THE DIGNITY CHRISTIANITY GIVES US

'Scripture allows me to claim that I am more than an invisible node in the indistinguishable mass of humanity. It affirms my particularity, makes it possible for me to believe myself to be seen and known, with a specific part only I can play, but it also humbles me. I can only begin to make sense as part of something bigger, an organ in a living body, a daughter in a family.'

Elizabeth Oldfield, Fully Alive, p.134.

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.

THE BURDEN OF SELF-CONSTRUCTION

'Modern notions of selfhood amplify our individual responsibilities and opportunities in this regard. In former times, when prevalent mental frameworks sealed the individual within an envelope of community, mapping the world was more of a shared effort. Today, imagining ourselves to be autonomous, we shoulder the burden of psychic self-construction in relative isolation. It must have been far less taxing to assume one's place in the choir than it is to improvise these solos.' 

Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.61. 

TANGIBLE ACHIEVEMENTS

'The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect on the world. But craftmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one's failure or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.' 

Matthew Crawford in Peter Korn, Why We Make Things & Why It Matters, p.56. 

WHERE OUR DESIRE FOR WHOLENESS COMES FROM

'We all long for unity and wholeness in life. 

We long for unity because we've been created for wholeness by the perfectly united triune God.' 

Paul M Gould, Cultural Apologetics, p.150. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF PRAYER TO THE SELF

'Prayer enables us to rebuild the very foundations of our existence, and gives back to a person the true purpose of their life: relationship with God. It provides an authentic self-fulfillment because it restores free and constant dialogue, that intimate fellowship with our Creator. Prayer is the vehicle that allows us to meet our deepest need, our thirst for God.' 

Pablo Martinez, Praying with the Grain: How Your Personality Affects The Way You Pray, p.96. 

CHRISTIAN IDENTITY

'Some Christians base their identity on being a sinner. I think they have it wrong - or only half right. You are not simply a sinner; you are a deeply loved sinner. And there is all the difference in the world between the two.' 

David G Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself, p.60. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING LOVED

'What matters to us, beyond mere existence, is the explicit confirmation: It is good that you exist; how wonderful that you are! In other words, what we need over and above sheer existence is: to be loved by another person.' 

Josef Pieper in Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.141. 

KNOW THYSELF

'A Ford car trying to be a Cadillac is absurd, but if a Ford accepts itself as a Ford, it can do many things that A Cadillac could never do: it can get in parking spaces that a Cadillac can never get in. And in life some of us are Fords and some of us are Cadillacs.' 

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.34.

UNION WITH CHRIST DOESN'T DESTROY THE INDIVIDUAL

'...our self is not obliterated by our union with Christ; our self is fully realized. God the Creator clearly delights in our unique particularity. From sunsets to snowflakes, he makes endless variations of beautiful things for the sheer joy of it.He never repeats himself and never runs out of ideas.' 

Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.162. 

THE PROBLEM WITH HUMANITY

'The central core difficulty in people, as I have come to know them, is that in the great majority of cases they despise themselves, and regard themselves as worthless and unlovable.' 

Carl Rogers in Rankin Wilbourne, Union with Christ, p.156. 

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. 

INTIMACY & SELF-ESTEEM

'...intimacy requires a solid sense of self to be successful and satisfying.'

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City, p.241.

DON'T BE TRUE TO YOURSELF

'If you are true to "yourself", you will end up a complete mess. The challenge is to take the "self" you find within, and to choose wisely which impulses and desires to follow, and which ones to resist.' 

Tom Wright in Brian S Rosner, Known by God: A Biblical Theology of Personal Identity, p.25. 

SELF-ESTEEM

'When in comes to the gaining of genuine confidence and genuine self-respect, even the supposed default humans needs a surprising amount of encouragement. What they need, life everyone else, is a) one thing to be good at, and b) one person to notice.

With me that starts at school.

It starts with Mrs Slater.' 

Robert Webb, How Not to be a Boy, p.113. 

A SENSE OF BEAUTY

'Male or female we all need to feel beautiful to be open to sexual communication: "beautiful" in the sense of welcome, desired, and treasured. Deprived of that, one objectifies oneself or the other for self-protection.' 

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p.148. 

THE NEED TO BE NEEDED

'Initiative and responsibility, to feel one is useful and even indispensable, are vital needs of the human soul.' 

Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, p.14. 

CHRISTIANS WHO BULLY

'...just as the insecure child becomes the playground bully, so the insecure Christian causes problems in the church, because he or she always has something to prove, is always seeking affirmation. By contrast, the Christian who grasps security in grace will build others up.' 

Christopher Ash, Teaching Romans (Volume 1), p.215. 

A NEW ROUTE TO WHOLENESS?

'...we are so accustomed to seeking personal wholeness through various forms of self-development, counselling, or therapy that it would occur to very few people to think of citizenship as a path to greater individual wholeness.' 

Daniel Kemmis in John Inge, A Christian Theology of Place, p.132. 

LASTING SELF-ESTEEM

'....people cannot have enduring self-esteem unless they genuinely believe in their centrality in the world.' 

Yi-Fu Tuan, 'Place/ Space, Ethnicity/ Cosmos' in Why Place Matters, p.113.