FRIENDSHIP DEFINED

'News of Lincoln's death was withheld from Seward. The doctors feared that he could not sustain the shock. On Easter Sunday, however, as he looked out the window towards Lafayette Park, he noticed the War Department flag at half-mast. "He gazed awhile," Noah Brooks reported, "then, turning to his attendant," he announced, "The President is dead." The attendant tried to deny it, but Seward knew with grim certainty. "If he had been alive he would have been the first to call on me," he said, "but he has not been here, nor has he sent to know how I am, and there's the flag at half-mast." He lay back on the bed, "the great tears coursing down his cheeks, and the dreadful truth sinking into his mind." His good friend, his captain and chief was dead.'

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, p.744.

THE PURPOSE OF OUR LIVES

'We are sent into the world for a short time to say - through the joys and pains of our clock-time - the great "Yes" to the love that has been given to us and in so doing return to the One who sent us with the "Yes" engraved on our hearts. Our death thus becomes the moment of return. But our death can be this only if our whole life has been a journey back to the One from whom we come and who calls us the Beloved.'

Henri JM Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, p.79.

THE INTIMACY OF EATING TOGETHER

'Isn't a meal together the most beautiful expression of our desire to be given to each other in our brokenness? The table, the food, the drinks, the words, the stories: are they not the most intimate ways in which we not only express the desire to give our lives to each other, but also to do this in actuality?'

Henri JM Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, p.65.

PAIN & SUFFERING ARE TRULY INDIVIDUAL

'Our brokenness is always lived and experienced as highly personal, intimate and unique. I am deeply convinced that each human being suffers in a way no other human being suffers. No doubt, we can make comparisons; we can talk about more or less suffering, but, in the final analysis, your pain and my pain are so deeply personal that comparing them can bring scarcely any consolation or comfort . In fact, I am more grateful for a person who can acknowledge that I am very alone in my pain than for someone who tries to tell me that there are many others who have a similar or a worse pain.'

Henri JM Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, p.52.

WHERE OUR TRUE VALUE COMES FROM

'Long before any human being saw us, we are seen by God's loving eyes. Long before anyone heard us cry or laugh, we are heard by God who is all ears for us. Long before any person spoke to us in this world, we are spoken to by the voice of eternal life. Our preciousness , uniqueness and individuality are not given to us by those who meet us in clock-time - our brief chronological existence - but by the One who has chosen us with an everlasting love, a love that existed from all eternity and will last through all eternity.'

Henri JM Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, p.37.

GOD'S LOVE FOR US

'Listening to that voice with great inner attentiveness, I hear at my centre words that say: "I have called you by name, from the very beginning. You are mine and I am yours. You are my Beloved, on you my favour rests. I have moulded you in the depths of the earth and knitted you together in your mother's womb. I have carved you in the plasm of my hands and hidden you in the shadow of my embrace. I look at you with infinite tenderness and care for you with a care more intimate than that of a mother for her child. I have counted every hair on your head and guided you every step. Wherever you go, I go with you, and wherever you rest, I keep watch. I will give you food that will satisfy all your hunger and drink that will quench all your thirst. I will not hide my face from you. You know me as your own and I know you as my own. You belong to me. I am your father, your mother, your brother, your sister, your lover and your spouse...yes even your child...wherever you are I will be. Nothing will ever separate us. We are one.'"

Henri JM Nouwen, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World, p.24

THE DANGER IN OUR VIRTUES

'When we're young, so much time is spent keeping our vices in check. Our anger, our envy, our pride. But when I look around, it seems to me that so many of our lives end up being hampered by a virtue instead. If you take a trait that by all appearances is a merit - a trait that is praised by pastors and poets, a trait that we have come to admire in our friends and hope to foster in our children - and you give it to some poor soul in abundance, it will almost certainly prove an obstacle to their happiness.'

Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway, p.495.

WHAT A CHILDHOOD OF SUFFERING GIVES YOU

'For her sake I have regretted that miserable homestead, and blamed my father for the blind and ignorant lemming-impulse that brought us to it. But on my own account I would not have missed it - could not have missed it and be who I am, for better or worse. How better could a boy have known loneliness, which I must think a good thing to know? Who ever can came more truly face to face with beauty than a boy who in a waste of characterless grass and burnouts came upon the first pale primrose on the coulee bank, or on some day of great coasting clouds looked across acres of flax in bloom? Why, short of exile, would anyone ever submit to the vast geometry of sky and earth, to the glare and heat, to the withering winds? But how else could he have met the mystery of nights when the stars were scoured clean and the prairie was full of breathings from a long way off, and the strange, friendly barking of night-hunting owls?'

