It is so important to balance orthodoxy with orthopraxy.
Silence is the necessary space around things that allows them to develop and flourish without my pushing.
You surrender to love; you do not accomplish love by willpower.
The more one gives one’s self in creative union with another, the more one becomes one’s self.
We do not make or create our souls, we just grow them up.
What we know about God is important, but what we do with what we know about God is even more important.
You create your response to reality, and that response, for all practical purposes, is your reality.
There is Someone dancing with you, and you are not afraid of making mistakes.
Being informed is different from being formed, and the first is a common substitute for the second.
I think most human beings are dualistic thinkers. It gets them through the day. It gives them a sense of superiority and security – that’s what the ego wants.
As to his gospel, Jesus Christ came into the world as the image of the invisible God to communicate to us that not only did we not need to be afraid of God, but that God is more for us than we are ourselves or one another. God’s love is infinite, and unstoppable, and will win!
If you stay in the mainstream of life, you let in the suffering of the world that invariably enters all of our lives by the time we’re in our middle years, when we’ve experienced a few deaths and read a few headlines.
One time, a Protestant minister said, “We made Jesus blonde haired and blue eyed and very cute. We made Jesus somehow a much more feminine figure.” And there’s probably truth to that.
When you do the first half of life well, you have a good sense of yourself.
It’s a gift to joyfully recognize and accept our own smallness and ordinariness. Then you are free with nothing to live up to, nothing to prove, and nothing to protect. Such freedom is my best description of Christian maturity, because once you know that your “I” is great and one with God, you can ironically be quite content with a small and ordinary “I.” No grandstanding is necessary. Any question of your own importance or dignity has already been resolved once and for all and forever.
My scientist friends have come up with things like ‘principles of uncertainty’ and dark holes. They’re willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. but many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of ‘faith’! How strange that the very word ‘faith’ has come to mean its exact opposite.
If you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who do not love him, then you have an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God!
Because I am a part of the Big Picture, I do matter and substantially so. Because I am only a part, however, I am rightly situated off to stage right – and happily so. What freedom there is in such truth! We are inherently important and included, yet not burdened with manufacturing or sustaining that private importance. Our dignity is given by God, and we are freed from ourselves!
As Desmond Tutu told me on a recent trip to Cape Town, “We are only the light bulbs, Richard, and our job is just to remain screwed in!
It is almost impossible to fall in love with majesty, power, or perfection. These make us fearful and codependent, but seldom truly loving. On some level, love can only happen between equals, and vulnerability levels the playing field. What Christians believe is that God somehow became our equal when he became the human “Jesus,” a name that is, without doubt, the vulnerable name for God.