Background Image

...

I Suspect That Jesus Spoke Many Of His Parables As A Kind Of Sad And Holy Joke And That That May Be Part Of Why He Seemed Reluctant To Explain Them Because If You Have To Explain A Joke, You Might As Well Save Your Breath.

-Frederick Buechner

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

I Suspect That Jesus

Frederick Buechner

...

I Suspect That Jesus Spoke Many Of His Parables As A Kind Of Sad And Holy Joke And That That May Be Part Of Why He Seemed Reluctant To Explain Them Because If You Have To Explain A Joke, You Might As Well Save Your Breath.

Views: 6

Topic

More From Frederick Buechner

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.

What's Prayer? It's Shooting Shafts Into The Dark. What Mark They Strike, If Any, Who's To Say? It's Reaching For A Hand You Cannot Touch. The Silence Is So Fathomless That Prayers Like Plummets Vanish Into The Sea. You Beg. You Whimper. You Load God Down With Empty Praise. You Tell Him Sins That He Already Knows Full Well. You Seek To Change His Changeless Will. Yet Godric Prays The Way He Breathes, For Else His Heart Would Wither In His Breast. Prayer Is The Wind That Fills His Sail. Else Drift With Witless Tides. And Sometimes, By God's Grace, A Prayer Is Heard.

People Are Disturbed Not By Things But By The View They Take Of Them. They May Forget What You Said, But They Will Never Forget How You Made Them Feel.

Maybe It's All Utterly Meaningless. Maybe It's All Unutterably Meaningful. If You Want To Know Which, Pay Attention To What It Means To Be Truly Human In A World That Half The Time We're In Love With And Half The Time Scares The Hell Out Of Us. Any Fiction That Helps Us Pay Attention To That Is Religious Fiction. The Unexpected Sound Of Your Name On Somebody's Lips. The Good Dream. The Strange Coincidence. The Moment That Brings Tears To Your Eyes. The Person Who Brings Life To Your Life. Even The Smallest Events Hold The Greatest Clues.

To Believe In Christ Is To Give Your Heart To Christ, Which Means Not To Affirm Things About Christ, But It's Like What You Mean When You Say, "i Believe In My Friend."

At Least To Look Back Over Their Own Lives, As I Have Looked Back Over Mine, For Certain Themes And Patterns And Signals That Are So Easy To Miss When You're Caught Up In The Process Of Living Them. If God Speaks To Us At All Other Than Through Such Official Channels As The Bible And The Church, Then I Think He Speaks To Us Largely Through What Happens To Us, So Listen To What Has Happened To You-for The Sound, Above All Else, Of His Voice.

Laugh Till You Weep. Weep Till There's Nothing Left But To Laugh At Your Weeping. In The End It's All One.

God Knows We Have Our Own Demons To Be Cast Out, Our Own Uncleanness To Be Cleansed. Neurotic Anxiety Happens To Be My Own Particular Demon, A Floating Sense Of Doom That Has Ruined Many Of What Could Have Been, Should Have Been, The Happiest Days Of My Life, And More Than A Few Times In My Life I Have Been Raised From Such Ruins, Which Is Another Way Of Saying That More Than A Few Times In My Life I Have Been Raised From Death - Death Of The Spirit Anyway, Death Of The Heart - By The Healing Power That Jesus Calls Us Both To Heal With And To Be Healed By.

The Incarnation Is “a Kind Of Vast Joke Whereby The Creator Of The Ends Of The Earth Comes Among Us In Diapers Until We Too Have Taken The Idea Of The God-man Seriously Enough To Be Scandalized By It, We Have Not Taken It As Seriously As It Demands To Be Taken.

...words Are Not Only Meaning But Music And Magic And Power.

A Christian Isn't Necessarily Any Nicer Than Anybody Else, Just Better Informed.

And Because God's Love Is Uncoercive And Treasures Our Freedom - If Above All He Wants Us To Love Him, Then We Must Be Left Free Not To Love Him - We Are Free To Resist It, Deny It, Crucify It Finally, Which We Do Again And Again. This Is Our Terrible Freedom, Which Love Refuses To Overpower So That, In This, The Greatest Of All Powers, God's Power, Is Itself Powerless.

The Past Is The Place We View The Present From As Much As The Other Way Around.

Your Vocation In Life Is Where Your Greatest Joy Meets The World's Greatest Need.

Part Of The Inner World Of Everyone Is This Sense Of Emptiness, Unease, Incompleteness, And I Believe That This In Itself Is A Word From God, That This Is The Sound That God’s Voice Makes In A World That Has Explained Him Away. In Such A World, I Suspect That Maybe God Speaks To Us Most Clearly Through His Silence, His Absence, So That We Know Him Best Through Our Missing Him.

We Must Be Careful With Our Lives, For Christ's Sake, Because It Would Seem That They Are The Only Lives We Are Going To Have In This Puzzling And Perilous World, And So They Are Very Precious And What We Do With Them Matters Enormously.

Not To Love Is, Psychically, Spiritually, To Die. To Live For Yourself Alone, Hoarding Your Life For Your Own Sake, Is In Almost Every Sense That Matters To Reduce Your Life To A Life Hardly Worth The Living, And Thus To Lose It.

All 'isms' Run Out In The End, And Good Riddance To Most Of Them. Patriotism For Example. [...] If In The Interest Of Making Sure We Don't Blow Ourselves Off The Map Once And For All, We End Up Relinquishing A Measure Of National Sovereignty To Some International Body, So Much The Worse For National Sovereignty. There Is Only One Sovereignty That Matters Ultimately, And It Is Of Another Sort Altogether.

