On God’s Love, Spiritual Discipline and the Freedom of Patience (Mustard Seeds 6)

Ann Nadge, a poet I know, has distilled some of the posts from this blog into poetry. She has used my words verbatim, captured the essence of the post, and moulded it into a poet's vision. 

This poem consists of verbatim fragments from an original post on 2 September, 2021.

On God’s Love, Spiritual Discipline  and the Freedom of Patience

There is nothing God is withholding,

waiting for us to earn.

Everything is given – what more

can there be than the love that is God?

What God has done in Jesus

and given in the Spirit

is working its way through our lives

and the whole of creation. 

 

To live into what has been bestowed

requires new habits of thought and feeling,

practising the spiritual disciplines, the sense

of the presence of God to blossom -

new habits of awareness and gratitude,

not always intense discipline,

but a freedom and patience

that waits for God in our lives,

the presence of God unveiled

now and in our past. After all,

joy can’t be manufactured

it is a gift.

The Kingdom of God is Like a Weed

 Jesus likens the kingdom to a weed. (The mustard seed grows into a weed.) So the kingdom isn't the project you are doing in the shed, it is to be found behind the shed in the unkempt part of the yard not usually visible from where all the action is happening. That's funny. It must have provoked at least a little snigger amongst some, while others may have been a little offended.

These days it is difficult to find someone in the church who doesn't recognise the danger of identifying our pet projects with the kingdom. We know that when we give our hearts to pet projects (that is, the pet project becomes an idol, displacing the kingdom from its place of honour in our hearts), all kinds of problems and disasters occur. Idols always distort those who worship the idol and the outcomes. 

If avoiding making our pet projects into idols were as easy to say as do, I suppose human history would look significantly different to what it actually does. And this isn't just for religious people. Pet projects become ideologies, driving adherents to say and do all sorts of crazy stuff. Like any idol.

And this is why the parable of the mustard seed is so helpful. It's a warning against pet projects. Even when we think the pet project is the kingdom. Even when the pet project begins in kingdom-type activity. It's just too easy to equate what we are doing and thinking with the kingdom. We all decry the empire-building of yesteryear but are happy enough to think that when we act justly or evangelise (or whatever it is your church tradition values in particular) that we are doing God's work. Well, yes, possibly. But it is a slippery slope, and is why history looks like it does.

I could just say, let's hang loose people. Let's not invest too much in our pet projects. But how to give (of self) genuinely and hang loose? How to avoid becoming tepid? (Neither hot nor cold, see Revelation 3:16.) Well, keep looking behind the shed. That's the point of the parable, or at least part of it. Keep looking behind the shed. And when we do, and we see the weeds growing, let the weeds take your interest for a while. We can divide our attention, which is a good, practical way to get our hearts off the pet project and (at least potential) idol in the shed. God is doing all kinds of stuff, not just our pet project. It might be time to move on from the pet project. The kingdom requires nimbleness.

Here is a parallel from the Christian tradition. People hunger for spiritual experiences. Christians have always hungered for spiritual experiences, and when an 'experience' is granted, hang on to the experience. And not just Christians, it seems that many contemporary people are hungering for 'spiritual' experiences, although who knows exactly what the world thinks it means by 'spiritual'. Anyway, the advice from the Christian tradition is not to hang onto the experience. The experience may well be helpful, but hang onto it and it will become less and less helpful until it has the opposite effect. Kind of like how the pet project can become an idol. The advice is to just go back to praying, like normal, and leave behind the experience. The experience has done what it was meant to do. Move on. And that is part of the problem with seeking a  'spiritual experience', it feels like it is helping us grow, but it will actually stop us from moving and growing in a relatively short space of time.

Or another parallel. In the Christian tradition, God is more unlike than like any image or thought we have of God. Words and images have the tendency to become replacements for God, that is, idols. Or, less dramatic, prevent us from continuing our journey into and with God. We get stuck. Just like spiritual experiences, we can get stuck. Just like pet projects. We can get stuck. The kingdom is moving on, let's keep looking, moving, joining, looking, moving ...

Further Thoughts on Hypocrisy (Part 1)

 Hypocrisy is such a nasty word. Its root is from Greek for an actor with a mask in a performance, a critic/interpreter underneath (the mask). That is, what you see is not the real person. 

