THE INCARNATION

'God coded himself into humanity.'

John C Lennox, Seven Daus that Divide the World: The beginning according to Genesis and science, p.104.

THE EXHAUSTION OF ANGER

'I had always thought that sorrow was the most exhausting of the emotions. Now I knew that it was anger.'
Helen Garner, The Spare Room, p.135.

PRAISE DEFINED

'Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it.'
CS Lewis, A Grief Observed, p.53.

JESUS'S ANGER

'Jesus isn't angry when he's mistreated; he's angry when others are mistreated. There was nothing selfish or self-serving in his anger.'

Tim Chester, Enjoying Jesus, p.140.

HOW MUCH JESUS LOVES US

'Even when we sin, Jesus desires us. Perhaps in our sin he desires us the most, for he longs for us to turn away from the ruin of sin and come back to his grace. When Jesus sees your sin and suffering, his instinct is not to turn away but to turn towards you in love.'

Tim Chester, Enjoying Jesus, p.102.

CHRIST'S POWER TO RESURRECT

'No one can as easily awaken another in bed, as Christ can in the tomb.'
Augustine of Hippo in Tim Chester, Enjoying Jesus, p.72.

JESUS GETS US

'He is affected with our infirmities, he feels them, he is touched with the feeling of them. He has a sense of them which touches his soul, and makes an impression on it; as one who not only has suffered what others feel, but suffers with them in what they feel.'

David Clarkson in Tim Chester, Enjoying Jesus: Experience the presence and kindess of the Son of God in everyday life, p.38.

HOW IDENTITY POLITICS FRAGMENTS

'...attaching the individual self to a fixed definition of a group self - and the group definition subsequently becoming entrenched - can lead to polarisation and even extremism. If you depend on a solid group identity to find individual stability, any questioning of that group also causes individual agony; identity is deeply emotional. And so, if a group's identity is challenged - as British national identity has been, for example, in the past few decades of increased immigration and globalisation - it fragments into the new version and a more stubbornly held iteration of the old, which enables individuals within the group to maintain their own sense of self. It follows that each old version becomes increasingly extreme or more concentrated. This is not just because it is smaller, but because the individuals within it pour in the same emotional significance they once did to the larger group: a narrower definition of the collective self is given the same weight.'

Emily Bootle, This Is Not Who I Am: Our Authenticity Obsession, p.84.

FEARING GOD

'To fear God is to no longer assert self. To fear God is to give up not only the need to master all threats but the drive to know all answers. To fear God is to trust that it is better to have him without answers than to have answers without him.'

Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Never Enough, p.194.

WHERE ENJOYMENT POINTS US

'...in God's world, enjoyment is a clue to reality's deepest, brightest secret: that the universe is the gleeful invention of unassailably happy God.'

Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Never Enough, p.132.

OUR DERANGED AGE

'You are depressed because you have every reason to be depressed. No member of the other two million species which inhabit the earth - and who are luckily exempt from depression - would fail to be depressed if it lived the life you lead. You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientfic and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he or what he is doing.'

Walker Percy in Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Not Enough, p.116.

A COSMIC IRONY

'The modern objective consciousness will go to any length to prove that it is not unique in the Cosmos, and by this effort establishes its own uniqueness.'

Walker Percy in Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Not Enough, p.113.

WE ARE COSMIC MISFITS

'God has made us cosmic misfits.'
Bobby Jamieson, Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes' Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness, p.71.

MIDDLE-AGE

'One of the disconcerting aspects of middle age was the realization that most of the crises which happened to other people also ultimately happened to you.'

Margaret Laurence, The Diviners, p.44.

THE DAMAGE CAUSED BY WRONG EXPECTATIONS

'Trauma in reponse to disaster often stems from the unbiblical fiction that the world is, and ought to be experienced as, all right. To declare it instead sick, "a vale of tears", is not pessimistic. It is to own that the world needs saving still; that Easter is not a past event, but present; that is our life, our joy and our hope depend on it. Only in paradise, when we are home at last, with Jesus, will God make all crying case. For now, we eat our fill from his table as wanderers, his bread, seasoned with our tears.'

Erik Varden, Healing Wounds, p.169.

THE VERY FACE OF GOD

 'When the Blessed Virgin, having given birth, looked into this face, she enjoyed a privilege no woman or man had known since Adam and Eve before the fall, still robed in glory.'

Erik Varden, Healing Wounds, p.143.

GOD'S ACTIVE HANDS

'Theology teaches that God's hands were never more active than when fastened to the wood of the tree, "puntured by nails", causing blood to flow "as the price of a great salvation". This is a lesson to be pondered often and in silence.'

Erik Varden, Healing Wounds, p.74.

INCARNATE INTIMATE LOVE

'Some time ago I read a remarkable book, the Confessions of a Chiropodist. The writer reveals an interesting fact: all her patients (she insists this is a rule without exception) ask, when they first turn up, forgiveness for their feet - for the general state of them, their shape, their relative smallness or largeness. Most of us, it seems, are ashamed of our feet. That explains, perhaps, why so many people are reluctant to take part in foot-washing on Maundy Thursday. It sheds light, too, on what went that night, long ago, in the Upper Room. When Jesus took the feet of the Twelve, one by one, into his hands it was to say: "I know you as you are. I love you as you are."'

Erik Varden, Healing Wounds, p.40.

THEOLOGY & PRAYER

'If you are a theologian, you will truly pray; and if you pray truly, you will be a theologian.'

Evagrius in Erik Varden, Healing Wounds, p.39,

THE FACT OF DEATH

'Death is the greatest fact in life. It faces us from our earliest consciousness. There is nothing startling in it to the child's mind.'

Frances Comper in Sarah Perry, Death of an Ordinary Man, p.183.