There Is No Event So Common Place But That God Is Present Within It, Always Hidden, Always Leaving You Room To Recognize Him Or Not To Recognize Him.

Listen To Your Life. All Moments Are Key Moments.

Inspirational Life

The Jesus Who Is The One Whom We Search For Even When We Do Not Know That We Are Searching And Hide From Even When We Do Not Know That We Are Hiding.

Whatever You Do With Your Life-whatever You End Up Achieving Or Not Achieving-the Great Gift You Have In You To Give To The World Is The Gift Of Who You Alone Are; Your Way Of Seeing Things, And Saying Things, And Feeling About Things, That Is Like Nobody Else’s. If So Much As A Single One Of You Were Missing, There Would Be An Empty Place At The Great Feast Of Life That Nobody Else In All Creation Could Fill.

Almost Nothing That Makes Any Real Difference Can Be Proved.

Through The Power That Memory Gives Us Of Thinking, Feeling, Imagining Our Way Back Through Time We Can At Long Last Finally Finish With The Past In The Sense Of Removing Its Power To Hurt Us And Other People And To Stunt Our Growth As Human Beings.

Speak In Your Own Voice And Speak About Things That You Have In Some Sense Witnessed, Not Just Things You Read About Or Have Been Taught About In Seminary. To Talk About The Resurrection, Think About Those Moments Where In Some Way You Have Been Resurrected.

The Sacred Moments, The Moments Of Miracle, Are Often The Everyday Moments.

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.

To Be Wise Is To Be Eternally Curious.

Faith Is Homesickness. Faith Is A Lump In The Throat. Faith Is Less A Position On Than A Movement Toward, Less A Sure Thing Than A Hunch. Faith Is Waiting.

If You Don't Have Doubts You're Either Kidding Yourself Or Asleep. Doubts Are The Ants-in-the-pants Of Faith. They Keep It Alive And Moving.

Envy Is The Consuming Desire To Have Everybody Else As Unsuccessful As You Are.

It Is As Impossible For Man To Demonstrate The Existence Of God As It Would Be For Even Sherlock Holmes To Demonstrate The Existence Of Arthur Conan Doyle.

Beneath Our Clothes, Our Reputations, Our Pretensions, Beneath Our Religion Or Lack Of It, We Are All Vulnerable Both To The Storm Without And The Storm Within.

Remember Me Not For The Ill I've Done But For The Good I've Dreamed.

If You Talk About Sin, You Don't Have To Use The First Person Singular, But Speak Out Of That Part Of Yourself Which Knows What It Means To Become Estranged From People You Love. Speak In Your Own Voice About Things That You In Your Own Life Have In One Way Or Another Experienced.

Go Where Your Best Prayers Take You.

Snobs Are People Who Look Down On Other People, But That Does Not Justify Our Looking Down On Them. Who Can Say What Dark Fears Of Being Inferior Lurk Behind Their Superior Airs Or What They Suffer In Private For The Slights They Dish Out In Public?

What Makes Me A Believer Is That From Time To Time, Going Back Almost As Far As My Memory Will Go Back, There Have Been Glimpses I've Had. Sometimes Literally A Glimpse Which Made Me Suspect The Presence Of Something Extraordinary And Beyond The Realm Of The Immediate. That's What I Think A Lot Of What My Writing Has Been, My Preaching Has Been - Trying To Listen To That Voice Again, To See Those Moments Again.

For As Long As You Remember Me, I Am Never Entirely Lost.

If You Are Going To Proclaim The Christian Faith, Speak About Those Dimensions Of It Which You['ve] Had Some Experience With.

What Gets Me Back To Church, I Think, Is Thinking Maybe This Time That Question "is It True?" Will Be Answered, Not Just In Terms Of Somebody Saying, "yes, It's True," But Something Will Happen In A Sermon Or Maybe Shuffling Up To The Eucharist, Or In The Old Lady Who's Sitting Beside Me With A Bible - Maybe Something Will Happen Which Will Show Me That It's True. So I Go Back Thinking, Maybe This Time I'll Be Lucky.

If We Are To Love Our Neighbors, Before Doing Anything Else We Must See Our Neighbors. With Our Imagination As Well As Our Eyes, That Is To Say Like Artists, We Must See Not Just Their Faces But The Life Behind And Within Their Faces. Here It Is Love That Is The Frame We See Them In.

In His Holy Flirtation With The World, God Occasionally Drops A Handkerchief. These Handkerchiefs Are Called Saints.

. . . [t]o Live Not With Hands Clenched To Grasp, To Strike, To Hold Tight To A Life That Is Always Slipping Away The More Tightly We Hold It, But . . . To Live With The Hands Stretched Out Both To Give And Receive With Gladness.

It's Very Easy In A Way, Horrible In Some Ways, But Simply To Give Up The Whole Thing, To Say, "well, The Hell With It, As Far As I'm Concerned Life Is Pointless And [so] Live The Fullest, Most Successfully Self-fulfilling Life You Can And Let The Rest Go Hang" - I've Never Reached That Point In My Life.

In New England, Especially, [faith] Is Like Sex. It's Very Personal. You Don't Bring It Out And Talk About It.

Faith Is Not Being Sure Where You're Going, But Going Anyway.

I Pray For People I Love When They Are Sick. I Pray That Way.

