WE ALL LIVE UNDER A TOTALITARIAN REGIME

'Reading Luke's Gospel I see why Steiner is so terribly wrong when he says that only people living under totalitarian regimes can produce art worthy of the name. We all live under the totalitarian regime of the world's evil. And it's in the terms in which our own culture manifests it that we have to expresss our struggle against it, our longings for glimpses of good.'

Helen Garner, How to End a Story:Collected Diaries, p.419.

WHEN WE FINALLY GET TO BE OURSELVES

'"Won't it be nice when we die, Edie, and we can finally be ourselves?"'

Laurie Colwin, A Big Storm Knocked it Over, p.163.

THE BEGINNING OF GOD SETTING EVERYTHING RIGHT AGAIN

'..with the resurrection of Jesus God's new world has begun; in other words, his being raised from the dead is the start, the paradigm case, the foundation, the beginning, of that great setting-right which God will do for the whole cosmos at the end. The risen body of Jesus is the one bit of the physical universe that has already been "set right", Jesus is therefore the one through whom everything else will be "set right".'

Tom Wright, Acts for Everyone: Part 2 Chapters 13-28, p.93. 

THE HEAVENS DECLARE

'After the world had been created, man was placed in it as in a theatre, that he, beholding above him and beneath the wonderful works of God, might reverently adore their Author.'

John Calvin in Matthew Bingham, A Heart Aflame for God, p.236.

DON'T BE A FISH OUT OF WATER

'As a fish lives in the water as in its element, and dies when it is out, so a Christian lives in prayer as in his element, and his heart dies when he is out of it.'

William Bridge in Matthew Bingham, A Heart Aflame for God, p.167.

OUR PATIENT GOD

'To read the Bible well is to become acquainted with God's patience.'
Esau McCaulley, Lent, p.60.

THE LORD'S SUPPER: RITUAL & ENCOUNTER

'Christ doesn't just teach us about himself in the Eucharist; he comes to us and nourishes the weary believer. We can have both. Ritual is both a means of spiritual formation (we learn through repetition) and an encounter (God meets us in the act of worship and praise in the liturgy).'

Esau McCaulley, Lent, p.55.

BECOMING A CHRISTIAN

'To transition from believing you live in a world where death is the end, to one in which an almighty God calls dead things to life.'

Esau McCaulley, Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal, p.7.

BIBLICAL MEDITATION

'Meditation is a middle sort of duty betweeen the word and prayer, and hath respect to both.'

Thomas Manton in Matthew Bingham, A Heart Aflame for God, p.131.

HOPELESS? HOPEFUL PRAYER

His prayers lean upward
on the dark and fall
like flares from a catastrophe.
He is a man breathing the fear
of hopeless prayer, prayed
in hope.

Wendell Berry, from '1994 VI' in A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, p.181.