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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.

-Frederick Buechner

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The Fearsome Blessing Of

Frederick Buechner

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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.

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

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 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.

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.

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'.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I Say, “you May Be Right, But Don’t Knock It Until You’re Tried It. Don’t Say, ‘i Think It’s Worthless; Therefore I’m Not Going To Spend Any Time Looking Into Myself The Way One Who Prays Does.'” Maybe That’s An Even Worse Mistake Than Praying Might Be.

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.

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.

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

On Her Deathbed, Gertrude Stein Is Said To Have Asked, 'what Is The Answer?' Then, After A Long Silence, 'what Is The Question?' Don't Start Looking In The Bible For The Answers It Gives. Start By Listening For The Questions It Asks.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

We Have God's Joy In Our Blood.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

. . 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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Five Friends I Had And Two Of Them Snakes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

. . . [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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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."

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.

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.'

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.

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

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

Making A Fool Of Yourself

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.

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.

The World Needs People Who Save Lives.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

Toleration Is Often Just Indifference In Disguise.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

You Enter The Extraordinary By Way Of The Ordinary

Here Is The World. Beautiful And Terrible Things Will Happen. Don't Be Afraid.

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.

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

Go Where Your Best Prayers Take You.

She Was Right That Reality Can Be Harsh And That You Shut Your Eyes To It Only At Your Peril Because If You Do Not Face Up To The Enemy In All His Dark Power, Then The Enemy Will Come Up From Behind Some Dark Day And Destoy You While You Are Facing The Other Way.

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.

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. All Moments Are Key Moments.

Inspirational Life

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

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.

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.

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.

To Be Bored To Death Is A Form Of Suicide.

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.

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.

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

Discovering The Truth

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.

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.

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

Coincidences Are God's Way Of Getting Our 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.

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.

Almost Nothing That Makes Any Real Difference Can Be Proved.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

If You Want To Be Holy, Be Kind.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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