If Our Pain Doesn't Destroy Us, It Just Might Transform Us Into Truly Human Beings At Last.

Many An Atheist Is A Believer Without Knowing It Juast As Many A Believer Is An Atheist Without Knowing It. You Can Sincerely Believe There Is No God And Live As Though There Is. You Can Sincerely Believe There Is A God And Live As Though There Isn't.

I'm A Hopeless Prayer. I Think Somewhere In There I Spend A Great Deal Of Time At It.

If What Makes You Happy Is Going Out And Living It Up And Spending All Your Money On Wine, Women, And Song, The World Doesn't Need That. But On The Other Hand, If You Give Your Life To Good Works - You Go And Work In A Leper Colony And It Doesn't Make You Happy - The Chances Are You're Not Doing It Very Well.

What's Lost Is Nothing To What's Found, And All The Death That Ever Was, Set Next To Life, Would Scarcely Fill A Cup.

Stop Trying To Protect, To Rescue, To Judge, To Manage The Lives Around You... Remember That The Lives Of Others Are Not Your Business. They Are Their Business. They Are God's Busineess... Even Your Own Life Is Not Your Business. It Also Is God's Business. Leave It To God.

In Other Words To Live Eternal Life In The Full And Final Sense Is To Be With God As Christ Is With Him, And With Each Other As Christ Is With Us.

We Are In Constant Danger Of Being Not Actors In The Drama Of Our Lives But Reactors, To Go Where The World Takes Us, To Drift With Whatever Current Happens To Be Running The Strongest.

Sin And Grace, Absence And Presence, Tragedy And Comedy, They Divide The World Between Them And Where They Meet Head On, The Gospel Happens.

Your Life And My Life Flow Into Each Other As Wave Flows Into Wave, And Unless There Is Peace And Joy And Freedom For You, There Can Be No Real Peace Or Joy Or Freedom For Me.

At The Evening Of Our Day, We Shall Be Judged By Our Loving.

When [our Secrets] Are Sad And Hurtful Secrets, Like My Father's Death, We Can In A Way Honor The Hurt By Letting Ourselves Feel It As We Never Let Ourselves Feel It Before, And Then, Having Felt It, By Laying It Aside; We Can Start To Take Care Of Ourselves The Way We Take Care Of People We Love.

The Trouble With Steeling Yourself Against The Harshness Of Reality Is That The Same Steel That Secures Your Life Against Being Destroyed Secures Your Life Also Against Being Opened Up And Transformed By The Holy Power That Life Itself Comes From. You Can Survive On Your Own. You Can Grow Strong On Your Own. You Can Even Prevail On Your Own. But You Cannot Become Human On Your Own.

The Jesus I Follow Is The Peacemaker, Is One Who Says Forgive Your Enemies, Who Worries About The Poor, Who Worries About The Poorest Of The Poor Instead Of The Richest Of The Rich.

There Is A Fragrance In The Air, A Certain Passage Of A Song, An Old Photograph Falling Out From The Pages Of A Book, The Sound Of Somebody's Voice In The Hall That Makes Your Heart Leap And Fills Your Eyes With Tears. Who Can Say When Or How It Will Be That Something Easters Up Out Of The Dimness To Remind Us Of A Time Before We Were Born And After We Will Die?

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.

If You Want To Talk About Grace, If You Want To Talk About Revelation, Talk About Your Life With Some Depth, Which Doesn't Mean Lurid Revelations As Much As Simply Looking At Your Own Deep Experiences And Describing Them As They Are.

Resurrection Means That The Worst Thing Is Never The Last Thing.

My Story Is Important Not Because It Is Mine, God Knows, But Because If I Tell It Anything Like Right, The Chances Are You Will Recognize That In Many Ways It Is Also Yours… It Is Precisely Through These Stories In All Their Particularity, As I Have Long Believed And Often Said, That God Makes Himself Known To Each Of Us More Powerfully And Personally. If This Is True, It Means That To Lose Track Of Our Stories Is To Be Profoundly Impoverished Not Only Humanly But Also Spiritually.

Your Vocation Lies In The Intersection Of The World's Deep Need And Your Deep Joy.

Jesus, Remember Me When You Come Into Your Kingdom, The Good Thief Said From His Cross (luke 23:42). There Are Perhaps No More Human Words In All Of Scripture, No Prayer We Can Pray So Well.

Jesus Didn't Come To Merely Speak Words That Were True, He Is The Word That Makes Us True.

True Faith, A Simple Life, A Helping Hand- The Three Things Prized Most In Heaven.

The Fearsome Blessing Of That Hard Time Continues To Work Itself Out In My Life In The Same Way We're Told The Universe Is Still Hurtling Through Outer Space Under The Impact Of The Great Cosmic Explosion.... I Think Grace Sometimes Explodes Into Our Lives Like That-sending Our Pain, Terror, Astonishment Hurtling Through Inner Space Until By Grace They Become Orion, Cassiopeia, Polaris To Give Us Our Bearings, To Bring Us Into Something Like Full Being 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.

Your Calling Is Where Your Own Greatest Joy Intersects With The Needs Of The World.

I'm Not Religious In The Sense That I Do Not Subscribe To Any Particular Set Of Religious Dogma. I Don't Go To Church. I Don't Read The Bible. But I Believe That The Word "spirit" With A Capital S Points To An Ultimate Reality Which I Give My Heart To.

Where Your Deep Gladness Meets With The Deep Hunger Of The World, There You Will Find A Further Calling.

