OUR TOTAL DEPENDENCE

'God's help is an attribute of his Being that keeps us in being.'

Erik Varden, Alight with Hidden Glory, p.22.

THE WEAK CARING FOR THE WEAK

'In the church, we know that we should care for the weak, but so often we seek to do so as the strong, the capable ones, the copers, those who have their stuff sorted. Strong people care for weak ones, after all.

The Lord's way is different. It is to bring the weak ones together to care for one another. This is not nearly so attractive to us. For those of us who like to be dependable, it is challenging to think we might need to depend on others.'

John Hindley, Weakness Our Strength: Learning from Christ Crucified, p.39.

WE ARE DEPENDENT CREATURES

'The liberal theory of the independent individual as the basic unit of society is full of exceptions....It would be fairer to say that dependence is our default state, and self-sufficiency the aberration. Our lives begin and (frequently) end in states of near total dependence, ad much of the middle is marked by periods of need.'

Leah Libresco Sargeant in Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, p.173.

PRAYING FOR HUMILITY

'Grant that
    whatever good things I have,
        I may share generously
            with those who have not
and that
    whatever good things I do not have,
        I may request humbly
            from those who do.'

Thomas Aquinas in Kelly Kapic, Your're Only Human, p.106.

ANTHROPOLOGY STARTS WITH CHRISTOLOGY?

'I am convinced that only when we have grasped the implications of the humanity of Jesus will we be able to properly assess our own humanity. The doctrine that the Word became flesh means that God himself affirms our flesh as good, and that affirmation liberates us from apologizing for our creaturely limitations. If we believe that Jesus, who was free from all sin, was fully human, then this means that he considered creaturely restrictions to be part of his good creation and not evil at all. It means that we must not apologize for what the Son of God freely embraces.'

Kelly M Kapic, You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design and Why That's Good News, p.43.

MATURITY COMES THROUGH SUFFERING

'Depending on God in trouble is a spiritual skill that can be learned only in trouble.'
Timothy Keller with Kathy Keller, The Way of Wisdom, p.42.

WHERE DESIRE POINTS US

'Conversion means that people change their direction, not their character or their history. Desire, that constant reminder that there is something beckoning beyond any immediate horizon, is there to be re-purposed: it is not there to be torn out or thrown away or violently bent out of shape. The flowering of desire in the human soul is a herald for God's presence, because desire points towards something we have not made for ourselves and cannot encompass. It speaks God's truth: that the perfectly regulated and performed self is not, in fact, available to anyone. Neither the religious not the secular closed self can thrive.

For those who recognize that they are dependent animals - creatures - this is not such a terrible shock.'

Jessica Martin, Holiness and Desire, p.166. 

WHAT MAKES DEPENDENCE ON GOD DIFFERENT

'To be unconditionally dependent on another human subject is to be in deep danger of repressive, dehumanizing patterns of relation. To depend on God in the context I have outlined is precisely to be delivered from this. God is not another ego greedy to control.'

Rowan Williams, Being Human, p.83. 

HOW GRACE BEGINS

'To desire the aid of grace is the beginning of grace.'
Augustine of Hippo in James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.67. 

TRUE FREEDOM MEANS DEPENDENCE

'...the irony: my freedom of choice brings me to the point where I need someone else to give me a will that is actually free. And not merely free to choose - since that's what got me here in the first place - be free to choose the good. If freedom is going to be more than mere freedom from, if freedom is the power of freedom for, then I have to trade autonomy for a different kind of dependence. Coming to end of myself is the realization that I'm dependent on someone other than myself if I'm going to be truly free.' 

James KA Smith, On the Road with Saint Augustine, p.66. 