The usual way of thinking of hypocrisy is to picture someone who acts and speaks in a way that does not reflect who they really are, and they wear this 'mask' to dupe those around them. Undoubtedly, this does happen, but it is not the only problem. Most of us don't want to be knowingly false to ourselves. Think of someone who has lost the fire in the belly for their 'passion' (what a terribly overused word these days) and no longer believes in it, and yet still must maintain the talk and the walk. Hypocrisy, I suppose, but most people get hollowed out and unhappy becasue they know they are play acting. They move on and discard the mask.

What is more common is the hypocrisy that is not directed to the outside world, but inwardly, to the hypocrite themselves. The hypocrisy is more likely unknown to the alleged hypocrite, at least consciously. The more common hypocrisy is the attempt to convince ourselves that we aren't who we really think we are.  We put on a mask for ourselves, desperate to convince ourselves. Forget the idea that we are trying to dupe others, hypocrisy is primarily about self-deception. Of course, the self-deception is strengthened if our hypocrisy convinces others as well. This is one reason why trying to be 'good' is a trap. ('Only God is good' says Jesus, see here.) Wanting to be good can easily become wanting to be good (or whatever the deception) because I suspect that I might be, or could be, bad etc. That's hypocrisy. And it is a path that leads away from our full humanity. No wonder Jesus didn't like it much. (See here.)

God Alone is Good

Jesus says that no one is good except God alone. (Mark 10:18) Well that’s a relief. It’s a burden to think that the task of our lives is to be good. (Which is to say, not being bad.)

Jesus makes the above declaration about God in response to a question from a rich man. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” So Jesus begins with the affirmation that God alone is good. “But anyway” says Jesus, “how you going with the commandments?” “Great” says the guy, “I seem to have them down pretty well.” This guy thinks he is good. And he thinks Jesus is good, and that Jesus thinks that Jesus is good. And so he tries to identify with Jesus, to build up a mutual back-slapping club with him for all those who are good.

No such luck for the guy. “Give up everything and follow me.” To give up his wealth would be to give up the evidence that he is good. (That is, God blesses the righteous, and the guy’s wealth is therefore evidence that he is righteous. We call this the prosperity gospel these days and it is alive and well not so much in the church but in society around us.) Jesus invites the guy to give up the burden of his (self-) righteousness and to follow him, Jesus. “No way fella”, he says, and off he goes grieving for (we are told) “he had many possessions”.

People can often feel guilty about their wealth when they hear this reading. And that would be to miss the point. Guilt about not being good? ("I feel guilty about my wealth", which is to in some way say that I am bad because of it.) Oh dear. But isn’t Jesus saying that God alone is good? Imagine if, having felt guilty about one’s wealth after reading this passage, one gave it all up. I suppose we could feel very good rather than guilty (bad). But would this be discipleship?

Only God is good.

The call to discipleship that Jesus makes to the man is not a better way to be good, that is, free from possessions.  The passage is consistent: Jesus says it’s not about being good (God alone is good), the man says that he is good, Jesus calls him to give it all up and follow him, surely not just to be good, but to escape being good. Discipleship of Jesus is not about being good.

It’s a call away from being good.

Here’s another way of looking at it. If I said I was showing compassion to someone because I was good, or if showed compassion because I felt guilty, that wouldn’t be compassion. That would make my ‘compassion’ be about me, not the person I am being compassionate toward. Being good to please God is about us, not God. Jesus asks us to love not be good.

The Virtue of Patience and the Traditional Church

Do we live in a particularly impatient age? Probably not, patience is a virtue that must be learned, meaning that impatience has not suddenly appeared in the last few years. But do we have the opportunity or necessity of learning to be patient as perhaps people did a thousand years ago? I suspect we do. All technological break-throughs shift the 'locality' where people have to show patience. We don't have to show patience in the same areas of life as did people in 1813, but we still have to show patience. So, for example, I have access to enormous amounts of information in a very short space of time. I don't need to patiently send a letter asking for a document; instead I can pull it up on the internet.    Perhaps - because of the pace of change and technological innovation - in comparison to former generations we are more tempted to think we shouldn't need to be patient, leading to higher levels of impatience. However,  it still takes the same disciplines to be patient now as it did a thousand years ago, and in some areas of our lives nothing has changed, and we must learn patience in exactly the same way as did our forebears.

