moving towards existence ...

yay! fedorable is now online. i shall look forward to reading his musings with laser pointer in hand! ;)

for future reference he’s now in the “friends and family plan” under life as i write it.

Jane Studdock is a modern graduate student, unhappily married to Mark, an ambitious young university lecturer. She is speaking here with Ransom, the director of a small Christian fellowship she happens onto:

“I suppose our marriage was just a mistake.” The Director said nothing. “What would you, what would the people you are talking about say about a case like that?” “I will tell you if you really want to know,” said the Director. “Please,” said Jane reluctantly. “They would say,” he answered , “that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.” Something in Jane that would normally have reacted to such a remark with anger or laughter was banished to a remind distance…

“I thought love meant equality,” she said, “and free companionship.” “Ah, equality,” said the Director, “we must talk about some other time. Yes, we all must be guarded by equal rights from one another’s greed because we are fallen, just as we all must wear clothes for the same reason…Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”

“I always thought that was just what it was, I thought that is was in their souls where people were equal.” “You were mistaken,” said he gravely. “That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before the law, equality of incomes, that is all very well. Equality guards life, it doesn’t make it. It is a medicine, not food.”

This matter of “salvation” is, when seen intuitively, a very simple thing. But when we analyze it, it turns into a complex tangle of paradoxes. We become ourselves by dying to ourselves. We gain only what we give up, and if we give up everything we gain everything. We cannot find ourselves within ourselves, but only in others; yet at the same time, before we can go out to others we must first find ourselves. We must forget ourselves in order to become truly conscious of who we are. The best way to love ourselves is to love others; yet we cannot love others unless we love ourselves, since it is written, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly, we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others. Yet there is a sense in which we must hate others and leave them in order to find God… As for this finding of God, we cannot even look for Him unless we have already found Him, and we cannot find Him unless He has first found us. We cannot begin to seek Him without a special gift of His grace; yet if we wait for grace to move us before beginning to seek Him, we will probably never begin.

-Thomas Merton

THOU hast made me known to friends whom I knew not.
Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own.
Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger.
I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter;
I forgot that there abides the old in the new, and that there also thou abidest. Through birth and death, in this world or in others,
wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same,
the one companion of my endless life who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar.
When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut.
Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the One in the play of the many.

andrea on how words matter…

Growth begins when we begin to accept our own weakness.
–Jean Vanier

I just listened to an amazing podcast from Krista Tippet’s Speaking of Faith. She did a radio “pilgrimage” to the L’Arche community in Clinton, Iowa to see how Jean Vanier’s vision has grown and become something truly wonderful and amazing. For those who don’t know, a brief biography:

Jean Vanier is the son of the late Georges P. Vanier, a former Governor General of Canada, and his wife Pauline. He was educated in England and Canada; for several years, he was with the navy. He resigned in 1950 and went to France to complete a doctorate in philosophy on Aristotle.
In 1964, with the support of his spiritual advisor, Père Thomas, he invited two men with a developmental disability, Raphael Simi and Phillippe Seux, to live with him in an old house in the French village of Trosly-Breuil.
He named the house L’Arche, after Noah’s Ark, and gradually welcomed not only more men and women with developmental disabilities but also the assistants who would live and work with them.

Since then, L’Arche has grown into an international federation of more than 100 communities in nearly 30 countries.
Vanier later also founded Faith and Light, an international network of support, which brings together the families of the disabled.
Jean Vanier has dedicated his life to working with physically and developmentally disabled adults. His philosophy is reflected in the guiding principle of L’Arche, which is that the weak and the disabled – indeed, all who are lonely and excluded from society – have much to teach us. Vanier believes true spirituality comes from our relationships with the less fortunate. Spirituality then becomes not an expression of self-indulgence, but of love for one another and for God. Vanier led the international L’Arche federation until 1981, when he stepped down.

The journey through the Clinton community at times made me smile, and at times moved me to tears. It’s really an amazing place.

Ultimately Krista realizes that she’s “learning less here about disabilities than what people with disabilities seem to teach others of what it means to be human.”

She then goes on to quote an amazing story from Jean Vanier:

I remember when a man who had gone through a very deep experience in one of our homes had been kept awake all night by one of the people who had screamed all night. He came to see me the next morning and he said, “You know, I wept all morning. I was in the chapel. I thought I could have killed him.” And we talked about it, and I said to him, “You know, I think this is probably one of the most important days of your life. You came to L’Arche thinking you could do good to the poor, and you have. You’ve done a lot of good. But today you are discovering that you are poor.” We all need help, and it’s only as we discover that “I have a handicap,” that “I am broken,” that “We’re all broken,” and then we can begin to work at it.

I’ve been grounding out those last sentences for the last couple of hours. I still don’t think I appreciate how true it is. So listen and tell me what you think…

*edit* if you’re in the atlanta area this monday Atlanta Theology on Tap will be hosting a conversation around this podcast at the Vortex in Little Five.

from kevin’s site:

 The divine light, permeating the entire world. The divine light, transfiguring man. The divine light in which everything acquires its ultimate and eternal meaning. “It is good for us to be here,” cried the apostle Peter seeing this light and this glory. And from that time, Christianity, the Church, faith is one continuous, joyful repetition of this “it is good for us to be here.” But faith is also a plea for the everlasting light, a thirst for this illumination and transfiguration. This light continues to shine, through the darkness and evil, through the drab grayness and dull routine of this world, like a ray of sun piercing through the clouds. It is recognized by the soul, it comforts the heart, it makes us feel alive, and it transfigures us from within.

Read the rest: Into the Light 

Night Cafe

“But I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.”

“For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.”

“I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people”

“Love is something eternal; the aspect may change, but not the essence”

“I am still far from being what I want to be, but with God’s help I shall succeed.”

“I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.”

“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore”

“An artist needn’t be a clergyman or a churchwarden, but he certainly must have a warm heart for his fellow men.

“You can’t be at the pole and the equator at the same time. You must choose your own line, as I hope to do, and it will probably be colour.”

“I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say ‘he feels deeply, he feels tenderly.’”

“It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.”

i don’t know if this is the most BRILLIANT idea, or the craziest.

as one who does love to wear his flip-flops, i am curious.

My eyes say “uhhhh”, but my feet say “yuhhhh”

(that’s an approximate of “yeah”. i needed a rhyme.)