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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.

-Frederick Buechner

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It Is Impossible To

Frederick Buechner

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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.

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... 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.

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.

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

Coincidences Are God's Way Of Getting Our Attention.

I Am Such A Person Of Words. I've Spent So Much Of My Life Trying To Get It Right, Say It Right, Say It Eloquently, Say It Truthfully, Say It Honestly, That When I Hear It Said In Ways That None Of Those Adverbs Would Describe I Find Myself So Repelled That It Almost Shuts My Mind Off.

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.

You Can't Be Too Careful What You Tell A Child Because You Never Know What He'll Take Hold Of And Spend The Rest Of His Life Remembering You By.

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.

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

We Find By Losing. We Hold Fast By Letting Go. We Become Something New By Ceasing To Be Something Old. This Seems To Be Close To The Heart Of That Mystery. I Know No More Now Than I Ever Did About The Far Side Of Death As The Last Letting-go Of All, But Now I Know That I Do Not Need To Know, And That I Do Not Need To Be Afraid Of Not Knowing. God Knows. That Is All That Matters.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

God Created Us In Joy And Created Us For Joy, And In The Long Run Not All The Darkness There Is In The World And In Ourselves Can Separate Us Finally From That Joy, Because Whatever Else It Means To Say That God Created Us In His Image, I Think It Means That Even When We Cannot Believe In Him, Even When We Feel Most Spiritually Bankrupt And Deserted By Him, His Mark Is Deep Within Us. We Have God's Joy In Our Blood.

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

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

The Shield Was Another Of The Fear's Names. According To Laughter, It Means He Shields The Seed Of Abraham The Way A Man Starting A Fire Shields The Flame. When Sarah Was About To Die Childless, The Fear Gave Her A Son. When Abraham Was About To Slaughter The Son, The Fear Gave Him The Ram. He Is Always Shielding Us Like A Guttering Wick, Laughter Said, Because The Fire He Is Trying To Start With Us Is A Fire That The Whole World Will Live To Warm Its Hands At. It Is A Fire In The Dark That Will Light The Whole World Home.

Toleration Is Often Just Indifference In Disguise.

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

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.

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.

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.

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."

We Are Children, Perhaps, At The Very Moment When We Know That It Is As Children That God Loves Us - Not Because We Have Deserved His Love And Not In Spite Of Our Undeserving; Not Because We Try And Not Because We Recognize The Futility Of Our Trying; But Simply Because He Has Chosen To Love Us. We Are Children Because He Is Our Father; And All Of Our Efforts, Fruitful And Fruitless, To Do Good, To Speak Truth, To Understand, Are The Efforts Of Children Who, For All Their Precocity, Are Children Still In That Before We Loved Him, He Loved Us, As Children, Through Jesus Christ Our Lord.

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.

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.

Justice Is The Grammar Of Things. Mercy Is The Poetry Of Things.

You Enter The Extraordinary By Way Of The Ordinary

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?

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.

When A Man Leaves Home, He Leaves Behind Some Scrap Of His Heart. . . . It's The Same With A Place A Man Is Going To. Only Then He Sends A Scrap Of His Heart Ahead.

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

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

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.

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 Not The Objective Proof Of God's Existence That We Want But The Experience Of God's Presence. That Is The Miracle We Are Really After, And That Is Also, I Think, The Miracle That We Really Get.

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

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.

Listen To Your Life. All Moments Are Key Moments.

Inspirational Life

You Can Survive On Your Own; You Can Grow Strong On Your Own; You Can Prevail On Your Own; But You Cannot Become Human On Your Own.

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.

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

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.

If The Truth Is Worth Telling, It Is Worth Making A Fool Of Yourself To Tell It.

Making A Fool Of Yourself

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.

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.

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.

Theology, Like Fiction, Is Largely Autobiographical.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Becoming A Christian Was Terribly Helpful To Me. I Can't Imagine Finding My Way Without It. I Think It Can Be Very Crucially Important To Ally Yourself With Some Religion.

It's Not As If I Knew Answers Which I Am Going To Set Down In The Form Of A Novel Or A Memoir Or A Sermon. It's, Rather, I'm Going To Search Myself For What I Might Have To Say In This Area.

