Reflections

Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don’t listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what’s behind the words.
~ Roy T. Bennett

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In the choir of life, it’s easy to fake the words—but someday each of us will have to sing solo before God.
~ Michael P. Green, 1947-

“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He’s thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left, the best way you can, by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. … No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.
~ Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Reading ought to be an act of homage to the God of all truth. We open our hearts to words that reflect the reality he has created or the greater reality which he is. Christ, the incarnate Word, is the Book of Life in whom we read God.
~ Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front–
~ G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), The Man Who Was Thursday

This Sunday’s readings: Acts 17:16-34

Reflections

Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply. When we listen with curiosity, we don’t listen with the intent to reply. We listen for what’s behind the words.
~ Roy T. Bennett

We need to cultivate the courage to be uncomfortable and to teach the people around us how to accept discomfort as a part of growth.
~ Brené Brown, Professor/author/Speaker

The church…is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave but to call them out in order to send them back as agents of God’s kingship.
~Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998), British theologian and missionary

The gospel is not a set of techniques for making people Christians. Nor is it a set of systematic theological reflections, however important. The gospel is the announcement that Jesus is Lord – Lord of the world, Lord of the cosmos, Lord of the earth … of whales and waterfalls, and of trees and tortoises. And as soon as we get this right we destroy in a stroke the disastrous dichotomy that has existed in people’s minds.
~N. T. Wright, (1948-present), Anglican theologian, former Bishop of Durham

There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present. But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.
~ Blaise Pascal, Philosopher / Mathematician, Pensées, (thought #425)

This Sunday’s readings: Acts 16:13-34