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow, p.281.

THE INTIMATE ACT OF MAKING A PATH

'Wearing any such path in the earth's rind is an intimate act, an act like love, and it is denied to the dweller in cities.'

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow, p.273.

THE POWER OF PLACE

'Expose a child to a particular environment at his susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.'

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow, p.21.

THE DANGER OF OVERPLAYING DIFFERENCE

'People say to me, "Men are different from women." Yes, but I have never met any differences so great as the differences between some men and other men.'

Theodore Roosevelt in Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt, p.237.

OUR RELATIONAL GOD

'The God, who in his very triune being us both union and communion, has created us for communion with one another and with himself.'

John Wyatt, Transforming Friendship, p.156.

OUR FRIENDS POINT US TO JESUS

'Christ himself kisses us in the love of our friends.'
Bernard of Clairvaux in John Wyatt, Transforming Friendship, p.155.

HOW RELATIONAL INTIMACY STRENGTHENS CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP

'One thing is clear to me: the temptation of power is greatest when intimacy is a threat. Much Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.'

Henri JM Nouwen in John Wyatt, Transforming Friendship, p.119.

FRIENDSHIP AS A CATALYST FOR FRIENDSHIP

'This is one of the wonders of friendship. The intimacy and depth of one relationship is in no way diluted by my friendship with another. In fact, as I learn and grow in one friendship, I develop greater abilities and resources for deepening friendships with others.'

John Wyatt, Transforming Friendships, p.114.

FRIENDSHIP AS TIME TRAVEL

'If you want to transcend time, build friendships across generations. Though you can't stand outside your own season, you can hear from those who've lived through your season. In my experience this is one of the great gifts of multigenerational friendships. Friendship in this respect is akin to time travel...if we can relinquish the myth of utter singularity, then listening to those generations ahead of us is a way of learning from our future. Granted it is the nature of youth to spurn such gifts. But when we are humbled, friendship across the generations becomes a lifeline, an almost sacramental means of transcending the purview of our now as God gives us an outside glimpse of our moment. But the gifts traverse time both ways. Older generations attentively listening to those younger avail themselves of different ears to hear what's whispering or shouting now.'

James KA Smith in John Wyatt, Transforming Friendship, p.113.

FRIENDSHIP POINTS TO THE RENWAL OF ALL THINGS

'The gospel, the good news about Jesus, concerns the re-creation and renewal of everything and everyone for communion, through the person of Christ. And the deepest and most intimate friendships between Christian believers can become a living embodiment, a tangible enactment, of the restoration of communion between broken human beings which the gospel enables.'

John Wyatt, Transforming Friendship: Lessons from John Stott & Others, p.60.

TRUE POWER

'To refrain, to put aside power is Godlike.'
Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.217.

GRACE MAKES US SUSPICIOUS

'Grace, being apart from the calculus of deserving, is often suspect.'
Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.215.

GOD'S EMOTIONS

'There is a long tradition in theology of divine "impassibility," which teaches that God has no emotions, since if He were capable of anger or pleasure that would mean He was capable of change, including change caused by something outside Himself. The Hebrew Flood narrative is interesting as a meditation on this question. It tells that God can be grieved and angered, and at the same time that God is and will be faithful, to earth and to Adam. He can change and not change. Immutability is not an inevitable consequence of His nature, as if options were denied Him by philosophical consistency. Rather, as the Psalmist says, His steadfast love endures forever.'

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.65.

GOD'S GRACE

'God's great constancy lies not in any one covenant but in the unshakeable will to be in covenant with willful, small-minded, homicidal humankind.'

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.53.

THE REALITY OF THE BIBLE

'...the Bible does not exists to explain away mysteries and complexities but to reveal and explore them with respect and restraint that resists conclusion.'

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.19.

THE HUMAN AUTHORS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

'...the Bible itself indicates no anxiety about association with human minds, words. lives, and passions. This is a notable instance of our having a lower opinion of ourselves than the Bible justifies.'

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.5.

THE BIBLE AS THEODICY

'The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil. This being true, it must take account of things as they are. It must acknowledge in a meaningful way the darkest aspects of the reality we experience, and it must reconcile them with the goodness of God and of Being itself against which this darkness stands out so sharply. This is to say the Bible is a work of theology, not simply a primary text upon which theology is based.'

Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis, p.3.