To value one another is our greatest safety, and
to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.
~ Marilynne Robinson
Reflect, Resonate, Reevaluate, Respond
Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.
~ Frederick Buechner, 1926-2022, from Beyond Words
No shortcomings of other people cause us to be more intolerant than those which are caricatures of our own.
~ Franz Grillparzer, 1791-1872, Austrian writer & dramatist
The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves.
~ Charles Cayton Colton
Stop for one whole day every week, and you will remember what it means to be created in the image of God, who rested on the seventh day not from weariness but from complete freedom. The clear promise is that those who rest like God find themselves free like God, no longer slaves to the thousand compulsions that send others rushing toward their graves.
~ Barbara Brown Taylor, 1951- , Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.
~ David Foster Wallace, from This Is Water
Authentic faith leads us to treat others with unconditional seriousness and to a loving reverence for the mystery of the human personality. Authentic Christianity should lead to maturity … It should fashion whole men and women living lives of love and communion. False, manhandled religion produces the opposite effect. … it draws us away from reality and God.
~ Brennan Manning, 1934-2013. Speaker