The seemingly slow pace of personal transformation is one of those areas. There are no shortcuts in the daily dying and rising with Christ. Technology hasn't made this dying and rising any easier than it was a thousand years ago. We still have to learn the same degree of patience with those we live with and love as did people in 1013. We still have to learn that we are not God and therefore we must exercise patience when praying and looking for the kingdom of God.  We still need patience in worship, learning the rhythms of worship and not to manufacture the kingdom now. Welcome to the traditional church.

Hypocrisy

If hypocrisy is defined as simply not living up to the ideals one preaches to others, then hypocrisy is not a bad thing. At least it means that I have ideals, even if I fail them.  No wonder the church is open to easy criticism on this account: we do actually believe in something which isn't all that easy to live. However, better this than believing in nothing at all and having no moral compass.

 The question is whether I am aware of my failure to live up to the ideals of the gospel and the ways in which I twist the demands of God to suit myself and exclude or oppress others. If we are aware of the gap between our own lives and the ideals of the gospel, and I let this knowledge seep into how I live and talk to others, this doesn't really deserve the accusation of hypocrisy. We just call it sin, and calls from us repentance and humility.

In today's Gospel reading from Matthew (22:15-22) Jesus accuses the Pharisees of hypocrisy. I thin we would just call it duplicity. The Pharisees pretend sincerity when all along they intend to try and trap Jesus. Jesus sees through them and cleverly slips through the trap while also embarrassing them. (They bring him a coin with a graven pagan image on it.) Although that they are acting in a way that their own faith would prohibit, and do so willingly and without any sense of caution, suggests hypocrisy.

In Matt 23 Jesus again accuses the Pharisees of hypocrisy, and this time we get some explicit content to the accusation. Although in the first few verses of Matt 23 it sounds like Jesus is equating hypocrisy with saying one thing but doing another (23:3-4), Jesus has more in mind. The rest of the chapter is an extended criticism of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees citing example after example. Jesus' criticisms revolve around superficiality, pride or self-congratulation,  and ignorance of the true demands of God (23:13-28), an ignorance (whether from a genuine blind-spot or willfully committed) that prevents others from responding to God.  And, even more sinister, all this can lead to the scapegoating of the those who point out the hypocrisy. (23:29-39; see also 22:33-46)

How do we prevent ourselves from being hypocrites? This is especially important given that we all fail to live up to the gospel and have blind-spots that prevent us from seeing the extent of our failure. A couple of things can help us in this regard.

1. Repentance for both the failures we are aware of and those we remain unaware of. This last is important because it encourages us to remain vigilant for these hidden sins. And repentance leads to humility. (Matt 23:8-12)

2. Remain in living contact with the gospel to allow it to do its inner and outer work on us. Regular, living contact with the gospel is essential. And I think this contact should be both personal (e.g. reading and reflection) as well as public exposure through the community of faith.  In the church I hear the gospel preached and see it lived, as well as meeting examples of failure to live it. All of this might help me learn something about myself and help me break out of my own small circles of self-deception and hypocrisy.

3. Judge as we would wish to be judged. (Matt 7:1-5) Repentance and humility while we are in regular contact with the gospel of grace will help us to judge as we are judged: mercifully, and with caution.  This is perhaps the best way to respond to those who like to make generalizations about 'the church' or 'Christians' or 'churchgoers' or 'priests' and label 'them' as hypocrites. It is tempting to join them in their hypocrisy by pointing out their hypocrisy in making the generalization. Better to judge as we are, and wish to be, judged.

Do You Really Want God? (Quote)

From Inward/Outward

"Do you really want to live your lives, every moment of your lives in God's Presence? Do you long for God, crave God? Do you sing and dance within yourselves, as you glory in God's love? Have you set yourselves to be God's, and only God's, walking every moment in holy obedience? I know I am talking like an old-time evangelist. But I can't help that, nor dare I restrain myself and get prim and conventional. We have too long been prim and restrained.

 "The fires of the love of God, of our love toward God and God's love toward us, are very hot."Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind and strength." Do we really do it? Is love steadfastly directed toward God, in our minds, all day long? Do we live in the steady peace of God, a peace down at the very depths of our souls, where all strain is gone and God is already victor over the world, already victor over our weaknesses?

 "This life, this abiding, enduring peace that never fails, this serene power and unhurried conquest--inward conquest over ourselves, outward conquest over the world--is meant to be ours. It is life that is freed from strain and anxiety and hurry, for something of the Cosmic Patience of God becomes ours." (Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion)

Presence and the Near-Life Experience

The wisdom of the great spiritual writers is that we human beings are too often not present to our own lives. We are in the past or the future, or too tired or distracted, angry or in denial about reality.  I said to the St John's students recently that if they disbelieve me they should try to see how many seconds they can be present to their lives before some thought, feeling or other distraction intrudes. I said if they lasted 7 seconds they would be doing well.

