INTIMACY WITH YOURSELF THROUGH INTIMACY WITH OTHERS

'Personhood develops in relationships. In turning to face each other, we see ourselves through new eyes, learning about our assumptions, fears, dreams and desires. As the other person draws out what is unique to me, I learn to become myself. Others experience me and tell me what they experience, freeing me to explore the external world in a new light. The encounter will be as rich as the honesty and generosity of hearts that accompany it. Other people confirm our existence and validate our worth by accepting and enjoying our presence.'

Marsh Moyle, Rumours of a Better Country, p.178.

WHAT'S MORE IMPORTANT

'As important as beautifully formulated theological propositions are to the Christian faith, they are no substitute for learning to live in the presence of God, who is present in all times and places.'

Marsh Moyle, Rumours of a Better Country, p.129.

HOW TO SPOT AN IDOL

'An object is free of idolatry when we associate with it only those attributes it actually has, no more and no less.'

Marsh Moyle, Rumours of a Better Country, p.69.

THE TRINITY & INTIMACY

'God is simultaneously three and one. We reflect God's image in being in communion with each other while simultaneously being unique. The invitation to intimacy is to a communion of unique persons; to each other and to all. Both the communion and the unique persons are important.'

Marsh Moyle, Rumours of a Better Country, p.64.

TRUE FREEDOM

'...Christian freedom...is the essential freedom of human beings to develop themselves as human creatures.'

Hans Rookmaaker in Marsh Moyle, Rumours of a Better Country: Searching for trust and community in a time of moral outrage, p.53.

PATHS TO GOD

'...any authentic longing, any longing that, even implicitly, points towards eternity, is a possible path towards God.'

Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness, p.145.

TO BE HUMAN

'To be created in God's image - to be human - is to carry in the depth of one's being a longing to transcend the boundaries of human nature so as to have a share in divine life.'

Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness, p.139.

WHAT WE'RE MADE OF

'...I'm made of longing...'
Rainer Maria Rilke in Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness, p.134.

THE FRAGILITY OF HAPPINES

'Happiness involves finding oneself the recipient of a spectacle, a moment, an atmosphere, and taking, accepting, and grasping the blessing of the moment. For that there be no recipe, no preparation; one has to be there when the moment comes. Otherwise, it's something else: satisfaction in having achieved something, joy in doing what you know how to do. Happiness is fragile precisely because it is not repeatable; opportunities for it are rare and random, like old threads in the world's fabric. They ought to be seized.'

Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, p.121.

BEWARE!

'...the chief intoxicant of spiritual life: self-righteous ingratitude.'
Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness, p.42.

HUMANITY

'I am dust with a nostalgia for glory.'
Erik Varden, The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance, p.32.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF JESUS' RESURRECTION

'The sun rose and set every day. The moon, too. The tides went out and came in. The seasons turned in order. Some of the trees lost their leaves in the autumn and grew them back in the spring. People ate breakfast and supper when they had food and smoked and drank their tea. They had babies and raised them. They worked and slept. They sang and laughed and yelled and wept and fought and coupled. But from the first time she'd heard it, Esther Honey understood that if the man Jesus had died and been buried then really and truly rose, it was the only time such a thing had ever happened and that meant everything else in the world took its real meaning from that young man lying dead in his grave and awakening back to life and rolling the stone away from his tomb and saying goodbye to his friends and helpless not in spirit but actually in that body that had died and come back to life.'

Paul Harding, This Other Eden, p.193.

TRUE FREEDOM

'Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon rapid consumption of exhaustible supplies. The other kind of freedom is the freedom to take care of ourselves and of each other. The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.129.

HUMAN WHOLENESS

'Men are whole not only insofar as they make common cause with each other, but also insofar as they make common cause with their native earth, which is to say with creation as a whole, which is to say with the creator.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.104.

