TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2013

In no particular order:

• Richard  F Lovelace, Disciplines of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal  
• Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy, The President's Club: Inside The World's Most Exclusive Fraternity
• Flannery O'Connor (Edited by Sally Fitzgerald), The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O'Connor 
• John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence
• Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
• Alan Paton, Too Late the Phalarope
• Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain 
• Christopher West, Fill These Hearts: God, Sex and the Universal Longing
• John Williams, Stoner 
• Bruce A Ware, The Man Christ Jesus: Theological Reflections on the Humanity of Christ 

IMPATIENCE

'...I would like to be a mystic and immediately.' 

Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal, p.38. 

SEX

'The Sex act is a religious act & and when it occurs without God is a mock act or at best an empty act. Proust is right that only a love which does not satisfy can continue. Two people can remain "in love" - a phrase made practically useless by stinking romanticism - only if their common desire for each other unites in a greater desire for God - i.e., they do not become satisfied but more desirous together of the supernatural love in union with God.'

Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal, p.31.

RELATIONSHIPS

'Man's desire for God is bedded in his unconscious & seeks to satisfy itself in physical possession of another human. This necessarily is a passing, fading attachment in its sensuous aspects since it is a poor substitute for what the unconscious is after. The more conscious the desire for God becomes the more successful the union with another becomes because the intelligence realizes the relation in its relation to a greater desire & if this intelligence is in both parties the motive power in the desire for God becomes double & gains in becoming God-like. The modern man isolated from faith, from raising his desire for God into a conscious desire, is sunk in the position of seeing physical love as an end in itself. Thus his romanticizing it, wallowing in it, & then cynicizing it.' 

Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal, p.30.

ATHEISM

'No one can be an atheist who does not know all things. Only God is an atheist. \\\the devil is the greatest believer & he has his reasons.' 

Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal,  p.25. 

WRITING

'If I ever do get to be a fine writer, it will not be because I am a fine writer but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me.' 

Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal, p.23. 

SIN

'Sin is large & stale. You can never finish eating it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited.' 

Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal, p.22. 

KNOWING GOD

'I do not know You God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside.' 

Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal, p.3. 

CHRISTMAS

'The shepherds sing; and shall I silent be?
                My God, no hymn for thee?
My soul ’s a shepherd too; a flock it feeds
                Of thoughts, and words, and deeds.
The pasture is thy word: the streams, thy grace
                Enriching all the place.
Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers
                Out-sing the day-light houres.
Then we will chide the sunne for letting night
                Take up his place and right:
We sing one common Lord; wherefore he should
                Himself the candle hold.
I will go searching, till I finde a sunne
                Shall stay, till we have done;
A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly,
                As frost-nipt sunnes look sadly.
Then we will sing, shine all our own day,
                And one another pay:
His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine,
Till ev’n his beams sing, and my musick shine.'

George Herbert 

MINISTRY

'Reticence, then - a healthy respect for limits - is a requisite pastoral skill. An enthusiasm for God's unlimited grace requires as its corollary a developed sensitivity to human limits. We have to know when and where to stop.'

Eugene H Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant, p.139.