The older we get the harder it becomes to switch from living outside our lives to living in them. We become calcified in our distractedness and the habit of living elsewhere than right now. A near-death experience can shake us up. Sometimes people 'find' God after a near-death experience. It is my experience that the near-death experience shakes us up not only because we could have died, but because we gain a new sense of the beauty, meaning and sheer goodness of  every moment of life. And although this new sense might only be temporary (because to live in the present and break old habits takes spiritual discipline) it remains evidence, I think, of the truth in the original insight itself, we are not present to our own life. And it is not just near-death experiences that lead people to grasp the sheer gift of life, but the process of dying itself. Sometimes people acquire a sense of the goodness and giftedness of life, their own waste of the gift, and can even move into receiving the gift of real livingness in a moment, as they move to death. (Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych" is a fictional account of just such a movement.)

There is also a parallel here with the complaint that God is absent in our lives. "I prayed but it didn't make any difference, and I didn't feel God's presence ... I don't think God exists."  Is there perhaps a parallel here with our absence from life? We think that life is dull and boring, or that it will begin when ... or that my life would be great if only such and such hadn't happened...  But what if, as Ron Rolheiser says, the fault of absence, both in terms of our lives and in our sense of God's presence in our lives, is on our side? It is easy to live as though God does not exist just as it is easy to live unaware of the life waiting to be lived!

See also Leunig's cartoon entitled " a Near-Death Experience (see picture above).

Immanence of God's Presence (Quote)

"The importance of the teaching of the Incarnation is that this mystery of God in his eternal creativity is not only brought closer to us but is really united to us. We no longer need to objectify the mystery that has taken up dwelling in our hearts of flesh. We now know that our awakening to his reality is an imminent possibility for each of us because the awakening is an incarnate encounter. The joyfulness to which this feast should recall us is that this awakening is not the result of our own inadequate resources. It is not our own power or wisdom that leads us but his love that is present as the light of the supreme reality in our hearts." (John Main)

Confusion in 'No Religion'

Here is an interesting article by Philip Hughes over on the ABC religion portal. it examines the waning of traditional religion in Australia. All is not as it seems though. 'No religion' might reflect people's inability to decide, to know what to believe, and how to develop a deeper spirituality. Some 'no religion' might be something like a default position for those confused and stuck by inertia.

Here is a quote.
 

"Thus, influenced by the freedom offered by the "post-traditional" culture that has developed in Australia, many people have withdrawn from the Christian faith, sometimes to a more general spirituality, sometimes to "no religion" at all.

"While many people experienced post-traditionalism as giving them freedom, and thus warmly embraced the option to make their own decisions, others found the responsibility of making their own decisions about the basic ways of approaching life and what to believe about life and the world daunting. Indeed, this has been a root cause of much insecurity in Australian culture.

"There is an interesting parallel here with occupations. While every Australian young person values the opportunity to make their own choices about what work they will do, finding the right occupation is often a very long process and causes great insecurity in the process.

"Young people jealously guard their right to make their own decisions about religious faith and spirituality. Yet they do not find those decisions easy. Few feel equipped to think through what is involved. They frequently fall, almost by default, into a non-religious, non-spiritual approach to life that focuses on the here-and-now."

Gratitude is a Way of Living

If I asked you how you feel when you are thankful, what would you say? When I feel thankful I feel happy, I feel confident about life, more trusting and that I could be more generous. I also feel less anxious. And if I asked you how you acted out your thankfulness, what would you say? It is easy to miss the progression from feeling thankful to acting thankfully. The progression from feeling to action is rewarding because it both consolidates and deepens  the feelings associated with thankfulness and leads to the possibility of a thankful life. Imagine living a thankful life! Being happier, more confident, more trusting, more generous and less anxious!!  It could be life changing. And there are lots of spiritual exercises embedded in and practiced within the Christian tradition to help us access this way of living in gratitude. Although be warned, if you pursue a thankful life you will probably end up believing in God, or deepening your faith!

See also this post on love as action, not just feeling.

