Why Jesus Came

God, Life, Love, Truth, Uncategorized 0

The Lord cared for no speculation in morals or religion. It was good people he cared about, not notions of good things, or even good actions except as the outcome of life, except as the bodies in which the primary live actions of love and will in the soul took shape and came forth.

Could he by one word have set to rest all the questionings of all the world’s philosophies as to the supreme good and the absolute truth, I venture to say that he would not have uttered that word. He would make no attempt to convince men mentally concerning the truth.

But he would die to make men good and true.

— George MacDonald, Knowing the Heart of God, p. 225

Spirals and Layers

Acceptance, Beauty, Growth, Healing, Life, Trials, Waiting 0

I’ve seen and experienced over and over that grief and loss are ALWAYS

Doorways to Transformation.

My experiences with both have showed me that we can more actively work with time as we process grief and loss, instead of just waiting for time to pass. We really can consciously practice integrating loss and grief and living with them more fully and beautifully.

I know now that this healing happens in spirals and layers and NOT in steps like a ladder.

We cycle back around and start over, get stuck in the middle, and sometimes get to what feels like the end quickly.

We can weave all these experiences together into an eventual elegant tapestry. I’ve been speaking with lots of people about the subjects of loss and grief, and it’s clear that in every case, whatever has been lost — job, savings, home, health, money, life — has tremendous gifts and opportunities to offer

IF

We do our transformational work.

— SARK, Glad No Matter What: Transforming Loss and Change Into Gift and Opportunity, p. 19-20

Strong Words

God, Life 0

Some words are strong for a reason. We need those words to be that intense, loaded, complex, and offensive, because they need to reflect the realities they describe.

And that’s what we find in Jesus’s teaching about hell — a volatile mixture of images, pictures, and metaphors that describe the very real experiences and consequences of rejecting our God-given goodness and humanity. Something we are all free to do, anytime, anywhere, with anyone.

He uses hyperbole often — telling people to gouge out their eyes and maim themselves rather than commit certain sins. It can all sound a bit over-the-top at times, leading us to question just what he’s so worked up about. Other times he sounds just plain violent.

But when you’ve sat with a wife who has just found out that her husband has been cheating on her for years, and you realize what it is going to do to their marriage and children and finances and friendships and future, and you see the concentric rings of pain that are going to emanate from this one man’s choices — in that moment Jesus’s warnings don’t seem that over-the-top or drastic; they seem perfectly spot-on.

Gouging out his eye may actually have been a better choice.

Some agony needs agonizing language.
Some destruction does make you think of fire.
Some betrayal actually feels like you’ve been burned.
Some injustices do cause things to heat up.

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 72-73

A Badge of Honor

Growth, Life, Trials 0

In many cultures, a person is not considered a man or a woman until they have endured certain rites of passage that challenge them much in the way that what you went through challenged you. In these cultures, survivorship is a badge of honor, to be worn with pride. It may be a journey to see yourself as someone who has endured a rite of passage and grown because of it, but you deserve to wear that badge of honor, too.

The ability to reframe trauma as a rite of passage, one that inoculates you and from which you emerge stronger and better, is a common theme among resilient survivors. What happened to you may be completely senseless, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t find meaning in the ways we have grown because of what we lived through. You are changed, yes. But it is time now to appreciate and celebrate the person you’ve become since the trauma.

— Alicia Salzer, Back to Life, p. 25-26

Possibilities and Limits

Beauty, Books, Life 0

We read books to widen and to deepen our own repertoire, because the performances of others (including fictive others) shed light on our own possibilities and limits. About those possibilities and limits — the self taking form, the figure achieving shape, the shape finally dissolving — we are otherwise, as I’ve said, strangely in the dark, since our education in school seems oddly outward-directed and generic in nature, anonymous even, unattuned to the outgoing private voyage we are making every minute. (The dazed look of students around the globe confirms this: whatever is happening in the classroom, whatever the subject, is distinctly not-me.) In the dark also because of natural incarceration, we are all landlocked creatures, stuck in particular minds and bodies, marooned in our specific time and place; and no matter how much information may come our way by dint of the electronic revolution that puts the world seemingly at our fingertips, only a click away, the austere fact of life is that we live and die within our own shell, doomed to our own perceptual equipment. Our eye can gauge much, but it cannot take the measure of “I.”

