Path to Peace

Forgiveness can also be bittersweet. It contains the sweetness of the release of a story that has caused us pain, but also the poignant reminder that even our dearest relationships change over the course of a lifetime. Regardless of the decision we reach about whether or not to include someone in our present-day life, in the end, forgiveness is a path to peace and an essential element of love for ourselves and others.

— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love, p. 199

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, December 4, 2018

The Way

Jesus once told a story about three people who encountered a beaten and battered man on the side of the road (Luke 10:29-37). The first two had all the right religious beliefs, and indeed were official representatives of their biblical religion. The third man was a heretic, from the perspective of the first two men. The first two men passed by without helping. The third man went out of his way to help the stranger, and this is the man Jesus held up as the model for what God asks of us. It’s a haunting and powerful story that challenges the way in which we want to make being right with God about something as easy as believing the right creed or engaging in the right religious ritual, rather than accepting the challenge of letting divine compassion fill our hearts until they overflow with action. Jesus defined real heresy as hard-hearted living, not simply wrong-minded thinking.

Inclusivism strikes me as the theological option that is most open to making room for this central insight of Jesus. On this view, what matters most is actually walking the Way of Jesus; the Way of unlimited forgiveness, unbounded compassion, restorative justice, and nonjudgmental truth-telling. People from a variety of religious perspectives, or no particular religious perspective at all, can walk on this Way of life that Jesus incarnated. We can be assured that when we walk this Way, it will lead us directly into the heart of God (whether that is our goal or not). Perhaps, with this in mind, John 14:6 isn’t a harsh threat at all. What if Jesus meant it as an assuring promise? When we follow “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” that he fully embodied, we can be assured that we are walking the path to God.

— Heath Bradley, Flames of Love, p. 130

Photo: Schloss Dhaun, Germany, July 2002

Shortcut to Happiness

Anyone can “consider it pure joy” when everything goes well. The time when such an attitude really counts is when “you face trials of many kinds.” Happy people can have just as many problems as unhappy ones. The difference is that unhappy people hate having problems, whereas happy people are content to work through their problems, finding joy in spite of and even because of them. Joy doesn’t result from avoiding suffering but from moving through it. If there’s a shortcut to happiness, it’s through trials.

— Mike Mason, Champagne for the Soul, p. 111

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, November 30, 2018

Delight in Our Efforts

Some people say, “God is good, and God has a plan for you.” I believe that God is good but also that God is too busy loving me to have a plan for me. Like a caring parent, God receives our childlike painting of a tree — usually an unrecognizable mess — and delights in it. God doesn’t hand it back and say, “Come back when it looks more like a tree” or tell us how to improve it. God simply delights in us. Like the kid at probation camp after confession: “You mean you just sealed my record?” The God who always wants to clean the slate is hard to believe. Yet the truth about God is that God is too good to be true. And whenever human beings bump into something too good to be true, we decide it’s not true.

— Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir, p. 22

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, November 27, 2018

Out of Our Own Way

Love allows us to get out of our own way. It allows us to transcend this fear and these calcified ways of reacting. Love allows us to receive freely. Love raises us above the worries and cares and creates the responsiveness that brings contact and joy.

Today, go out there and love. Get out of your own way. Love everyone you meet, and let the love that wants to come to you from God through others reach you.

— Chuck Spezzano, If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love, p. 381

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, November 30, 2018

Gifts of Failure

No, life is not about winning. It is about trying, about participating, about striving, about becoming the best we can be, not the best by someone else’s measure. That’s what failure does for us. It teaches us about ourselves: our energy level, our endurance level, what we’re naturally good at and what we’re not, what we like and what we don’t, what it means to do something just for the fun of it. Failure doesn’t mean that we cannot compete; it doesn’t mean not to give everything we have to doing what we do. It does mean that just because we play we don’t have to win. The playing is the thing.

Most of all, it gives us the permission to go through life without public certification. Failure enables us to take risks as we grow until we find where we really fit, where we can not only succeed, but also enjoy the challenges of life as well.

No, winning is not everything. But we will never really know that until we lose a few and discover that the world does not end when we lose. Now it is just a matter of trying again somewhere else, perhaps. Now we’re free to be unnoticed. We’re free to do what we like best, what is needed most, what will bring us to the most we can be: the most happy, the most competent, the most satisfied with who we are and what we do. That means, of course, that we have to make choices about what we want to do and why we want to do it.

— Joan Chittister, Between the Dark and the Daylight, p. 57-58

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, October 29, 2018

A Choice

Reconciliation means you reestablish a relationship with the person who hurt you. Forgiveness means you make peace with a bitter part of your past and no longer blame your experiences on the offender. You can forgive and decide there is no reason to have any further relationship with the person who hurt you. In fact, every time we forgive someone who is dead you do this. Every time we forgive someone we only knew for a short painful moment (like the victim of a hit-and-run car accident), we do this. With forgiveness we have a choice. We can forgive and give the offender another chance, or we can forgive and move on to new relationships. The choice is ours.

— Fred Luskin, Forgive for Good, p. 75

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 26, 2016

Changing Course

There is no force in the world better able to alter anything from its course than love. Ruskin’s comment that you can get someone to remove his coat more surely with a warm, gentle sun than with a cold, blistering wind is particularly apt. Meeting the world with a loving heart will determine what we find there. We mistakenly place our trust, too often, in the righteousness of our wind, though we rarely get evidence that this ever transforms anything.

— Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart, p. 124

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, September 21, 2014

Restoration Mightier Than the Fall

I plead for the acceptance of the larger hope, as taught by so many in primitive days (a fact fully proved); a hope, that it has ever been the purpose of “our Father” to save all his human children. To believe or to hope for less than this would be, not alone to contradict Scripture, as I have tried to show, but to mistake its whole scope and purpose. For the Bible is the story of a restoration, wide; deep; mightier than the fall, and therefore bringing to every child of Adam salvation. It is not, as the popular creed teaches, the self-contradictory story of one almighty to save, and yet not, in fact, saving those for whom he died. It is the story of infinite love seeking “till it find”; a love that never fails, never, though heaven and earth pass away: a love that is, from its very nature, inextinguishable — being the love of a divine Father. It is the story of the unchanging purpose of the unchanging Lord God Omnipotent.

— Thomas Allin, Christ Triumphant, p. 334

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, September 21, 2014

The Path of Wisdom

The aim of wisdom literature is to uncover something true about the nature of reality in a way that makes the reader or listener wiser. In the Bible, wisdom is rarely presented as a single decision, belief, or rule, but rather as a “way” or “path” that the sojourner must continually discern amid the twists and turns of life.

I had a college professor who assigned the book of Proverbs to his Psychology 101 class, instructing us to circle in our Bibles every appearance of the word way or path. The point, he said, is that wisdom isn’t about sticking to a set of rules or hitting some imaginary bull’s-eye representing “God’s will.” Wisdom is a way of life, a journey of humility and faithfulness we take together, one step at a time.

— Rachel Held Evans, Inspired, p. 96-97

Photo: Burg Lahneck, Germany, August 22, 2004