Prayer of Abandonment (And a Discipline of Mind)

Four o'clock in the morning, or thereabouts, when I often have to get up and tend a child, is a dangerous time for my discipline of mind. I get back into bed, and generally, having had enough sleep not to fall back to sleep immediately, start thinking. Thinking about what I should have done yesterday, what I have to do today or this week, what so and so said yesterday and what I should have said in response, etc. And it is easy for these thoughts to chain themselves to other events or thoughts, and before I know it I am agitated or worried, with no possibility of getting back to sleep. And worse still, I enter the new day with those thoughts and feelings in the background. This is not uncommon, and can happen to people during the day or night. There is a traditional spiritual practice that provides an antidote. Pray! At 4AM, once I realise that my mind is spiralling out of control, I say to myself, "I surrender", over and over. The trick is to stop thinking about anything else and saying the word without thinking about anything else at all. Don't concentrate on the word too much because the idea is that the word reflects a confidence in God, to whom you are surrendering. When I do this I am asleep within minutes.

It is the clue for the day as well. Experiencing a rise in aggravation of any kind? Thoughts, feelings building a momentum of negativity? Then say the surrender prayer above, or better still, during the day, try this prayer from Charles de Foucauld.

Father,

I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will.

Whatever you may do, I thank you:

I am ready for all, I accept all.

Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures.

I wish no more than this, O Lord.

Into your hands I commend my soul;

I offer it to you

with all the love of my heart,

for I love you, Lord,

and so need to give myself,

to surrender myself into your hands,

without reserve,

and with boundless confidence,

for you are my Father. Amen.

Life, Boredom and Ritual

Ron Rolheiser

Following on from a recent post that included comments about why a little boredom is not necessarily a bad thing, see Ron Rolheiser here on staying away from those who expect excitement all the time.

Yes, But ...

Last week I quoted from Diana L. Hayes. it was a good quote (see here), quoting in turn, and in approval, St Augustine about our need for God. In the same small article - written like a manifesto for a new spirituality - she says that churches, synagogues and any of the other traditional forms of institutional religion are not answering the deepest yearnings of people anymore. "Perhaps this is so because these institutions have become so involved in naming and thereby controlling the Spirit that they no longer have it within their midst... They have lost that which they sought and claimed to own and have become 'whitened sepulchers' devoid of life, of knowledge, of hope, of the spirit." (p. 54)  Seems a bit extreme, but it is written as rhetoric, so a bit of exaggeration is mandatory. Would the traditional religion she mentions be like that practiced by St Augustine himself? Presumably. Yes, of course, churches and church people can think that God is theirs, thereby making God into an idol. It is a common human failing, even when the god owned is the more common idol of wealth, power, family, longevity, security, etc. And I think it was Jesus who used the" whitened sepulchers bit", and he was most definitely traditional. (Unless, of course, you think nothing good can come from Israel, and therefore agree with the "Jesus went to India ..." antisemitism.) It seems quite a common practice for contemporary 'spirituality' to take from traditional religion its great insights and truths, cut the truths away from all the practices, beliefs and history that produced those truths, and then claim that, somehow, you know the truth better and can get there from some other route. Call me a skeptic, but it just doesn't hold water. Bonhoeffer, with his hint about a religionless Christianity, is used in a similar way. But Bonhoeffer was traditional. And the great figures who stood for justice and peace, favourites of the non-traditional movements, were traditional Christians. Think of Romero, or Dorothy Day. And then there is the deep spirituality of the mystics like Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Brother Laurence, not to mention Francis of Assisi, and so many others that are beloved of new age religion, but flap around like fish out of water in it. The traditional faith and its traditional practices produced the mentioned greats. A strict, traditional sacramental and prayer life, with traditional ethics, theology and Scripture reading grounded the great mystics. Yes, the traditional church fails to be anywhere near perfect, but it has always thrown up the greats like Augustine and Teresa, as well as the ordinary, traditional Christians who do so much good in the world despite their failings, and who will always, it seems, be a disappointment to the new age.

Diana L. Hayes, "Who do You, God, Say That We Are?", in Mary Hembrow Snyder, ed. Spiritual Questions for the Twenty First Century, pp. 53-56.