HUMAN INTERDEPENDENCE

'And don't forget in doing something for others that you have what you have because of others. Don't forget that. We are tied together in life and in the world. And you may think you got all you got by yourself. But you know, before you got out here to church this morning, you were dependent on more than half of the world. You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and you reach for a bar of soap, and that's handed to you by a Frenchman. You reach over for a sponge, and that's given to you by a Turk. You reach over for a towel, and that comes to your hand from the hands of a Pacific Islander. And then you go on to the kitchen to get your breakfast. You reach over to get a little coffee, and that's poured into your cup by a South American. Or maybe you decide that you want to drink a little tea this morning, only to discover that that's poured into your cup by a Chineses. Or maybe you want a little cocoa, that's poured in your cup by a West African. Then you want a little bread and you reach over to get it, and that's given to you by the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. Before you get through eating breakfast in the morning, you're dependent on more than half the world. That's the way God structured it; that's the way God structured this world. So let us be concerned about others because we are dependent on others.'  

Martin Luther King Jr., 'The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life' in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, p.40.

SAYING GRACE

'...to say grace before a meal is among the highest and most honest expressions of our humanity....Here, around the table and before witnesses, we testify to the experience of life as a precious gift to be received and given again. We acknowledge that we do not and cannot live alone but are beneficiaries of the kindness and mysteries of grace upon grace.' 

Norman Wirzba in Tish Harrison Warner, Liturgy of the Ordinary, p.65. 

TRUE FAITH

'As far back as I can remember, I had the habit of thanking God for everything I received, and asking him for everything I wanted. If I lost a book, or any of my playthings, I prayed that I might find it. I prayed walking along the streets, in school and out of school, whether playing or studying. I did this not in obedience to any prescribed rule. It seemed natural. I thought of God as an everywhere-present Being, full of kindness and love, who would not be offended if children talked to him.' 

Charles Hodge in Dale Ralph Davis, Slogging Along in the Paths of Righteousness: Psalms 13-24, p. 62. 

GOD AS FATHER

'Is the idea of God an infantile prolongation of our ideal father image, or is our receptivity to the child-father idea the result of our more profound and primary relationship with God? Indeed the basic criticism of Freud proposed by the German psychiatrist Binswanger is a reversal: God is not the prolongation of the child's relationship with his dad, but the child's feeling for his dad is a concretizing of an idea born of his more fundamental relation to his Creator. In others words, we couldn't love our father if God had not loved us first.'

Henri JM Nouwen, Intimacy, p.11. 

WE EXIST TO RELATE

'What makes a creature a specific creature is the ordering of a life with other lives, never its individual being alone. A child not only is a child but is a child for the adult who cares for her; a young man not only is a young man in himself but is one for the sake of the older man who teaches him; an old woman not only is an old woman but is so in respect to the young she embraces and guides. The textures of generation, genealogy, and probation that marks human creatureliness is itself given as a comprehensive set of relationships who shape can be determined only across time. The point is not that human creaturehood is species driven, with each individual serving the survival of the race. Rather, creaturehood is constellation driven: it is all about the all about the landscape and its multiple objects as they exist together, encounter, engage, and crumble within the divinely figured order.' 

Ephraim Radner, A Time to Keep, p.154. 

WE ARE CREATURES

'We are creatures; and therefore dependence is the very mode of our being, and our glory is precisely that gift of dependence we call faith.' 

Robert W Jenson, Song of Songs, p.87. 

PRAYER

'"Come on, Dad. Come on, Dad. Come on, Dad." He often prayed to his father in his absence. God, he decided, was just like his Dad, only bigger. It was easier to pray to him and hope God got the message on relay.'

Tim Winton, Scission, p.9.

DEPENDENCE

'Every person starts out as a child dependent on those providing us care, and we remain interdependent with others in thoroughly fundamental ways throughout our lives. That we can think and act as if we were independent depends on a network of social relations making it possible for us to do so.' 

Virginia Held in Alexander Nehamas, On Friendship, p.53. 

IMAGE OF GOD

'The language of "image" argues for a dependence upon an "original".'
Richard Lints, Identity and Idolatry, p.29.  

DEPENDENCE

'I've carried the subtle idea around with me that growing in knowledge will mean that I get to depend less and control more. But Jesus indicates the opposite, and this challenges the way we do theology and Bible study. To know God truly, we have to know that we are not him. In a word, Jesus teaches us that humility is the dominant quality of becoming like a child in order to see the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 18:3-4).'

Zack Eswine, Sensing Jesus, p.136.