Prophets are so dangerous because they cry in season and out of season, politely and impolitely, loud and long.
Failure is the foundation of truth. It teaches us what isn’t true, and that is a great beginning. To fear failure is to fear the possibility of truth.
We are living in a period of commerical globalization. What we really need is spiritual globalization.
Everything we do seeds the future. No action is an empty one.
The spiritual response is too often a simplistic one: we abandon God or we blame God for abandoning us.
Life is a series of lessons, some of them obvious, some of them not. We learn as we go that dreams end, that plans get changed, that promises get broken, that our idols disappoint us.
Hope grows in us, despite our moments of darkness, regardless of our regular bouts of depression.
Goodness is a process of becoming, not of being. What we do over and over again is what we become in the end.
The kind of “blind obedience” once theologized as the ultimate step to holiness, is itself blind. It blinds a person to the insights and foresight and moral perspective of anyone other than an authority figure.
The spiritual life, in other words, is not achieved by denying one part of life for the sake of another. The spiritual life is achieved only by listening to all of life and learning to respond to each of its dimensions wholly and with integrity.
Silence is a frightening thing. Silences leaves us at the mercy of the noise within us. We hear the fears that need to be faced. We hear, then, the angers that need to be cooled. We hear the emptiness that needs to be filled. We hear the cries for humility and reconciliation and centeredness. We hear ambition and arrogance and attitudes of uncaring awash in the shallows of the soul. Silence demands answers. Silence invites us to depth. Silence heals what hoarding and running will not touch.
It is one thing to speak kindly to an irritating stranger on Monday. It is quite another thing to go on speaking kindly to the same irritating relative, or irritating employee, or irritating child day after day, week after week, year after year and come to see in that what God is asking of me, what God is teaching me about myself in this weary, weary moment.
We struggle to maintain a dead past in the name of peace and refuse the new life that running water brings to everything. We confuse “stagnant” with “calm” and call it holiness. We miss the power of the paradox that peace is not passivity and that a living death is neither death nor life.
The time is now. The time is for reflection on what we’ve lost in life, yes, but for what we have left in life too. It’s time to begin to live life fuller rather than faster.
These questions do not call for the discovery of data; they call for the contemplation of possibility.
When God has become a business, though, it is very hard for people to get the confidence to realize that God is really a personal God, a God who touches us as individuals, a God who is as close to us as we choose to see. We have learned well the remoteness of a God who lived for so long behind communion rails and altar steps and seminary doors and chancery desks that the experience of God, however strong, has always been more private secret than public expectation.
This compulsion to look back, to explain to myself, to others, why I did what I did – or, worse, to justify why I didn’t do something else – is one of the most direct roads to depression we have. Our thoughts, emotions, and attitudes, according to Dr. Andrew Weil in his book Healthy Aging, are “key determinants of how we age.” They can threaten the quality of time we bring to the present.
The historian Arnold Toynbee says of it, “The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves.
Bloom where you are planted,′ the poster reads. But the poster does not tell the whole story. ′ plant yourself where you know you can bloom’ may well be the poster we all need to see. Or better yet, “Work the arid soil however long it takes until something that fulfills the rest of you finally makes the desert in you bloom.
It is what we do routinely, not what we do rarely, that delineates the character of a person.