Desire for God

If you have been following the comments on expectation and desire between Cecil and I (here), then check this out from Laurence Freeman. Here is an excerpt:

The certainty of the fundamentalist must be sacrificed and radical doubt must be allowed to question us all. Our experience with the death of certainty is also the death of desire—the egotistical desire to be right, to be safe, to be better than others. Such death is our sharing in the cross. The rebirth of desire that follows is the transformed desire that springs from a pure heart in the vision of God. This “desire for God” is not like any other desire we have known. Yet “happy is the person whose desire for God has become like a lover’s passion for his beloved,” St John Climacus declared. It does not exhaust itself or lead us to exploit others in order to fulfill it. It is both desire and freedom from desire as it was experienced before. [. . . . ]

Worship is About God

I have had reason to revisit an earlier post on worship because of some continuing comment. The point of that previous post is that worship is not about us and receiving what we think God should give. Of course, different styles suit different people, and bad liturgy and worship is still bad. Yes, but the point still remains that worship is about God, not us, and coming to worship with minimal expectations is best. If we could do this then our perceived absence of God in worship might become a gift that leads somewhere deeper. Instead the temptation is to be complacent with the boredom or to seek variety (and move churches). Spiritually it is tougher, but potentially more important, to remain worshiping where you think God is absent without being complacent. 

Moreover, such a practice (of remaining where we perceive God to be absent) is a spiritual practice that will serve us well when we face those intense times and places of God's absence, like sickness and death. Working with our need to tell God where and how God should be present is a spiritual practice that can lead to spiritual maturity. This 'working with our need to tell God' will include questioning God ("Where are you?" "Why have you deserted me?"), but that is part of the faith experience. But if we rant at God from a position of waiting for God, then such questioning is productive and does not need to lead to atheism.

Pastoral Care and Unbaptised Secular Psychology

There was a trend (that is still being played out) in the 70s and 80s toward the clergy re/training in the human sciences like psychology and social work, etc. For some it was a natural move given their liberal theological position that struggled to give faith, theology and even God any firm foundations other than as a cipher for justice and care for others. For some it also provided a little insurance against ecclesiastical caprice! This confusion between the human sciences and Christian theology and practice was evident in the training I received in pastoral care back in the mid-80s. A large part of our practice and reflection consisted of learning secular techniques of counselling and then constructing a theological justification for the use of these techniques. However, it was all a little too uncritical. (One of the ironies in this is that those who advocated the mostly uncritical use of the human sciences were often those most critical of the church's alleged uncritical baptism of political power in the time of Constantine and since.)

Now, the human sciences are an extremely valuable and pragmatic grab-bag of theory and practice that serve us all well. Good therapy, when you need it, is a great gift. However, to collapse Christian pastoral care into this grab-bag of psychology and medicine is a mistake. Pastoral care is more than psychology conducted in a Christian context or by Christians supplemented with prayer and Bible reading. (Although it can be this too.) When this collapse occurs the goals of Christian pastoral care and Enlightenment medicine and psychology become almost indistinguishable. For example, the tendency of the human sciences (and medicine) is to consider pain and suffering something to be avoided and eradicated. If it cannot be eradicated then the task is to help the client/patient cope with the pain. Well and good at one level, but we wouldn't want that to determine our response in toto. A specifically Christian response might be to spend some time on the person's relationship with God in the midst of the pain and suffering, and ask, "What practices might help this person remain faithful to God in the midst of this pain, and to know the continuing care of God in their life?" How might we help people cope with their experience of a providential God, their eschatological hope in the kingdom to come, and their current experience of confusion and alienation? The experience of pain and suffering can be a laboratory where we learn our need and renew our love for God in a more real manner. But that is a tough thing for a pastor to try these days because the aims of the secular human sciences and medicine have a virtual monopoly on the practice and goals of pastoral care.

The Hollowness Within (Quote)

That hollowness we sometimes feel is not a sign of something gone wrong. It is the holy of holies inside of us, the uncluttered throne room of the Lord our God. Nothing on earth can fill it, but that does not stop us from trying. Whenever we start feeling too empty inside, we stick our pacifiers into our mouths and suck for all we are worth. They do not nourish us, but at least they plug the hole. Barbara Brown Taylor

The Messy Life and Soul (Quote)

Our search for God and our service to others will never be conducted in a neat world. Life will never submit to our good intentions, will never fall in line, will never stand still long enough to do our bidding.

Life will never cease to be a messy affair, and our spiritual journey will never be reduced to a tidying-up operation. God and the others don’t wait to enter our life until we have put it all in order. Our journey … is about finding God and serving others in the midst of the mess. The messiest place of all will be our own soul, our own life, which, despite our best efforts, will insist on remaining human. And it is into this mess, this confusion, that God and others will invite themselves. John Kirvan