WE LIVE FOR COMFORT

'The fruit most valued by the contemporary stronghold of self is comfort. In the contemporary world, feeling good is the expected normative state of being. When one doesn't experience good feelings - if a task is unpleasant, if a relationship goes through a difficult period, if a job is tough - it is taken as a signal that something is wrong, or that something is wrong with you. The absence of good feelings becomes an amber warning light.'

Mark Sayers, A Non-Anxious Presence, p.107.

THE DANGER OF JUST FOLLOWING YOUR DESIRES

'The most dangerous thing you can do is take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us devils if we set it up as an absolute guide.' 

CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, p.10. 

THE PURPOSE OF MARRIAGE

'In the wake of the affair, Rabih, adopts a different view of the purpose of marriage. As a younger man he thought of it as a consecration of a special set of feelings: tenderness, desire, enthusiasm, longing. However, he now understands that it is also, and just as importantly, an institution, one which is meant to stand fast from year to year without reference to every passing change in the emotions of its participants. It has its justification in more stable and enduring phenomena than feelings: in an original act of commitment impervious to later revisions and, more notably, in children, a class of beings constitutionally uninterested in the daily satisfactions of those who created them.' 

Alain de Botton, The Course of Love, p.182. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORY IN THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

'...history is important, for without it we are at the mercy of whims. Memory is a databank we use to evaluate our position and make decisions. With a biblical memory we have two thousand years of experience from which to make the off-the-cuff responses that are required each day in the life of faith. If we are going to live adequately and maturely as the people of God, we need more data to work from than our own experience can give us. 

What would we think of pollster who issues a definitive report on how the American people felt about a new television special, if we discovered later that he has interviewed only one person who had seen only ten minutes of the program? We would dismiss the conclusions as frivolous. Yet that is exactly the kind of evidence that too many Christians accept as the final truth about many much more important matters - matters such as answered prayer, God's judgement, Christ's forgiveness, eternal salvation. The only person they consult is themselves, and only experience they evaluate is the most recent ten minutes. But we need other experiences, the community of experience of brothers and sisters in the church, the centuries of experience provided by our biblical ancestors. A Christian who has David in his bones, Jeremiah in his bloodstream, Paul in his fingers tips and Christ in his heart will know how much and how little value to put on his own momentary feelings and the experience of the past week.' 

Eugene H Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p.160.  

THE ROLE OF FEELINGS IN DISCIPLESHIP

'My feelings are so important for many things. They are essential and valuable. They keep me aware of much that is true and real. But they tell me next to nothing about God or my relation to God. My security comes from who God is, not from how I feel. Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not what I feel about him or myself or my neighbors.' 

Eugene H Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, p.81. 

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.

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. 

LONELINESS AS A PHYSICAL FEELING

'What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It  advances, is what I'm trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.' 

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.11.

WHAT MAKES AN IMPACT

'It often happens that we are most touched by what we are least capable of.'
Clive James, Unreliable Memoirs, p.61.

THE DISCIPLINES OF LOVE

'...in our age we are more prone than ever to expect too much of love as a feeling, and too little of love as an ongoing choice or commitment. In our worship services and marriages, we expect emotional highs will carry us through life's difficult times, when we would better expect engagement in daily disciplines to sustain us in our commitments.'

Rebecca Konydyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices, p.97.

THE MIND

'O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.'
Gerard Manley Hopkins. 'No worst' in The Major Works, p.167.  

AN UNDECIDED HEART

The Contrite Heart

Isaiah, lvii, 15

The Lord will happiness divine
On contrite hearts bestow:
Then tell me, gracious GOD, is mine
A contrite heart, or no?

I hear, but seem to hear in vain,
Insensible as steel;
If aught is felt, 'tis only pain,
To find I cannot feel.

I sometimes think myself inclin'd
To love thee, if I could;
But often feel another mind,
Averse to all that's good.

My best desires are faint and few,
I fain would strive for more;
But when I cry "My strength renew,"
Seem weaker than before.

They saints are comforted I know,
And love thy house of pray'r;
I therefore go where others go,
But find no comfort there.