THE POWER OF FANTASY

'My childhood was surrounded by a communal daydreaming, the richest sort of imaginative talk, that began this way - in work, in the misery of work, to make the work bearable and even pleasant. Such talk ranged all the way from a kind of sensuous realism to utter fantasy, but because the bounds of possibility were almost always ignored I would say that the impetus was always that of fantasy. I have heard crowds of men, weary and hungry and hot near the end of a day's work, construct long elaborate conversations on the subject of what would be good to eat and drink, dwelling at length and with subtlety on the taste and the hotness or the coldness of various dishes and beverages, and on combinations of dishes and beverages, the menu lengthening far beyond the capacity of any living stomach. I knew one man who every year got himself through the ordeal of the tobacco harvest by elaborating from one day to the next the fantasy of an epical picnic and celebration which was always to occur except, richly, marvelously, in the minds of his listeners.'

Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, p.44.

PERSPECTIVE

'One afternoon [in 1939] I was planting in the orchard under an apple tree iris reticulata...Suddenly I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting-room window: "Hitler is making a speech." I shouted back: "I shan't come. I'm planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead." Last March, 21 years after Hitler committed suicide in the bunker, a few of those violet flowers still flowers flowered under the apple-tree in the orchard.'

Leonard Woolf in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, p.727.

THE POWER OF FICTION

'...fiction is our most intimate and acute means of communication, at a profound level, about our deepest apprehensions and intuitions on the meaning of life and death. And that is what binds us together, young and old.'

John Cheever in Dana Gioia, Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a young writer's life p.168.

READING NOVELS

'Life being so terribly short, and without guarantees against disaster, it is something that by picking up a book what we know to be true we can place in the widest possible context, and take the world in through eyes and hearts that are not our own. We have this always accessible form of reincarnation.'

William Maxwell, The Writer at Illusionist: Uncollected & Unpublished Work, p.106.

GOD'S POWER MADE PERFECT IN WEAKNESS

'Where on earth does the glory of God dwell in power? It is in people that are needy and at their end - people that have given up on believing that they can be the hero of their story or that their dreams of a designer life will deliver. So God abides - his power to strengthen sits over, rests upon, and meets with people in the lowly place of acknowledged weakness and need.'

Ste Casey, I prayed and nothing changed: What God is up to in the silence, p.114.

JESUS' RESURRECTION BODY

'Once incarnate, always incarnate, we might say...'
Wesley Hill, Easter: The Season of the Resurrection of Jesus, p.85.

GRIEF

'...grief, as I said, is a state as well as a process. And as with love, time simultaneously both stops and moves. You want it to stop - to be a state, so that you can hold on as much as possible to the image and memory of the lost loved one; but you also want it to be a process, one which will convey you out of this strange new land of pain before your spirit breaks.'

Julian Barnes, Changing My Mind, p.56.

THE REACH OF SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS

'Self-righteousness can feed upon doctrines, as well as upon works....'
John Newton in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p.258.

PASSING ON THE COMFORT

'Some of our afflictions perhaps befall us for the sake of our people, that we may be reminded and enabled to speak their feelings, by what we feel ourselves. In this way the tongue of the learned is acquired and skill to speak a word in season to the weary.'

John Newton in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p.237.

ASSUARANCE

'Assurance is not the eradication of indwelling sin, but the honest and humbled awareness of it.'

Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p.222.

HONESTY ABOUT PRAYER

'I sometimes think that the prayers of believers afford a stronger proof of a depraved nature, than even the profaneness of those who know not the Lord. How strange is it, that when I have the fullest convictions that prayer is not only my duty—not only necessary as the appointed means of receiving those supplies, without which I can do nothing, but likewise the greatest honour and privilege to which I can be admitted in the present life—I should still find myself so unwilling to engage in it.

However, I think it is not prayer itself that I am weary of, but such prayers as mine. How can it be accounted prayer, when the heart is so little affected,—when it is polluted with such a mixture of vile and vain imaginations—when I hardly know what I say myself—but I feel my mind collected one minute, the next, my thoughts are gone to the ends of the earth.