I Believe With The Best Of Who I Am In God, But I Sometimes Think If Anybody Would Watch Me And [they] Didn't Believe A Damn Thing, They Would Have A Very Hard Time Deciding Which Of Us Is Which.

It's All So Verbal In The Protestant Church. You've Heard These Words A Million Times Before. Maybe People Are Leaving The Church Because They Find The Church Has Nothing That They're Looking For.

When A Child Is Born, A Father Is Born. A Mother Is Born, Too Of Course, But At Least For Her It's A Gradual Process. Body And Soul, She Has Nine Months To Get Used To What's Happening. She Becomes What's Happening. But For Even The Best-prepared Father, It Happens All At Once. On The Other Side Of A Plate-glass Window, A Nurse Is Holding Up Something Roughly The Size Of A Loaf Of Bread For Him To See For The First Time.

Romantic Love Is Blind To Everything Except What Is Lovable And Lovely, But Christ's Love Sees Us With Terrible Clarity And Sees Us Whole. Christ's Love So Wishes Our Joy That It Is Ruthless Against Everything In Us That Diminishes Our Joy. The Worst Sentence Love Can Pass Is That We Behold The Suffering Which Love Has Endured For Our Sake, And That Is Also Our Acquittal. The Justice And Mercy Of The Judge Are Ultimately One.

The World Says, The More You Take, The More You Have. Christ Says, The More You Give, The More You Are.

Faith Is Better Understood As A Verb Than As A Noun, As A Process Than As A Possession. It Is An On-again-off-again Rather Than Once-and-for-all. Faith Is Not Being Sure Where You're Going But Going Anyway. A Journey Without Maps. Tillich Says That Doubt Isn't The Opposite Of Faith; It Is An Element Of Faith.

To Be Bored Is To Turn A Cold Shoulder To Engage All That God Is And Has For You In The Moment.

Five Friends I Had And Two Of Them Snakes.

For Some People, Going To Church Is Going Home. In A Very Profound Sense, I Would Say The Same Thing. Home Is Where Christ Is.

By And Large A Good Rule For Finding Out Is This: The Kind Of Work God Usually Calls You To Is The Kind Of Work A) That You Need Most To Do And B) The World Most Needs To Have Done. If You Really Get A Kick Out Of Your Work, You've Presumably Met Requirement A), But If Your Work Is Writing Tv Deodorant Commercials, The Chances Are You've Missed Requirement B).

The Story Of Any One Of Us Is In Some Measure The Story Of Us All

Much As We Wish, Not One Of Us Can Bring Back Yesterday Or Shape Tomorrow. Only Today Is Ours, And It Will Not Be Ours For Long, And Once It Is Gone It Will Never In All Time Be Ours Again. Thou Only Knowest What It Holds In Store For Us, Yet Even We Know Something Of What It Will Hold. The Chance To Speak The Truth, To Show Mercy, To Ease Another’s Burden. The Chance To Resist Evil, To Remember All The Good Times And Good People Of Our Past, To Be Brave, To Be Strong, To Be Glad.

A Miracle Is When The Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts. A Miracle Is When One Plus One Equals A Thousand.

If It Seems A Childish Thing To Do, Do It In Remembrance That You Are A Child.

Joy Is A Mystery Because It Can Happen Anywhere, Anytime, Even Under The Most Unpromising Circumstances, Even In The Midst Of Suffering, With Tears In Its Eyes.

Faith Is Stepping Out Into The Unknown With Nothing To Guide Us But A Hand Just Beyond Our Grasp.

Grace Is Something You Can Never Get But Only Be Given.

The Magic Of Words Is That They Have Power To Do More Than Convey Meaning; Not Only Do They Have The Power To Make Things Clear, They Make Things Happen.

Make Things Happen

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.

In A World Where There Are No Longer Books We Have Almost All Of Us Read, The Movies We Have Almost All Of Us Seen Are Perhaps The Richest Cultural Bond We Have. They Go On Haunting Us For Years The Way Our Dreams Go On Haunting Us. In A Way They Are Our Dreams. The Best Of Them Remind Us Of Human Truths That Would Not Seem As True Without Them. They Help To Remind Us That We Are All Of Us Humans Together.

...words Are In A Way Our Godly Sharing In The Work Of Creation, And The Speaking And Writing Of Words Is At Once The Most Human And The Most Holy Business We Engage In.

Preaching And Writing - It's The Same. Whether I'm Writing To Speak Or Writing To Be Read In A Book, It's The Same Thing.

Religion Points To That Area Of Human Experience Where In One Way Or Another Man Comes Upon Mystery As A Summons To Pilgrimage.

All Other Days Have Either Disappeared Into Darkness And Oblivion Or Not Yet Emerged From It. Today Is The Only Day There Is.

Wherever People Love Each Other And Are True To Each Other And Take Risks For Each Other, God Is With Them And For Them And They Are Doing God's Will.

Love Each Other

My Prayer Is Spasmodic, Occasional, Desperate. It Has A Great Deal To Do With My Children's Physical Well-being - That When They're Traveling In The Air The Plane Not Crash, Things Like That.

I Don't Think Christ Would Give A Hoot Whether You Mentioned Christ To Them Or Not. What Matters - I'm Speaking Arrogantly And Absurdly - To Him Is, Are You Living The Kind Of Life That I Embodied? Whether You Believe In Christ Or Don't, Who Cares?

To Believe In God Is To Give Your Heart To God.