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

Discovering The Truth

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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 First Ministers Were The Twelve Disciples. There Is No Evidence That Jesus Chose Them Because They Are Brighter Or Nicer Than Other People. Their Sole Qualification Seems To Have Been Their Initial Willingness To Rise To Their Feet When Jesus Said, "follow Me."

In The Christian Sense, Love Is Not Primarily An Emotion But An Act Of The Will. When Jesus Tells Us To Love Our Neighbors, He Is Not Telling Us To Love Them In The Sense Of Responding To Them With A Cozy Emotional Feeling. You Can As Well Produce A Cozy Emotional Feeling As You Can A Cough Or Sneeze. On The Contrary, He Is Telling Us To Love Our Neighbors In The Sense Of Being Willing To Work For Their Well-being Even If It Means Sacrificing Our Well-being To That End.

To Be Commanded To Love God At All, Let Alone In The Wilderness, Is Like Being Commanded To Be Well When We Are Sick, To Sing For Joy When We Are Dying Of Thirst, To Run When Our Legs Are Broken. But This Is The First And Great Commandment Nonetheless. Even In The Wilderness - Especially In The Wilderness - You Shall Love Him.

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

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.

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

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

...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.

The Other Day, The Way People [do] Who Are Approaching Their 80th Birthday, I Was Thinking About All The Last Business - Funerals And Where Do You Want To Be Buried - And I Thought If Anything Were To Be Inscribed On My Tombstone, I Said Let It Be That.

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.

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.

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

They Are Prepared For A God Who Strikes Hard Bargains But Not For A God Who Gives As Much For An Hour's Work As For A Day's. They Are Prepared For A Mustard-seed Kingdom Of God No Bigger Than The Eye Of A Newt But Not For The Great Banyan It Becomes With Birds In Its Branches Singing Mozart. They Are Prepared For The Potluck Supper At First Presbyterian But Not For The Marriage Supper Of The Lamb.

That's Five Friends, One Each For Jesu's Wounds, And Godric Bears Their Mark Still On What's Left Of Him As In Their Time They All Bore His On Them. What's Friendship, When All's Done, But The Giving And Taking Of Wounds?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Listen To Your Life. Listen To What Happens To You Because It Is Through What Happens To You That God Speaks...it's In Language That's Not Always Easy To Decipher, But It's There Powerfully, Memorably, Unforgettably.

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.

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

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.

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.

I Was Deeply Influenced By An Episcopal Laywoman Named Agnes Sanford, Who In Her Day Was Quite Famous As A Faith Healer, Which Is A Term I've Always Distrusted, Because It Conjures Up Charlatanry. She Was Not A Charlatan. She Was The Real Thing, And She Had Had Remarkable Healings.

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.

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.

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.

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

Gail Godwin Has Written A Book About The Heaviest Matters Of Loss, Grief, And Loneliness With A Touch So Light That I Was As Often Deeply Amused By It As I Was Deeply Moved.

Wether You Call On Him Or Don't Call On Him, God Will Be Present With You.

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

The Trouble With Really Seeing And Really Hearing Is That Then We Really Have To Do Something About What We Have Seen And Heard.

If You Want To Be Holy, Be Kind.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In Honesty You Have To Admit To A Wise Man That Prayer Is Not For The Wise, Not For The Prudent, Not For The Sophisticated. Instead It Is For Those Who Recognize That In Face Of Their Deepest Needs, All Their Wisdom Is Quite Helpless. It Is For Those Who Are Willing To Persist In Doing Something That Is Both Childish And Crucial.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Go Where Your Best Prayers Take You.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

To Journey For The Sake Of Saving Our Own Lives Is Little By Little To Cease To Live In Any Sense That Really Matters, Even To Ourselves, Because It Is Only By Journeying For The World's Sake - Even When The World Bores And Sickens And Scares You Half To Death - That Little By Little We Start To Come Alive.

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.

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

God Doesn't Reveal His Grand Design. He Reveals Himself.

You Hear As Many Things As You Would Imagine. I Hear Voices Of People I Loved Once. I Hear Moments That Took Place. I Hear Silences.

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

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

Each One Of Us Could Describe His Or Her Life As A Sacred Journey. You Are Journeying From The Beginning To The End, And What Makes It Sacred Is That In The Process Of This Journey You Encounter The Holy In Various Forms Which, Unless You Have Your Eyes Open, You Might Not Even Notice.

