Why Christian Universalism?

God, Truth 0

In conclusion, let me ask you to hold in your mind traditional Christian visions of the future, in which many, perhaps the majority of humanity, are excluded from salvation forever.  Alongside that hold the universalist vision, in which God achieves his loving purpose of redeeming the whole creation.  Which vision has the strongest view of divine love?  Which story has the most powerful narrative of God’s victory over evil?  Which picture lifts the atoning efficacy of the cross of Christ to the greatest heights?  Which perspective best emphasizes the triumph of grace over sin?  Which view most inspires worship and love of God bringing him honor and glory?  Which has the most satisfactory understanding of the divine wrath?  Which narrative inspires hope in the human spirit?  To my mind the answer to all these questions is clear, and that is why I am a Christian universalist.

— Gregory MacDonald, The Evangelical Universalist, p. 176-177

New Choices

Healing, Letting Go, Life 0

That’s the heartening news for those of us on a spiritual path.  We don’t have to do what we always did!  We don’t have to think the way we always thought.  We don’t have to expect what we always expected.

— Karen Casey, Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow, p. 19-20

The Opposite of Resentment

Forgiveness 0

The emotional opposite of resentment is forgiveness.  However, forgiveness does not mean condoning or overlooking the offense.  It does not mean reconciling with someone who has hurt you.  Neither does it require that you forego legal procedures of justice.

Forgiveness means letting go of the compulsion to punish, in the realization that we cannot harm others, particularly those we love or have loved, without harming the self.

— Steven Stosny, Manual of the Core Value Workshop, p. 74

Synergy of Honesty

Marriage, Relationships, Truth 0

When the going gets tough, the tough get honest.  Lying and evading is the easy way out; honesty takes effort.  For one person, putting effort into the relationship means speaking up when feeling fragile.  For another, it means listening to a partner rather than bulldozing.  What is easy for one person may be a challenge for the other.

Usually those aspects of ourselves that we try to conceal — our personal demons — do shade how we come across.  We like to believe that what we lock away won’t affect us.  Actually, it’s like a radioactive leak:  Most of the time it does.

For many people, the hardest thing to say to a spouse is “I’m angry at you.”  They may feel it; they may communicate it obliquely, but they won’t admit to it.  The anger strikes too close to taboo emotions.  This may frustrate the other person because the anger is intuited but never confirmed….

When your partner doesn’t recoil from your darker feelings it kickstarts your own acceptance of yourself, and your own self-acceptance helps you to create a stronger bond.

By the Together as Two Stage, you can say to your partner, “It terrifies me to say this, but I have to tell you that I’m furious with you.”  The other person breathes a sign of relief because your words are congruent with what you portray.  Finally, the anger is out there!  At that moment, you and your partner are on the way to a special kind of synergy, primed for the type of healing only couples can give each other.

Because marriage is so interdependent, the growth potential is enormous — not by pleading or demanding, nor sitting at a drawing board, but through the models of integrity you provide for each other.  You can’t develop intimacy without involving and evolving yourself. . . .  You don’t generate growth, intimacy, or maturity from being polite to each other for fifty years.

— Ellyn Bader, PhD, and Peter T. Pearson, PhD, Tell Me No Lies, p. 214-216

Communion with God

God, Trials 0

Satan’s desire is to keep us away from communion with God.  He doesn’t care how he does it.

God’s intention, on the other hand, is to use spiritual warfare to draw us into deeper communion with himself.  Satan’s device is to isolate us and wear us out obsessing about what he has done and what he will do next.  And he is very effective in using our particular Message of the Arrows to do it.  God desires to use the enemy’s attacks to remove the obstacles between ourselves and him, to reestablish our dependency on him as his sons and daughters in a much deeper way.  Once we understand that, the warfare we are in begins to feel totally different.  It is not really even about Satan anymore, but about communion with God and abiding in Jesus as the source of life.  The whole experience begins to feel more like a devotional.

Through my own experience, I begin to see more clearly that God is so confident in the good that he is willing to allow our adversary latitude in carrying out his evil intentions for the purpose of deepening our communion with himself.

— Brent Curtis & John Eldredge, The Sacred Romance, p. 120

Prideful Forgivers

Forgiveness 0

How do we counter the pride of virtuous magnanimity, the second form of pride associated with forgiving?  As forgivers, we should remind ourselves that, on our own, we have neither the power nor the right to forgive and that we are neither knowledgeable nor virtuous enough to forgive well.  When we forgive, we make God’s forgiveness our own.  And even as we do, it’s Christ who forgives through us, not we who forgive on our own.  Our forgiveness is proper to the extent that it reverberates with God’s.  When offenders thank us for forgiving, we should respond the same way we respond when recipients thank us for giving — we should deflect gratitude and direct it to God, the true source and the true agent of all forgiving.  When we forgive well, there’s in fact very little to be proud of.  God being the source of our forgiveness, the better we forgive, the less reason there is for pride.

Prideful forgivers are bad forgivers partly because pride subverts what forgiveness seeks to achieve in the first place.  As we saw in the two previous chapters, forgiveness is not a private, virtuous act.  It’s part of a larger strategy of overcoming evil with good and bringing about reconciliation.  It doesn’t just relieve us from bitterness and resentment.  It enacts love for the enemy.  Good forgivers can’t therefore just dispense forgiveness without any regard for how it is received by the offenders.  Forgiveness will help overcome evil with good if it nudges offenders to repent, reconcile, and be restored to the good.  Humble forgiveness might achieve that goal.  Prideful forgiveness will have the opposite effect.

— Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge, p. 217

Seduced Into Growth

Life, Trials 0

There is a certain innocence about beginning, with its excitement and promise of something new.  But this will emerge only through undertaking some voyage into the unknown.  And no one can foretell what the unknown might yield.  There are journeys we have begun that have brought us great inner riches and refinement; but we had to travel through dark valleys of difficulty and suffering.  Had we known at the beginning what the journey would demand of us, we might never have set out.  Yet the rewards and gifts became vital to who we are.  Through the innocence of beginning we are often seduced into growth.

John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us, p. 2-3

At My Most Monstrous

Forgiveness, God, Love 0

I know that when I am most monstrous, I am most in need of love.  When my temper flares out of bounds it is usually set off by something unimportant which is on top of a series of events over which I have no control, which have made me helpless, and thus caused me anguish and frustration.  I am not lovable when I am enraged, although it is when I most need love.

One of our children when he was two or three years old used to rush at me when he had been naughty, and beat against me, and what he wanted by this monstrous behavior was an affirmation of love.  And I would put my arms around him and hold him very tight until the dragon was gone and the loving small boy had returned.

So God does with me.

— Madeleine L’Engle, The Irrational Season, quoted by Carole F. Chase in Glimpses of Grace, p. 250-251