Love Yourself Not In Some Egocentric, Self-serving Sense But Love Yourself The Way You Would Love Your Friend In The Sense Of Taking Care Of Yourself, Nourishing Yourself, Trying To Understand, Comfort, And Strengthen Yourself.

It Was The Upward-reaching And Fathomlessly Hungering, Heart-breaking Love For The Beauty Of The World At Its Most Beautiful, And, Beyond That, For That Beauty East Of The Sun And West Of The Moon Which Is Past The Reach Of All But Our Most Desperate Desiring And Is Finally The Beauty Of Beauty Itself, Of Being Itself And What Lies At The Heart Of Being.

I Don't Go To Church All That Regularly, And One Reason I Don't Is Very Often When I Go I Am Bored Out Of My Wits. I Find Myself Being Addressed By Preachers Who, I Assume, Were Led By Some Initial Passion For Christ, For The Truth, For God, For "the More." That's What Got Them There. But That Has Gotten Buried Under All The Debris Of Having To Run A Church, Of Concerns.

Words Spoken In Deep Love Or Deep Hate Set Things In Motion In The Human Heart That Can Never Be Reversed.

I Don't Want To Give The Impression That I'm A Great Bible Reader. I Don't Sit Down Every Day And Read For An Hour Through The Bible. But I Really Do Read It With A Great Deal Of Pleasure... Which Is The Last Thing I Would Have Suspected. So I Read It Sometimes As A Devotional, But Really More, Not For Fun, But Because It's Fascinating.

Whenever You Find Tears In Your Eyes, Especially Unexpected Tears, It Is Well To Pay The Closest Attention.

Listen To Your Life. See It For The Fathomless Mystery It Is. In The Boredom And Pain Of It, No Less Than In The Excitement And Gladness: Touch, Taste, Smell Your Way To The Holy And Hidden Heart Of It, Because In The Last Analysis All Moments Are Key Moments, And Life Itself Is Grace.

Your Life And My Life Flow Into Each Other As Wave Flows Into Wave, And Unless There Is Peace And Joy And Freedom For You, There Can Be No Real Peace Or Joy Or Freedom For Me. To See Reality-not As We Expect It To Be But As It Is-is To See That Unless We Live For Each Other And In And Through Each Other, We Do Not Really Live Very Satisfactorily; That There Can Really Be Life Only Where There Really Is, In Just This Sense, Love.

When Someone We Love Suffers, We Suffer With That Person, And We Would Not Have It Otherwise, Because The Suffering And The Love Are One, Just As It Is With God's Love For Us.

Prayers Out Of, Very Often, Not The Most Religious Part Of Me, But The Most Anxious Part Of Me, The Most Desperately Loving, Fearing Part Of Me.

Coincidences Are God's Way Of Getting Our Attention.

God Himself Does Not Give Answers. He Gives Himself.

If You Want To Be Holy, Be Kind.

Everybody Prays Whether [you Think] Of It As Praying Or Not. The Odd Silence You Fall Into When Something Very Beautiful Is Happening Or Something Very Good Or Very Bad. The Ah-h-h-h! That Sometimes Floats Up Out Of You As Out Of A Fourth Of July Crowd When The Sky-rocket Bursts Over The Water. The Stammer Of Pain At Somebody Else S Pain. The Stammer Of Joy At Somebody Else's Joy. Whatever Words Or Sounds You Use For Sighing With Over Your Own Life. These Are All Prayers In Their Way.

Vocation Is The Place Where The World's Greatest Need And A Person's Greatest Joy Meet.

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.

In The Silence Of A Midwinter Dusk, There Is A Sound So Faint That For All You Can Tell It May Be Only The Sound Of The Silence Itself. You Hold Your Breath To Listen. You Are Aware Of The Beating Of Your Heart. The Extraordinary Thing That Is About To Happen Is Matched Only By The Extraordinary Moment Just Before It Happens. Advent Is The Name Of That Moment.

Extraordinary Moments

I've Written A Lot Of Autobiography, Which Also Involved Listening.

Lord, I Believe; Help My Unbelief' Is The Best Any Of Us Can Do Really, But Thank God It Is Enough.

From The Simplest Lyric To The Most Complex Novel And Densest Drama, Literature Is Asking Us To Pay Attention. Pay Attention To The Frog. Pay Attention To The West Wind. Pay Attention To The Boy On The Raft, The Lady In The Tower, The Old Man On The Train. In Sum, Pay Attention To The World And All That Dwells Therein And Thereby Learn At Last To Pay Attention To Yourself And All That Dwells Therein.

The Gospel Writers Are Not Really Interested Primarily In The Facts Of The Birth But In The Significance, The Meaning For Them Of That Birth Just As The People Who Love Us Are Not Really Interested Primarily In The Facts Of Our Births But In What It Meant To Them When We Were Born And How For Them The World Was Never The Same Again, How Their Whole Lives Were Changed With New Significance.

It Is Impossible To Conceive How Different Things Would Have Turned Out If That Birth Had Not Happened Whenever, Wherever, However It Did For Millions Of People Who Have Lived Since, The Birth Of Jesus Made Possible Not Just A New Way Of Understanding Life But A New Way Of Living It. It Is A Truth That, For Twenty Centuries, There Have Been Untold Numbers Of Men And Women Who, In Untold Numbers Of Ways, Have Been So Grasped By The Child Who Was Born, So Caught Up In The Message He Taught And The Life He Lived, That They Have Found Themselves Profoundly Changed By Their Relationship With Him.

