Morning Gratitude
In a very real way, morning gratitude is a primary form of mindfulness, a practice of paying attention to abundance and life.
— Diana Butler Bass, Gratitude, p. 76
[Photo: Sunrise, South Riding, Virginia, March 16, 2015]
God’s Forgiveness
The crucifixion is not what God inflicts on Jesus in order to forgive; the crucifixion is what God endures in Christ as he forgives. The monstrous aspects of Good Friday are of entirely human origin. What is divine about Good Friday is the completely unprecedented picture of a crucified God responding to his torturers with love and mercy. Golgotha offers humanity a genuinely new and previously unimagined way of conceiving the nature of God.
— Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, p. 90
Photo: Kilchurn Castle, Scotland, July 2003
Surprises
Feelings of apathy as they relate to our relationships often stem from insufficiently paying attention to those around us. Remember: everyone we interact with has the capacity to surprise us in an infinite number of ways. What can first open us up to each of our innate capacities for love is merely to recognize that.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love, p. 127
Photo: Sky Meadows State Park, Virginia, July 3, 2017
Punishing in Order to Save
God’s active involvement in drawing people to repentance is not to be thought of as an activity that is separate from God’s activity of punishing people for their involvement in wrongdoing, as is often assumed by many traditionalist Christians. God does not punish people instead of saving them from their sins, but, if the foregoing picture of divine punishment is true, God punishes people (by showing them the essential ugliness of their sins) so that God can save them.
— Heath Bradley, Flames of Love, p. 77
Photo: Carlyle Lake, Illinois, October 1992
Joy Banishes Loneliness.
Joy is a presence. When I’m happy it’s because I do not feel alone. Gone is that gnawing core of anxious ache that makes me think I must face the world alone and handle all my problems without help. Joy fills up this emptiness with a presence. Indeed this mysterious sense of presence is joy’s chief characteristic. There’s a fellowship, a secret companionship, an invisible embrace. Happiness comes wrapped in warmth because it’s literally like being hugged.
Joy, like love, banishes loneliness. Whereas love is specifically directed toward another person, joy has a softer focus. If love is the sun, joy is the moon and the planets — a reflected light. Just as the moon shines only because of the sun, so we are happy only because of the loving presence of the Other. We may not be consciously aware of the Other, nevertheless His presence is the reason for our joy.
— Mike Mason, Champagne for the Soul, p. 89
Photo: Rhododendron Park, Bremen, Germany, May 16, 2004
Settling
Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little. We settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to an exquisite holiness. We settle for the fear-driven when love longs to be our engine. We settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any-life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all.
— Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir, p. 2-3
Photo: Sky Meadows State Park, Virginia, July 3, 2017
Secret of Forgiveness
The secret of forgiveness, regardless of whether you want to use it as a method of detachment or as a way to fortify your relationship after repair, is to focus not on the offensive behavior, but on freeing yourself of the emotional pain you experienced as a result of the behavior.
The most severe aspect of emotional pain is the sense of powerlessness it engenders. Intentional forgiveness helps you take back power over your emotional life.
— Steven Stosny, Living and Loving After Betrayal, p. 230
Photo: Notre Dame, Paris, April 2001
Deciding to Love Life
You have to make a conscious decision to love life. It won’t happen on its own and no one else can do it for you. One way to help you become conscious of your own love of life is to do as this young man did, and remember the times you felt it in your own life.
Like him, many people have gotten into the habit of not loving life. I don’t think it happens deliberately, but it seems to be a habit that comes easily. It’s a habit, though, that has a seriously destructive effect on our lives, and erodes so much of our potential for happiness. We need to break this habit by starting to see the little joys that are in our lives. I meet mothers who see their lives as one chore after another, and forget to see all the moments when they really love being a mother. When we allow ourselves to love life we get energized mentally and physically, and start to see more purpose in our lives. We become happier and healthier people, more able to cope with whatever life throws at us. We become more compassionate and loving, less judgmental.
— Lorna Byrne, Love from Heaven, p. 115
Photo: Meadowlark Gardens, Virginia, April 3, 2012
Choosing to Bless
Our worry is a form of fear, and all fear comes from our attack thoughts. When we worry about someone, we have no confidence in them or the situation. Our worry says that negative things could happen, so we are using the power of our mind to create a lack of confidence in them and to allow fearful elements in the situation. Worry attacks the situation; choosing to bless it would help build the situation and those in it.
Today, every time you feel tempted to worry about someone or something, give your blessing. Your blessing is your trust and your positive choice for the best thing to happen for everyone in the situation.
— Chuck Spezzano, If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love
[Photo: Falkenstein, Germany, April 27, 2000]
The Redemption Story
And with all this we lift up our eyes and realize that when the New Testament tells us the meaning of the cross, it gives us not a system, but a story; not a theory, but a meal and an act of humble service; not a celestial mechanism for punishing sin and taking people to heaven, but an earthly story of a human Messiah who embodies and incarnates Israel’s God and who unveils his glory in bringing his kingdom to earth as in heaven. The Western church – and we’ve all gone along with this – has been so concerned with getting to heaven, with sin as the problem blocking the way, and therefore with how to remove sin and its punishment, that it has jumped straight to passages in Paul that can be made to serve that purpose. It has forgotten that the gospels are replete with atonement theology, through and through — only they give it to us not as a neat little system, but as a powerful, sprawling, many-sided, richly revelatory narrative in which we are invited to find ourselves, or rather to lose ourselves and to be found again the other side. We have gone wading in the shallow and stagnant waters of medieval questions and answers, taking care to put on the right footwear and not lose our balance, when only a few yards away is the vast and dangerous ocean of the gospel story, inviting us to plunge in and let the wild waves of dark glory wash us, wash over us, wash us through and through, and land us on the shores of God’s new creation.
— N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began, p. 415-416
[Photo: From Schloß Neuschwanstein, Germany, June 2, 1997]