{mostly on fiction, poetry, spirituality, biblical studies and theology}
The present moment holds infinite riches beyond your wildest dreams but you will only enjoy them to the extent of your faith and love. The more a soul loves, the more it longs, the more it hopes, the more it finds.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence, as quoted by James Martin, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life
It’s like there’s a scale from 1 to 10, and you always would have sworn that someone or something mattered to you with a 10. But then you almost (or you actually do) lose her or him or it or them, and suddenly your heart is filled with a 17 or a 39 or a 4,291 kind of mattering. New capacities, ones you didn’t know were possible before, open up inside you.
Rob Bell, What We Talk about When We Talk about God
Because of [faith], you freely, willingly, and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown you such grace.
Thus Martin Luther in ‘An Introduction to St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans’, quoted by John Swinton, Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to the Problem of Evil. Swinton goes on to say that:
Faith … is countercultural. It is not a work of reason; indeed, it is not something that, on their own, human beings can achieve at all. It is an act of God’s grace wherein a person learns what it means to live in the power of the Holy Spirit and to love God in all things, even in suffering.
‘Taking up the cross’ in costly discipleship means a willingness to struggle against evil, for the sake of fullness of life, for the ‘bringing back of beauty’. It does not mean the passive acceptance of imposed suffering. Rather it means resistance to any pain or violence unjustly inflicted and an affirmation of abundant life for all. It means prioritizing love and justice inseparably intertwined.
Mary Grey, To Rwanda and Back: Liberation, Spirituality and Reconciliation
Belief in a God of infinite mercy and transforming love means [to] hold on to the belief that there is no place from which God is absent. […] God’s silence signifies not absence, but total engagement. God becomes silent in order to be with the silenced. It is an ultimate act of love to be able to enter the awful silence and suffer together.
This, once again, is from Barbara Glasson, A Spirituality of Survival: Enabling a Response to Trauma and Abuse.
Here’s my last quote from Samuel Wells and Marcia A. Owen, Living without Enemies: Being Present in the Midst of Violence:
Receiving God’s love is like breathing in. Responding to the suffering of others is like breathing out. If I do the first without doing the second, I will pass out.
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God showed us in Christ a love that abides, that perseveres, that remains present to us, however bad things are, for however long it takes; a love that sticks around, a love that stays put, a love that hangs on. … In the resurrection, God made clear to us in Christ that nothing – neither death nor life – can separate us from God’s love. And in the sending of the Spirit, God promised to be with us always, to the end of time, and to empower us to be Christ for others and find Christ in them, beyond our own strength and courage.
Samuel Wells and Marcia A. Owen, Living without Enemies: Being Present in the Midst of Violence
Brief thoughts & quotes … 