to speak to them, on purpose, in a way that makes a person feel human.
I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back. Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
The separation of truth from reason is a dangerous game. I think ideas have to sink very deeply into a person’s soul, into their being, before they can effect change.
He captures memories because if he forgets them, it’s as though they didn’t happen.
The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November.
Anybody who wants to get their way says that Jesus supports their view. But that isn’t Jesus’ fault.
In church, the rules of the lifeboat don’t apply. Church is the refuge where the Kingdom of God is emulated, not mocked.
When you build a city near no mountains and no ocean, you get materialism and traditional religion. People have too much time and lack inspiration.
God allows us to face the tension whether we like it or not.
Perhaps one of the reasons I’ve avoided standing on the point toward the horizon is the second you stand up and point toward a horizon, you realize how much there is to lose.
Life isn’t memorable enough to remember everything. It’s not like there are explosions all the time, or dog smoking cigarettes.
When you live countless stories in which you play a sedentary role, it’s an odd feeling to switch stories.
What good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?
(The monks) approach was far less narcissistic and our tends to be. Their goal when reading Scripture was to see Christ in every verse, and not a mirror image of themselves.
Because it is so scatterbrained and has absolutely no charts and graphs, I’m actually quite surprised the Bible sells.
You’d think God would come right out and tell us what to do in the Bible, but He doesn’t. He mostly tells stories, and He rarely stops the story to say what the point is. He just lets the characters and conflict hang in the air like smoke.
The mountains themselves call us into greater stories.
You don’t realize your story is changing you until you look back.
I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.
The inciting incident is how you get (characters) to do something. It’s the doorway through which they can’t return, you know. The story takes care of the rest.
I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.
We don’t know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending.
…I wondered about the story we were writing and wanted even more to write a better story for myself, something that leaves a beautiful feeling even as the credits roll.
The actual language of life is not the charts and graphs and stuff we map out to feel smart. The hidden language we are speaking is really about negotiating the feeling God used to give us.
The downside of being a writer is you get plenty of time to overthink your life.
Jesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day.
It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.
A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.
The same principles that make up a good story also make up a good life.
I lay there under the stars and thought of what a great responsibility it is to be human.
The repentance we are called to is about choosing one audience over another.
About the time I told God that He didn’t exist, I was desperate for an identity.
A big part of me needed something outside myself to tell me who I was. The thing that had been designed to tell me who I was was gone.
All relationships are teleological, are going somewhere.
For a long time, I thought I was good at relationships because I was charming.
Paul was terribly personal. The books I like are the ones that make you feel like you are with a person who is being quite vulnerable, telling you all sorts of stuff that is personal, and that’s the thing Paul did that makes me like him.
If the Gospel of Jesus is relational, that is, if our brokenness will be fixed not by our understanding of theology but by God telling us who we are, then this would require a kind of intimacy of which only Heaven knows.
You get a feeling when you look back on life that all God really wants from us is to live inside a body He made, and enjoy the story, and to bond with Him through the experience.
Just out of high school, you didn’t realize you were creating drama for the sake of drama.
The reason stories have dramatic tension is because LIFE has dramatic tension.
The problem is this: those of us who are never satisfied with our accomplishments secretly believe nobody will love us unless we’re perfect.
I learned that true love turns the other cheek, does not take a wrong into account, loves all people regardless of their indifference or hostility.
What if part of God’s message to the world was you, the true and real you?
When one of my friends becomes a Christian, which happens about every 10 years because I am a sheep about sharing my faith, the experience is euphoric. I see in their eyes the trueness of the story.
Life no longer felt meaningless. It felt stressful and terrifying, but it definitely didn’t feel meaningless.
All this gave way to my first encounter with guilt, which is still something entirely inscrutable to me, as if aliens were sending transmissions from another planet, telling me there is a right and a wrong in the universe.
Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us.
Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father’s face lit up.
Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they’re shy.
Sunday morning church service is not an enormous priority spending time with other believers is.
Meaning is something we experience more than we attain. It’s like finding a nice, easy current in a river that carries you through life.