O make this heart rejoice, or ache;
Decide this doubt for me;
And if it be not broken, break,
And heal it, if it be.

William Cowper, Verse and Letters, p.147. 

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. 

FEELINGS

'If one thing unties crystal-gazers, huckster TV evangelists and High Church heritage-aesthetes, it is the elevation of religious feeling above dull plodding religious duty. If you bristle with mistrust at the self-indulgence of Glastonbury wire-twisters, you should extend that mistrust to emotional revival meetings where you are urged to"Let Jesus be your friend" and to "bear witness' to Jesus on stage - but never told that when the meeting is over you should go home and be nicer to your family, not to mention your enemies at the office.' 

Libby Purves, Holy Smoke: Religion and Roots: A Personal Memoir, p.183. 

FEELINGS

'Feelings are the scourge of prayer. To pray by feelings is to be at the mercy of glands and weather and digestion. And there is no mercy in any of them. Feelings lie. Feelings deceive. Feelings seduce. Because they are so emphatically there, and so incontrovertibly interior, it is almost inevitable that we take our feelings seriously as reputable guides to the reality that is deep within us - our hearts before God. 

But feelings are no more spiritual than muscles. They are entirely physical. They are real, and they are important. But they are real and important in the same way that our fingernails and noses are important - we would not want to live without them (although we could if we had to), but their length and shape and color tell us nothing about our life with God. To suppose that our emotions in any way give us reliable evidence of the nature or quality of our life with God is to misinterpret them.'

Eugene H Peterson, Answering God, p.87. 

ENCOUNTERING GOD

'When we encounter God we experience the bipolar ambivalence of shame at our sin coupled with unbridled joy at God's forgiveness. I do not trust my own or other's religious experiences if they are characterized by only one of the two poles. I can be wrong, but I have known too many believers who are crippled by guilt and shame and unable or unwilling to receive God's grace. Likewise I have heard too many descriptions of worship or prayer encounters that were only pleasurable with no corresponding experience of being "undone" by the overshadowing presence of God's holiness.'

Michael Mangis, Signature Sins, p.71.

FEELINGS

'Even when reason is bright and the judgement clear, yet it will be ineffectual for any valuable purposes, if religion reach no farther than the head, and proceed not to the heart: it will have but little influence if there are none of the affections engaged.'

Isaac Watts in Graham Beynon, Emotions, p.174.

FEELINGS

'The grave is the only burying place of unruly affections.'

Isaac Watts in Graham Beyon, Emotions, p.163.

FEELINGS

'Our emotions tend to be raised by our five senses: things we can see, touch, taste, feel and smell. Our senses affect us more directly than unseen things and raise an emotional response. This is why I can be so affected by a film - I hear the dialogue, I see the expressions, I'm aware of the music. But here's the point: we can't use those senses on the truths of the gospel.

That is not to say we can't be affected by those truths we can't see. God's Spirit makes them real to us, bringing us an awareness of sin, confidence in the gospel, knowledge of God's love. These things are real to us, but they are real by faith.

That is why it is easier to feel rightly for concrete situations around us than for spiritual truths. We can see and touch the physical situations. We can't see or touch the spiritual reality.

This is why we will always have to work at reminding ourselves of truths about God and feeling rightly in the light of them. When we actually see something, the feelings usually flow by themselves.

If you stand in front of the Grand Canyon, you will feel enormous awe and wonder. But you will have to remind yourself of God's majesty and awe in order to feel awe about him.

If you are treated kindly by someone when you don't deserve it, you will feel gratitude. But you will have to remind yourself of God's kindness to feel grateful to him.

If you look at a beautiful jewel, painting, car or house (whatever it is for you), you will easily feel a great desire for it. But you will have to remind yourself of God's beauty in order to desire him above all else.

This explains why right feelings are a battle.'

Graham Beynon, Emotions, p.161.

MEDITATION

'Meditation does, as it were, open the door between the head and the heart.'

Richard Baxter in Graham Beynon, Emotions, p.100.