Literature is the great bridge that enables us to exit our precincts, that enables other places and other lives to come to us, asking us to “try it on,” “try it out.” Facts, statistics, theorems, and discursive argument address only our reasoning powers. Art operates differently; it is a beckoning mirror. It is, in the poet Baudelaire’s terms, an invitation au voyage. Put differently, literature grows us, and I am especially drawn to the unfurling organic processes in play here: not just the evolution of “characters” but our own move through time and — no less central — our move into the mirror, into the precious virtuality of art. . . . Only the work of art treats us to that richer, pulsating, lived experience of what it might feel like to be there, to have been there, whether coming or going or both.

Art is our second life.

— Arnold Weinstein, Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages Through Books, p. 7-8

Tender and Vulnerable Joy

Joy, Life 1

In another very unexpected discovery, my research also taught me that there’s no such thing as selective emotional numbing. There is a full spectrum of human emotions and when we numb the dark, we numb the light. While I was “taking the edge off” of the pain and vulnerability, I was also unintentionally dulling my experiences of good feelings, like joy. Looking back, I can’t imagine any research finding that has changed what my daily life looks like more than this. Now I can lean into joy, even when it makes me feel tender and vulnerable. In fact, I expect tender and vulnerable.

Joy is as thorny and sharp as any of the dark emotions. To love someone fiercely, to believe in something with your whole heart, to celebrate a fleeting moment in time, to fully engage in a life that doesn’t come with guarantees — these are risks that involve vulnerability and often pain. When we lose our tolerance for discomfort, we lose joy. In fact, addiction research shows us that an intensely positive experience is as likely to cause relapse as an intensely painful experience.

— Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 72-73

Embracing Detachment

Acceptance, Growth, Letting Go, Life, Love, Peace, Relationships 0

To begin with, I think we have to cultivate our willingness to let go, that is, to detach from the trials and tribulations of our contemporaries if we want to find the quiet peace we long for, a peace that will allow us to truly love, to truly embrace, and to appreciate those who journey with us. In this process, we also give those companions the freedom to grow and to find their own way, thus their own eventual peace too. I don’t think we can come together as loving equals without embracing the willingness to detach.

We live very codependent lives, from my perspective. By this I mean that too many of us let even the whims of others — in our families, our communities, our workplaces, even in other parts of the world — define us, determine how we feel, and then decide what we will do next in many instances. Learning to detach allows us to live the life we were meant to live. By allowing other people’s behavior, good, bad, or disinterested, control us, we miss many opportunities for movement and expression in new directions. The converse is also true: if we attempt to control the other persons on our path, wherever they may reside, keeping them “attached” to us through any means (and most of us are very practiced at this), we immobilize them, thus preventing the growth they deserve and have been prepared for already.

— Karen Casey, Let Go Now: Embracing Detachment, p. 1-2

Going Somewhere

God, Gratitude, Growth, Joy, Life, Peace 0

In the Genesis poem that begins the Bible, life is a pulsing, progressing, evolving, dynamic reality in which tomorrow will not be a repeat of today, because things are, at the most fundamental level of existence, going somewhere.

When Jesus tells the man that there are rewards for him, he’s promising the man that receiving the peace of God now, finding gratitude for what he does have, and sharing it with those who need it will create in him all the more capacity for joy in the world to come.

How we think about heaven, then, directly affects how we understand what we do with our days and energies now, in this age. Jesus teaches us how to live now in such a way that what we create, who we give our efforts to, and how we spend our time will all endure in the new world.

— Rob Bell, Love Wins, p. 44-45

Book-Learning

Books, Growth, Life, Reading 0

Good books instruct me about the world. I learn information; I gain perspective. I get a handle on history or people who have influenced the world. I have more breadth in my thinking — not a clinical detachment, but an involvement of myself so that it translates into my life.

I travel to places I might never visit in any other way except in a book. I solve problems in my life by sharing in the lives of others. I grow spiritually by encountering the wisdom of people who have thought through issues that still cause me to struggle. I share in the adventures of others and widen my own experiences.

— Gladys Hunt, Honey for a Woman’s Heart, p. 26-27