The familiar face of the person we live with, the quality of their steadfast covenant love, can suddenly become a window through which the face of the God who loves us in and through them shines.
Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness
Category: Random thoughts
Creating your world
The way you tell the story about your world will … co-create that world.
Gareth Higgins, ‘Here isn’t the news’, Third Way, Summer 2014
Education, passivity and God’s plan for humanity
I was rather interested in Michel de Verteuil’s comment (in: Let All the Peoples Praise Him: Lectio Divina and the Psalms) that
because of the insights of great educators like Paulo Freire, we are conscious that the education system encourages passivity; it frustrates God’s plan for humanity.
I can certainly relate to our education system encouraging passivity, which seems true in so many ways. I’ve thought before that I ought to read Paulo Freire myself sometime. De Verteuil’s comment has just reinforced that.
The body was even scarier
Interesting thoughts by Margaret Atwood on ‘dirty words’:
The bad ones in French are the religious ones, the worst ones in any language were what they were most afraid of and in English it was the body, that was even scarier than God.
From Surfacing.
Re-membering and the ongoing work of making creation whole
Some sobering and insightful thoughts about the Eucharist from Sara Miles’s inspiring book Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion:
The entire contradictory package of Christianity was present in the Eucharist. A sign of unconditional acceptance and forgiveness, it was doled out and rationed to insiders; a sign of unity, it divided people; a sign of the most common and ordinary human reality, it was rarefied and theorized nearly to death. And yet that meal remained, through all the centuries, more powerful than any attempts to manage it. … The feast showed us how to re-member what had been dis-membered by human attempts to separate and divide, judge and cast out, select or punish. At that Table, sharing food, we were brought into the ongoing work of making creation whole.
Lion Isaiahists and Wolf Isaiahists battling over the Peaceable Kingdom
The Lion Isaiahists and the Wolf Isaiahists both preached on street corners, battling when they met: they were at odds over whether it was the lion or the wolf that would lie down with the lamb once the Peaceable Kingdom had arrived.
This little satirical gem from Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood puts it finger rather squarely on one of the problems Christianity tends to suffer from.
There’s much insight in the following thought, too:
… religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.
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The barbarians have already been governing us for quite some time
What matters … is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages, which are already upon us. The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theology
Brief thoughts & quotes … 