FAITH DEFINED

'Faith...is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.140.

GOD'S LOVE FOR US MATTERS MOST

'On the whole God's love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair on the will. If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in it's determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to him.'

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.133.

THOUGHT NEEDS EMOTION

'Thinking without emotion is impoverished thinking.'
Matthew Mullins, Enjoying the Bible, p.71.

THE POWER OF THE PAST

'The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object but its subtle relations to our own past: no wonder the secret escapes the unsympathising observer, who might as well put on his spectacles on to discern odours.'

George Eliot, Adam Bede, p.245. 

THE GENTRIFICATION OF EMOTIONS

'There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it's about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that see to afflict us are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.' 

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.280. 

WHEN SPIRITUALLY FLAT

'...when we gaze at the richness of the gospel and find them dull and uninteresting, it's actually we who have been hollowed out. We have lost our capacity to see wonders where true wonders lie. We must be formed as people who are capable of appreciating goodness, truth and beauty.' 

Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary, p.34. 

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. 

STUDYING CHRIST'S EMOTIONS

'Because it is sin rather than human nature that is opposed to grace, the study of Christ's emotions trains us to understand what it means to be properly human. In the process, we, as Spirit-filled Christians see how our emotions, which are God's gifts to us, should be expressed in the various circumstances we encounter...

...He knew when to laugh, and he knew when to weep. He knew when to stay silent and when to speak. As we consider his emotional life, we are at the same time learning how to be properly emotional Christians. After all, one of the problems in the church today is not that we are too emotionally driven, but that we are not sufficiently such after the pattern of Christ.' 

Mark Jones, Knowing Christ, p.69. 

SINGING

'Let us remember that the very power of singing was given to human nature chiefly for this purpose, that our warmest affections of soul might break out into natural or divine melody, and that the tongue of the worshipper might express his own heart.' 

Isaac Watts in Bob Kauflin, True Worshippers: Seeking what matters to God, p.109. 

THINKING & FEELING

'...feeling and thinking are like two hands with which we grasp the world and that together serve us in gaining knowledge. Just as without good thinking we are prone to inappropriate feelings, so without our feelings we are actually incapable of proper feeling.' 

Michael Jensen, 'On Being Moved: A Theological Anthropology of the Emotions' in True Feelings: Perspectives on emotions in Christian life and ministry,  p.182. 

EMOTIONS

'Some Christians repress their emotions as they sing. They fear feeling everything too strongly and think maturity means holding back. But the problem is emotionalism  not emotions. Emotionalism pursues feelings as an end in themselves. It's wanting to feel something with no regard for how that feeling is produced or its ultimate purpose. Emotionalism can also be view heightened emotions as the infallible sign that God is present. In contrast, the emotions that singing is meant to invoke are a response to who God is and what he's done. Vibrant singing enables us to combine truth about God seamlessly with passion for  God.'  

Bob Kauflin in David G Peterson, Encountering God Together, p.141. 

WHAT DRIVES US

'...an orientation toward a particular vision of the good life becomes embedded in our dispositions or "adoptive unconscious" by being pictured in concrete, alluring ways that attract us in a non cognitive level ... By "pictures" of the good life I mean aesthetic articulations of human flourishing as found in images, stories, and films (as well as advertisements, commercials, and sitcoms). Such pictures appeal to our adoptive unconscious because they traffic in the stuff of embodiment and affectivity. Stories seep into us - and stay there and haunt us - more than a report on the facts. A film like Crash gets hold of our hearts and minds and moves us in ways that textbooks on racism never could. This is because it is a medium that traffics in a wavelength, as it were, that is closer to the core of our being. Such compelling visions, over time, seep into and shape our desire and thus fuel dispositions toward them.' 

James KA Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, p.58. 

TRUTH

'But I can never agree with you that the Incarnation, or any truth, has to satisfy emotionally to be right (and I would not agree that for the natural man the Incarnation does not satisfy emotionally). It does not satisfy emotionally for the person brought up under many forms of false intellectual discipline such as 19th century mechanism, for instance. Leaving the Incarnation aside, the very notion of God's existence is not emotionally satisfactory for great numbers of people, which does not mean that God ceases to exist. M.Satre finds God emotionally unsatisfactory in the extreme, as do most of my friends of less stature than he. The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.

There is a question whether faith can or is supposed to be emotionally satisfying. I must say that the thought of everyone lolling around in an emotionally satisfying faith is repugnant to me. I believe that we are ultimately directed Godward but that this journey is often impeded by emotion.' 

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being, p.100.   

CHRISTIANITY

‘I myself am a Christian and not a Muslim or a Buddhist for a mixture of two different kinds of reasons; as an outcome of both kinds of process. On the passive side, Christianity was the religion of my childhood. It’s the ancient religion, for something like forty generations, of the place I come from. It’s the matrix of my culture. But it’s also something that I came back to, freely as an adult, after twenty-odd years of atheism, because piece by piece I have found that it answers my need, and corresponds to emotional reality for me. I also find that the elaborated structure of meaning it builds, the story it tells, explains that reality more justly, more profoundly, more scrupulously and plausibly than any of the alternatives. (Am I sure I’m right? Of course not. Don’t you get bored with asking that question?).’

Francis Spufford, Unapologetic, p.75.