What Deadens Us Most To God's Presence Within Us, I Think, Is The Inner Dialogue That We Are Continually Engaged In With Ourselves, The Endless Chatter Of Human Thought.

We Learn To Praise God Not By Paying Compliments But By Paying Attention.

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.

My Story Is Important Not Because It Is Mine, God Knows, But Because If I Tell It Anything Like Right, The Chances Are You Will Recognize That In Many Ways It Is Also Yours.

... The World Can Give You These Glimpses As Well As Fairy Tales Can--the Smell Of Rain, The Dazzle Of Sun On White Clapboard With The Shadows Of Ferns And Wash On The Line, The Wildness Of A Winter Storm When In The House The Flame Of A Candle Doesn't Even Flicker.

I Don't Know That It Makes Any Difference Whether It's At This Time Or A Hundred Years Before Or A Hundred Years Later. I Think Always It's A Matter Of Simply Listen[ing] To What Is Going On Around You And In Your Own Experience. Try To Understand What's Happening, Or If Not To Understand It, At Least To Appreciate The Reality Of It.

But It Has Been My Experience That The Risks Are Faroutweighed By The Rewards, Chief Of Which Is When You Speak To Strangers As Though They Are Friends, More Often Than Not, If Only For As Long As The Encounter Lasts, They Become Friends, And If In The Process They Also Think Of You As A Little Peculiar, Who Cares?

... In The Long Run, There Can Be No Joy For Anybody Until There Is Joy Finally For Us All

Here And There And Not Just In Books We Catch Glimpses Of A World Of Once Upon A Time And They Lived Happily Ever After, Of A World Where There Is A Wizard To Give Courage And A Heart, An Angel With A White Stone That Has Written On It Our True And Secret Name, And It Is So Easy To Dismiss It All That It Is Hardly Worth Bothering To Do. ... But If The World Of The Fairy Tale And Our Glimpses Of It Here And There Are Only A Dream, They Are One Of The Most Haunting And Powerful Dreams That The World Has Ever Dreamed.

If Preachers Decide To Preach About Hope, Let Them Preach Out Of What They Themselves Hope For.

I Not Only Have My Secrets, I Am My Secrets. And You Are Yours. Our Secrets Are Human Secrets, And Our Trusting Each Other Enough To Share Them With Each Other Has Much To Do With The Secret Of What It Means To Be Human.

Trusting Each Other

One Life On This Earth Is All That We Get, Whether It Is Enough Or Not Enough, And The Obvious Conclusion Would Seem To Be That At The Very Least We Are Fools If We Do Not Live It As Fully And Bravely And Beautifully As We Can.

Faith Is The Assurance That The Best And Holiest Dream Is True After All.

What Makes You, In The Deepest Sense Of The Word, Happy? That's What You Should Be Doing, If The Other Part Is Also Met - If It Is Something The World Needs.

The Preaching Is Part Of The Reason I Don't Go To Church. Plus, I Don't Know, It Was Never Part Of My Tradition.

I Loved Rain For Making Home Seem Home More Deeply, And I Suspect That Is Why, From As Far Back As I Can Remember, I Also Loved Those Books I Read And The People I Met In Them And The Worlds They Opened Up To Me. Like A House In The Rain, Books Were Havens Of Permanence And Protection From Whatever It Was That As A Child I Needed Protection From.

Jesus Is Apt To Come, Into The Very Midst Of Life At Its Most Real And Inescapable Moments. Not In A Blaze Of Unearthly Light, Not In The Midst Of A Sermon, Not In The Throes Of Some Kind Of Religious Daydream, But...at Supper Time, Or Walking Along A Road...he Never Approached From On High, But Always In The Midst, In The Midst Of People, In The Midst Of Real Life And The Questions That Real Life Asks.

He [jesus] Speaks In Parables, And Though We Have Approached These Parables Reverentially All These Many Years And Have Heard Them Expounded As Grave And Reverent Vehicles Of Holy Truth, I Suspect That Many If Not All Of Them Were Originally Not Grave At All But Were Antic, Comic, Often More Than Just A Little Shocking.

. . Some Moment Happens In Your Life That You Say Yes Right Up To The Roots Of Your Hair, That Makes It Worth Having Been Born Just To Have Happen. Laughing With Somebody Till The Tears Run Down Your Cheeks. Waking Up To The First Snow. Being In Bed With Somebody You Love... Whether You Thank God For Such A Moment Or Thank Your Lucky Stars, It Is A Moment That Is Trying To Open Up Your Whole Life. If You Turn Your Back On Such A Moment And Hurry Along To Business As Usual, It May Lose You The Ball Game. If You Throw Your Arms Around Such A Moment And Hug It Like Crazy, It May Save Your Soul.

The Place God Calls You To Is The Place Where Your Deep Gladness And The World’s Deep Hunger Meet.

Faith In God Is Less Apt To Proceed From Miracles Than Miracles From Faith In God.

The Best Moments Any Of Us Have As Human Beings Are Those Moments When For A Little While It Is Possible To Escape The Squirrel-cage Of Being Me Into The Landscape Of Being Us.

Don't Let Your Life Just Go In One Eye And Out The Other.

Avarice, Greed, Concupiscence And So Forth Are All Based On The Mathematical Truism That The More You Get, The More You Have. The Remark Of That It Is More Blessed To Give Than To Receive Is Based On The Human Truth That The More You Give Away In Love, The More You Are. It Is Not Just For The Sake Of Other People That Tells Us To Give Rather Than Get, But For Our Own Sakes Too.

