THE LANTERN OUT OF DOORS

'Sometimes a lantern moves along the night,
That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?

Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.

Death or distance soon consumes them: wind
What most I may eye after, be in at the end
I cannot, and out of sight is out of mind.

Christ minds: Christ’s interest, what to avow or amend
There, éyes them, heart wánts, care haúnts, foot, fóllows kínd,
Their ránsom, théir rescue, ánd first, fást, last friénd.'

Gerard Manley Hopkins 

THE CHALLENGE OF CHANGE

'...maybe you cannot ever really walk away from the things you most want to walk away from.'

Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men, p.66.

THE DAMAGE REVOLUTIONS CAN DO

'The last forty years on the land were revolutionary and disrupted all that had gone on before for thousands of years - a radical and ill thought through experiment that was conducted on our fields.' 
James Rebanks, English Pastoral: An Inheritance, p.6.

WHEN YOUR FREEDOM TO BE THE PERSON YOU WANT TO BE IS LIMITED BY YOURSELF

'It is a terrible and terrifying thing to know what you want to be and then realize you're the only one standing in your way - to want with every fiber of your soul to be someone different, to escape the "you" you've made of yourself, only to fall back into the self you hate, over and over again and over again. After the thrill of independence and experiments in self-actualization, drinking your so called "potential for Being" to the dregs, when the exhaustion starts to set in and then eventually morphs into a kind of self-disgust, you can reach a point where you know you want a different life but are enchained to the one you've made.'  

James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.64. 

THE WEAKNESS OF STATS

'Hearts are rarely strangely warmed by statistics.'
Emma Ineson, Ambition: What Jesus said about power, success and counting stuff, p.55. 

FAKE IT TILL YOU MAKE IT IN WORSHIP

'We think that if we don't feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much better than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship, our deep, essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured.'

Eugene H Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p.48.

HOW TO CHANGE

'True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you'll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.' 

James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, p.34. 

OUR CONTRADICTORY DESIRES

'...at the heart of our human condition is an unwillingness to accept things as they really are. We long for lives of permanence in a world of constant change and we strive to achieve it. We long for change in a world of permanent repetition and we dream of how to interrupt it.'  

David Gibson, Destiny, p.32. 

THE CHALLENGE OF THINKING

'Human beings are not built to be indifferent to the waves and pulses of their social world. For most of us the question is whether we have even the slightest reluctance to drift along with the flow. The person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognizing the subtlest of social pressures, confronting the pull on the ingroup and disgust for the outgroup. The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.'  

Alan Jacobs, How to Think, p.23. 

BREAKING HABITS

'Habits respond to cues that trigger them. Over time habits ossify and become encrusted in behaviour riffs because, in one way or another, they reward us. In order to break habits, we need to recognise those cues and avoid them, or force ourselves to respond to them differently, to experiment with new rewards.' 

Giovanni Frazzetto, Together, Closer, p.173. 

CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP

'Leading a church, an organisation, or a ministry that transforms the world requires more than the latest leadership strategies and techniques. Lasting change in churches and organizations requires men and women committed to leading from a deep and transformed inner life. We leads more out of who we are than out of what we do, strategic or otherwise. If we fail to recognize that who we are on the inside informs every aspect of our leadership, we will do damage to ourselves and to those we lead.' 

Peter Scazzero, The Emotionally Healthy Leader, p.48. 

WHEN ACCUSED OF BEING A "CRANK"

'A crank is a very elegant device. It's small, it's strong, it's lightweight, energy efficient, and it makes revolutions.' 

EF Schumacher in Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, p.126. 

HOW TO MAKE AN IMPACT

'...I thought for years that the best way to put a spanner in the consumer dystopia that is unfolding is to ground yourself in a place and learn to do things with your hands - actually learn to do them, not just write about learning to do them. Grow your own carrots, learn to use an axe and a scythe, know where the sun falls and what the trees do and what is growing in the laneways. Get to know your neighbors, put down roots and stay even when you don't want to stay. Be famous, as Gary Snyder so wonderfully suggested, for fifteen miles.' 

Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, p.105.

BRINGING ABOUT CHANGE

'Once you start thinking you are responsible for, or can influence, everything, you are lost. When you take responsibility for a specific something, on the other hand, it's possible you might get somewhere.'

Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, p.101. 

SUICIDE

'Suicide is everywhere in this culture, under every stone and once you come to be part of that great, unspeakable clan of people that have been touched by it, you see this. Three years ago, my wife and I had a baby daughter. Before she was born I never noticed babies except when they annoyed me in cafes. Now I see babies everywhere. The streets are full of toddlers; they cascade from the doorways and overflow the drains. Experience changes you. Nothing else changes you.'

Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, p.16.

THE NEED FOR PERFECTION

'One of the fundamental truths of Christianity is that progress towards a lesser imperfection is not produced by the desire for lesser imperfection. Only the desire for perfection has the virtue of being able to destroy in the soul some part of the evil the defiles it.' 

Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, p.208. 

WHY PEOPLE CHANGE

'What the heart  loves, the will chooses and the mind justifies.'
Thomas Cranmer in Glynn Harrison, A Better Story, p.57. 

OUR HEARTS

'Our hearts are like stringed instruments that are plucked by story, poetry, metaphor, images.' 

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love, p.91. 

THE POWER OF HABIT

'...there is no formation without repetition. Virtue formation takes practice, and there is no practice that isn't repetitive. We willingly embrace repetition as a good in all kinds of other sectors of our life - to hone our golf swing, our piano prowess, and our mathematical abilities, for example. If the sovereign Lord has created us as creatures of habit, why should we think repetition is inimical to our spiritual growth.'  

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love, p.80. 

CORPORATE WORSHIP

'Instead of the bottom up emphasis on worship as our expression of devotion and praise, historic Christian worship is rooted in the conviction that God is the primary actor or agent in the worship encounter. Worship works from the top down, you might say. In worship we don't just come to show God our devotion and give him our praise; we are called to worship because in this encounter God (ree)makes us and molds us top-down. Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn't just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.' 

James KA Smith, You Are What You Love, p.76.