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

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?

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

The Worst Isn't The Last Thing About The World. It's The Next To The Last Thing. The Last Thing Is The Best. It's The Power From On High That Comes Down Into The World, That Wells Up From The Rock-bottom Worst Of The World Like A Hidden Spring. Can You Believe It? The Last, Best Thing Is The Laughing Deep In The Hearts Of The Saints, Sometimes Our Hearts Even. Yes. You Are Terribly Loved And Forgiven. Yes. You Are Healed. All Is Well.

He Also Said We Should Carve In The Year And Place Where I Was Born, But I Said No. As A Man Dies Many Times Before He's Dead, So Does He Wend From Birth To Birth Until, By Grace, He Comes Alive At Last.

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

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

Pray Anyway. Who Knows What God Can Do Through Your Prayer?

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.

When Friends Speak Overmuch Of Times Gone By, Often It's Because They Sense Their Present Time Is Turning Them From Friends To Strangers. Long Before The Moment Came To Say Goodbye, I Think, We Said Goodbye In Other Words And Ways And Silences. Then When The Moment Came For It At Last, We Didn't Say It As Should Be Said By Friends. So Now At Last, Dear Mouse, With Many, Many Years Between: Goodbye.

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.

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.

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

We Have God's Joy In Our Blood.

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.

Even The Saddest Things Can Become, Once We Have Made Peace With Them, A Source Of Wisdom And Strength.

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.

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.

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.

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. Here Is The World. Beautiful And Terrible Things Will Happen. Don't Be Afraid. I Am With You. Nothing Can Ever Separate Us. It's For You I Created The Universe. I Love You. There's Only One Catch. Like Any Other Gift, The Gift Of Grace Can Be Yours Only If You'll Reach Out And Take It. Maybe Being Able To Reach Out And Take It Is A Gift Too.

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.

In The Entire History Of The Universe, Let Alone In Your Own History, There Has Never Been Another Day Just Like Today, And There Will Never Be Another Just Like It Again. Today Is The Point To Which All Your Yesterdays Have Been Leading Since The Hour Of Your Birth. It Is The Point From Which All Your Tomorrows Will Proceed Until The Hour Of Your Death. If You Were Aware Of How Precious Today Is, You Could Hardly Live Through It. Unless You Are Aware Of How Precious It Is, You Can Hardly Be Said To Be Living At All.

Think Of These Pages As Graffiti Maybe, And Where I Have Scratched Up In A Public Place My Longings And Loves, My Grievances And Indecencies, Be Reminded In Private Of Your Own. In That Way, At Least, We Can Hold A Kind Of Converse.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I Believe That What Genesis Suggests Is That This Original Self, With The Print Of God's Thumb Still Upon It, Is The Most Essential Part Of Who We Are And Is Buried Deep In All Of Us As A Source Of Wisdom And Strength And Healing Which We Can Draw Upon Or, With Our Terrible Freedom, Not Draw Upon As We Choose. I Think That Among Other Things All Real Art Comes From That Deepest Self - Painting, Writing Music, Dance, All Of It That In Some Way Nourishes The Spirit.

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

A God In The Hand Is Worth Two In The Bush.

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.

Whenever You Find Tears In Your Eyes, Especially Unexpected Tears, It Is Well To Pay The Closest Attention. They Are Not Only Telling You Something About The Secret Of Who You Are But, More Often Than Not, God Is Speaking To You Through Them Of The Mystery Of Where You Have Come From And Is Summoning You To Where, If Your Soul Is To Be Saved, You Should Go To Next.

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?

To Be Wise Is To Be Eternally Curious.

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

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.

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.

Five Friends I Had And Two Of Them Snakes.

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

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.

. . . [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.

God Himself Does Not Give Answers. He Gives Himself.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

We Cannot Make The Kingdom Of God Happen, But We Can Put Out Leaves As It Draws Near. We Can Be Kind To Each Other. We Can Be Kind To Ourselves. We Can Drive Back The Darkness A Little. We Can Make Green Places Within Ourselves And Among Ourselves Where God Can Make His Kingdom Happen.

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

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.

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