We Find By Losing. We Hold Fast By Letting Go. We Become Something New By Ceasing To Be Something Old.

I Don't Know How To Save My Own Life, So Anything They've Found In What I've Written That Saved Theirs - I Can't Take Responsibility For It.

Pay Attention To The Things That Bring A Tear To Your Eye Or A Lump In Your Throat Because They Are Signs That The Holy Is Drawing Near.

Lust Is The Craving For Salt Of A Man Who Is Dying Of Thirst.

The Life I Touch For Good Or Ill Will Touch Another Life, And In Turn Another, Until Who Knows Where The Trembling Stops Or In What Far Place My Touch Will Be Felt.

Without Somehow Destroying Me In The Process, How Could God Reveal Himself In A Way That Would Leave No Room For Doubt? If There Were No Room For Doubt, There Would Be No Room For Me.

We Have God's Joy In Our Blood.

Listen. Your Life Is Happening. You Are Happening. Think Back On Your Journey. The Music Of Your Life.

To Forgive Somebody Is To Say One Way Or Another, "you Have Done Something Unspeakable, And By All Rights I Should Call It Quits Between Us. Both My Pride And My Principles Demand No Less. However, Although I Make No Guarantees That I Will Be Able To Forget What You've Done, And Though We May Both Carry The Scars For Life, I Refuse To Let It Stand Between Us. I Still Want You For My Friend.

Grace Is Something You Can Never Get But Can Only Be Given. There's No Way To Earn It Or Deserve It Or Bring It About Anymore Than You Can Deserve The Taste Of Raspberries And Cream Or Earn Good Looks. A Good Night's Sleep Is Grace And So Are Good Dreams. Most Tears Are Grace. The Smell Of Rain Is Grace. Somebody Loving You Is Grace.

Thus, When You Wake Up In The Morning, Called By God To Be A Self Again, If You Want To Know Who You Are, Watch Your Feet. Because Where Your Feet Take You, That Is Who You Are.

Here And There Even In Our World, And Now And Then, Even In Ourselves, We Catch Glimpeses Of A New Creation, Which, Fleeting As Those Glipmses Are Apt To Be, Give Us Hope Both For This Life And For Whatever Life May Await Us Later On.

Maybe At The Heart Of All Our Traveling Is The Dream Of Someday, Somehow, Getting Home.

And There Are Other Dangers Potentially More Dangerous Than Even Nuclear War. There Is Aids. There Is Terrorism. There Are Drugs And More To The Point The Darkness Of Our Time That Makes People Seek Escape In Drugs. There Is The Slow Poisoning Of What We Call "the Environment" Of All Things As If With That Absurdly Antiseptic Phrase We Can Conceal From Ourselves That What We Are Really Poisoning Is Home, Is Here, Is Us.

You Can Never Be Sure Whether You Are Discovering The Truth Or Inventing It.

Discovering The Truth

I Could, Of Course, Have Done No More If No Less Than Affiliated Myself In One Way Or Another With A Particular Church, Could Have Simply Read Books About Christianity, Talked To Christian People, Set Out To Discover Something About What A Christian Life Is Supposed To Involve And Then Tried As Best I Could To Live One. But, On The One Hand, That Didn't Seem Enough To Me, And On The Other, It Seemed To Much.

One Of The Blunders Religious People Are Particularly Fond Of Making Is The Attempt To Be More Spiritual Than God

To Believe Is Not Intellectual Assent: "yes, I Believe In Jesus. I Will Sign My Name To The Nicene Creed. I Believe It All" - Which You Could Do, [but] It Would Have No Effect On Who You Were Or What You Did. It Is, Rather, To Give Your Heart.

Our Stories Are All Stories Of Searching. We Search For A Good Self To Be And For Good Work To Do. We Search To Become Human In A World That Tempts Us Always To Be Less Than Human Or Looks To Us To Be More. We Search To Love And To Be Loved. And In A World Where It Is Often Hard To Believe In Much Of Anything, We Search To Believe In Something Holy And Beautiful And Life-transcending That Will Give Meaning And Purpose To The Lives We Live.

To Remember The Past Is To See That We Are Here Today By Grace, That We Have Survived As A Gift.

I Think Most People, If I Asked, Would Say, "yes, Of Course I Believe." But I Think For A Great Many Of Them It Doesn't Really Make Much Difference In Terms Of Either What They Do With Their Lives Or With Their Own Inner Well-being. They Believe Because So Did Grandfather, And That's The Same Church They've Been Going To All These Years.

The Original, Shimmering Self Gets Buried So Deep That Most Of Us End Up Hardly Living Out Of It At All. Instead We Live Out All The Other Selves, Which We Are Constantly Putting On And Taking Off Like Coats And Hats Against The World’s Weather

Phrases Like Worship Service Or Service Of Worship Are Tautologies. To Worship God Means To Serve Him. Basically There Are Two Ways To Do It. One Way Is To Do Things For Him That He Needs To Have Done - Run Errands For Him, Carry Messages For Him, Fight On His Side, Feed His Lambs, And So On. The Other Way Is To Do Things For Him That You Need To Do - Sing Songs For Him, Tell Him What's On Your Mind And In Your Heart, In General Rejoice In Him.

When You Remember Me, It Means You Have Carried Something Of Who I Am With You, That I Have Left Some Mark Of Who I Am On Who You Are. It Means That You Can Summon Me Back To Your Mind Even Though Countless Years And Miles May Stand Between Us. It Means That If We Meet Again, You Will Know Me. It Means That Even After I Die, You Can Still See My Face And Hear My Voice And Speak To Me In Your Heart.