If what I express with my lips were written down, and the thoughts which at the same time are passing through my heart were likewise written between the lines, the whole taken together would be such an absurd and incoherent jumble—such a medley of inconsistency, that it might pass for the ravings of a lunatic. When he points out to me the wildness of this jargon, and asks, is this a prayer fit to be presented to the holy heart-searching God? I am at a loss what to answer, till it is given me to recollect that I am not under the law, but under grace—that my hope is to be placed, not in my own prayers, but in the righteousness and intercession of Jesus. The poorer and viler I am in myself, so much the more is the power and riches of His grace magnified in my behalf.

Therefore I must, and, the Lord being my helper, I will pray on, and admire his condescension and love, that He can and does take notice of such a creature—for the event shows, that those prayers which are even displeasing to myself, partial as I am in my own case, are acceptable to him, how else should they be answered? And that I am still permitted to come to a throne of grace—still supported in my walk and in my work, and that mine enemies have not yet prevailed against me, and triumphed over me, affords a full proof that the Lord has heard and has accepted my poor prayers–yea, it is possible, that those very prayers of ours of which we are most ashamed, are the most pleasing to the Lord, and for that reason, because we are ashamed of them. When we are favoured with what we call enlargement, we come away tolerably satisfied with ourselves, and think we have done well.'

John Newton in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p.205.

I SHALL NOT WANT

'All shall work together for good: everything is needful that he sends; nothing can be needful that he withholds.'

John Newton in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p.194.

JESUS' PASTORAL CARE

'...with the eye, and the ear, and the heart of a friend, he attends to their sorrows; he counts their sighs, puts their tears in his bottle; and when our spirits are overwhelmed within us, he knows our path, and adjusts the time, the measures of our trials, and every thing that is necessary for our present support and reasonable deliverance, with the same unerring wisdom and accuracy as he weighted the mountains in scales and hills in a balance, and meted out the heavens with a span.'

John Newton in Tony Reinke, Newton on the Christian Life, p,.202.

THE PURPOSE OF SEXUALITY

'The fire of erotic impulse, intrinsic to human nature, can brighten and warm our lives as a source of gladness and fruitfulness. It can also erupt in conflagrations of deadly passion. In a Christian optic, eros is an impulse towards the divine, but it not itself divine. It has its part to play in ordering human existence towards its true goal, the knowledge and love of God. It must not be mistaken for the goal.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.160.

THE INTIMACY OF BEING TRULY SEEN

'To be seen in truth is an intimate experience. Sight can in fact be more intimate than touch. As any pastor knows, people often go out in search of sexual adventure because they do not feel seen, suffer from this fact and crave a substitute. The risk is that pleasure serves, then, to exacerbate sadness and make loneliness worse. Intimacy does not have to be sexual. Sex can stand in intimacy's way.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.158.

THE ESCHATALOGICAL LIMITS TO BINARIES

'There is an eschatological thrust in the desire to overcome binary oppositions. Christ came to make the two one (cf. Ephesians 2.14, Galatians 3.28). Trouble ensues when human beings try to accomplish overcoming unaided. Christianity entertains hope of transcending human dichotomies not through pendular alterations, but through a transfiguration in love that realizes our thirst for infinity through graced communion with Infinite Being.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.124.

BEING A CHRISTIAN

'The Christian condition is the art of striving to answer a call to perfection while plumbing the depth of our imperfection without despairing and without giving up on the ideal.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.120.

DON'T LOSE THE SUPERNATURAL THRUST OF CHRISTIANITY

'Once the supernatural thrust has gone from Christianity, what remains? Well-meaning sentiment and a set of commandments found to be crushing, the finality of change they were meant to serve having been summarily dismissed.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.114.

