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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.

-Frederick Buechner

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Listen To Your Life.

Frederick Buechner

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Of The Seven Deadly Sins, Anger Is Possibly The Most Fun. To Lick Your Wounds, To Smack Your Lips Over Grievances Long Past, To Roll Over Your Tongue The Prospect Of Bitter Confrontations Still To Come, To Savor To The Last Toothsome Morsel Both The Pain You Are Given And The Pain You Are Giving Back--in Many Ways It Is A Feast Fit For A King. The Chief Drawback Is That What You Are Wolfing Down Is Yourself. The Skeleton At The Feast Is You.

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.

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

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

The Birth Of Jesus Made Possible Not Just A New Way Of Understanding Life But A New Way Of Living It.

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.

...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.

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.

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'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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

. . . [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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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

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.'

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Almost Nothing That Makes Any Real Difference Can Be Proved.

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

Turn Around And Believe That The Good News That We Are Loved Is Better Than We Ever Dared Hope, And That To Believe In That Good News, To Live Out Of It And Toward It, To Be In Love With That Good News, Is Of All Glad Things In This World The Gladdest Thing Of All. Amen, And Come Lord Jesus.

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

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

Theology, Like Fiction, Is Largely Autobiographical.

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

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.

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.

Doubts Are The Ants In The Pants Of Faith. They Keep It Awake And Moving.

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

Five Friends I Had And Two Of Them Snakes.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Go Where Your Best Prayers Take You.

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

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.

... 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

Listen To Your Life. All Moments Are Key Moments.

Inspirational Life

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

God Himself Does Not Give Answers. He Gives Himself.

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."

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

To Be Bored To Death Is A Form Of Suicide.

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.

We Have God's Joy In Our Blood.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

If You Want To Be Holy, Be Kind.

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.

No Words Come Easily To My Lips. I Think Ultimately - What I Like To Think Is That I'm In Some Sense Hearing The Mystery Itself.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The World Speaks Of Holy Things In The Only Language It Knows, Which Is Worldly Language.

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.

Coincidences Are God's Way Of Getting Our Attention.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 World Needs People Who Save Lives.

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

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

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

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