Don't Look Down On Them For Looking Down On Us. Look At Them, Instead, As Friends We Don't Know Yet And Who Don't Yet Know What They Are Missing In Not Knowing Us.

I'm Trying To Listen To My Past, Listen To What's Most Deeply Going On Inside Myself, My Creative Set Of Fictional Characters, A Fictional World - To Listen To That World, To Search.

A Christian Is One Who Points At Christ And Says, 'i Can't Prove A Thing, But There's Something About His Eyes And His Voice. There's Something About The Way He Carries His Head, His Hands, The Way He Carries His Cross-the Way He Carries Me.'

Being A Good Steward Of Your Pain. . . . It Involves Being Alive To Your Life. It Involves Taking The Risk Of Being Open, Of Reaching Out, Of Keeping In Touch With The Pain As Well As The Joy Of What Happens Because At No Time More Than At A Painful Time Do We Live Out Of The Depths Of Who We Are Instead Of Out Of The Shallows.

Theology, Like Fiction, Is Largely Autobiographical.

To Be A Saint Is To Be A Little Out Of One's Mind, Which Is A Very Good Thing To Be A Little Out Of From Time To Time. It Is To Live A Life That Is Always Giving Itself Away And Yet Is Always Full.

Principles Are What People Have Instead Of God. To Be A Christian Means Among Other Things To Be Willing If Necessary To Sacrifice Even Your Highest Principles For God's Or Your Neighbour's Sake The Way A Christian Pacifist Must Be Willing To Pick Up A Baseball Bat If There's No Other Way To Stop A Man From Savagely Beating A Child. Jesus Didn't Forgive His Executioners On Principle But Because In Some Unimaginable Way He Was Able To Love Them. 'principle' Is An Even Duller Word Than 'religion'.

It Is The First Day Because It Has Never Been Before And The Last Day Because It Will Never Be Again. Be Alive, If You Can, All Through This Day - Today - Of Your Life. What's To Be Done? What's To Be Done? Follow Your Feet. Put On The Coffee. Start The Orange Juice, The Bacon, The Toast. Then Go Wake Up Your Children And Your Spouse. Think About The Work Of Your Hands. Live In The Needs Of The Day.

The World Needs People Who Save Lives.

Toleration Is Often Just Indifference In Disguise.

You Do Not Need To Understand Healing To Be Healed Or Know Anything About Blessing To Be Blessed.

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 Bridge.

Of All Powers, Love Is The Most Powerful And The Most Powerless. It Is The Most Powerful Because It Alone Can Conquer That Final And Most Impregnable Stronghold Which Is The Human Heart. It Is The Most Powerless Because It Can Do Nothing Except By Consent.

Lord, Catch Me Off Guard Today. Surprise Me With Some Moment Of Beauty Or Pain So That At Least For The Moment, I May Be Startled Into Seeing That You Are Here In All Your Splendor, Always And Everywhere, Barely Hidden, Beneath, Beyond, Within This Life I Breathe.

The Kind Of Work God Usually Calls You To Is The Kind Of Work (a) That You Need Most To Do And (b) That The World Most Needs To Have Done....the Place God Calls You To Is The Place Where Your Deep Gladness And The World's Deep Hunger Meet

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.

Like Buddha Under The Bo Tree, Jesus, On His Tree, Has His Eyes Closed Too. The Difference Is This. The Pain And Sadness Of The World That Buddha's Eyes Close Out Is The Pain And Sadness Of The World That The Eyes Of Jesus Close In.

Beneath The Worst The World Can Do, There Is Always The Glimmer Of The Best.

You Enter The Extraordinary By Way Of The Ordinary

The Difference To Me Is Not Between The Believers On One Hand And The Nonbelievers On The Other Hand. It's Between People Who Carry In Their Hearts Some Sense Of What The Word "god," At Least To Me, Means, Which Is A Loving, Creating, Everlastingly Renewing Presence Deeply Concerned With The Well-being Of The Earth And All Its Creatures.

Despair Has Been Called The Unforgivable Sin-not Presumably Because God Refuses To Forgive It, But Because It Despairs Of The Possibility Of Being Forgiven.

Unforgivable Sin

Jesus Doesn't Say, "the Religion Founded In My Name Is The Way, The Truth, And The Life, [and] What People Say About Me Is The Way." "our Way Of Worship, The Christian Structure, Is Not The Way," [he Would Say,] "i Am. I Am. If You Want To Know What Life Is All About, What It's Supposed To Be, Where It's Supposed To Go, Where It's Supposed To Derive Its Strength From, Don't Look At Anything People Say About Me. Don't Look At The Faith That's Been Created. Look At My Life, Which Is A Life Ultimately Of Sacrificial Love."

It’s Less The Words They Say Than Those They Leave Unsaid That Split Old Friends Apart.

People Will Buy Snake Oil From Anybody Who Seems To Be Selling It In A Persuasive Way.

It Is Important To Tell Our Secrets Too Because ... It Makes It Easier For Other People To Tell Us A Secret Or Two Of Their Own, And Exchanges Like That Have A Lot To Do With What Being A Family Is All About And What Being Human Is All About.

The Pride That Keeps Us From Forgiving Is The Same Pride Which Keeps Us From Accepting Forgiveness.

Trending Author

Melina Mercouri

Category