FREEDOM FOR, NOT FREEDOM FROM

'Ordinarily we think of freedom as scope to do what we feel like. We think in terms of freedom from, not of freedom unto. In Christian terms, freedom is about enabling commitment. The Biblical view of human nature, evidenced in Christ, regards the human being as essentially relational, oblative and covenantal. On this account, unhindered pursuit of momentary inclinations is not freedom. It it is enslavement to whim, which, empirically speaking, rarely produces last happiness. Sensational thrills can come of it, true, but they are not much of a foundation on which to construct a life.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.113.

WHY BEAUTY MATTER TO US

'The human will to embody beauty is, I suspect, underrated. But it lives in us as a consequence and expression of our iconic nature. He in whose image we are made is Beauty. Beauty is naturally the end towards which we strive.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.59.

OUR DIVINE CRAVINGS

'To be human is to exist with the sense of an absence to be filled. Only the light of our human's substance's longing for union with the divine do our lesser yearnings make sense.'

Erik Varden, Chastity, p.32.

CHASTITY DEFINED

'...chastity is not a denial of sex. It is an orientation of sexuality, of the whole vital instinct, towards a desired finality. It is a function of the wholeness sought and healing found.'

Erik Varden, Chastity: Reconciliation of the senses, p.17.

THE EXHAUSTION OF EMPATHY

'Always George's problem, seeing both sides of everything. Wore him out.'
John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies, p.341. 

EDEN RESTORED

'When a human being, by the power of God’s grace, expresses a desire that is rooted not in his own selfishness (‘My will’) but rather in God’s plan for creation (‘Thy will’), such a posture reverses the bias of the Fall in that individual’s own life and re-establishes a little piece of Eden, through him or her, on earth.’

Pete Grieg, God on Mute, p.162.

THE INCARNATION

'...the omnipotent God becoming an incontinent baby...'
Pete Greig, God on Mute: Engaging the silence of unanswered prayer, p.158.

THE FOLLY OF IDOLATRY

'Idolatry is the folly of expecting a gift to be a giver. The good things of this life are not meant to generate joy in and of themselves. Rather, they are to be gratefully received as they bring our eyes up to our greatest treasure, the one who provides all things and seeks our deepest joy, the Triune God. Idolatry always disappoints, God never does.'

Dane Ortlund, In the Lord I Take Refuge: 150 Daily Devotions through the Psalms, p.373.

WHAT HISTORY TEACHES US

'First, whom the gods would destroy they must first make mad with power. Second, the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small. Third, the bee fertilizes the flower it robs. Fourth, when it is dark enough you can see the stars.'

Charles A Beard in Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Death of Evil upon the Seashore', p.86.

EVIL DESTROYS ITSELF

'...evil carries the seed of its own destruction. In the long run right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Death of Evil upon the Seashore' in The Gift of Love, p.86.

CAESAR VS. CHRIST

'Caesar occupied a palace Christ a cross, but the same Christ so split history into A.D. and B.C. that even the reign of Caesar was subsequently dated by his name.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Death of Evil upon the Seashore' in The Gift of Love, p.81.

THE PRESENCE OF EVIL

'Is anything more obvious that the presence of evil in the universe? Its nagging, prehensile tentacles project into every level of human existence. We may debate the origin of evil, but only a victim of superficial optimism would debate its reality. Evil is stark, grim, and colossally real.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Death of Evil upon the Seashore' in The Gift of Love, p.79.

WORLD TRANSFORMING CHRISTIANITY

'We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane patterns of the world. Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune and life itself on behalf of a cause they knew to be right. Quantitively small, they were qualitatively giants. Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests. Finally they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'Transformed Nonconformists' in The Gift of Love, p.16.

WHERE OUR ULTIMATE LOYALTY LIES

'Living in the colony of time, we are ultimately responsible to the empire of eternity. As Christians we must never surrender our supreme loyalty to any time-bound custom or earth-bound idea, for at the heart of our universe is a higher reality - God and his kingdom of love - to which we must be conformed.'

Martin Luther King Jr., 'Transformed Nonconformist' in The Gift of Love, p.12.