Category Archives: quotes

…paltry little definitions

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A quote:

“I don’t fear the questions any more. I know that they are all part of the process of coming to union with God and refusing to make an idol of anything less. The point is that during that difficult time I didn’t try to force anything. I simply lived in the desert believing that whatever life I found there was life enough for me. I believed that God was in the darkness. It is all part of the purification process and should be revered. It takes away from us our paltry little definitions of God and brings us face-to-face with the Transcendent. It is not to be feared. It is simply to be experienced. Then, God begins to live in us without benefit of recipes and rituals, laws, and “answers”—of which there are, in the final analysis, none at all.”

(Sister Joan Chittister, Benedictine nun, from “In My Own Words”)
Found it at: The Daily Dish under “Sheer Christianity”
I no longer fear the questions, either, although a bit of worry does creep in periodically. As no one intends on becoming addicted to anything, so does no one intend on losing one’s faith by dwelling too long on questions. There is a balance, as for all things. Moderation in all things. “All things are permissible, but not all things are beneficial. All things are permissible, lest one be mastered by anything.” – Paul

A truism from Fiction

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A quote from fiction that presents a a trustworthy statement, even if a bit rough around the edges.
“Safaris through ancestral memories teach me many things. The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most. I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over the future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It’s true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner. Ahhh, well, if patterns teach me anything it’s that patterns are repeated. My oppressions, by and large, are no worse than any of the others and, at least, I teach a new lesson.”
– The Stolen Journals (from God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert – p168)

Speaking of simplicity and dignity…

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“Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude the question, ‘What on earth is he up to now?’ will intrude. It lays one’s devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, ‘I wish they’d remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks.”
C.S. Lewis

Simplicity

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“The loss of simplicity is the destruction of dignity.”
The Parson’s Handbook, Revised Edition; Cyril E. Pocknee; (1965, p. 28)
(Of course, this 13th edition is “on the basis of the 12th Edition by Percy Dearmer.”)

The Dark Night (of the soul)

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The dark night is God’s attack on religion. If you genuinely desire union with the unspeakable love of God, then you must be prepared to have your ‘religious’ world shattered.
-Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

The Language of God

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“Davis had decided his path in the first year of medical school, but he told his mother and father that he planned to be a surgeon. His father was never churched, but he was a devout believer. An engineer, he taught his children that the purpose of life was to discover God from the inside out. The old man loved science, especially physics. The language of God was not Aramaic, or Latin, or Hebrew, or Arabic, he used to say, usually with the dismissive wave at a church or a Bible. The language of God, he’d say, is mathematics. When we reconcile the randomness of the universe with the precision of its rules, when we can see no contradiction in the chaos of nature and the equations of natural law, then we will understand his hows and whys.”
(Kevin Guilfoile, Cast of Shadows, p. 139)

What’s dangerous about this naïveté

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A quote from the book, “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society,” by Farhad Manjoo:

“It’s important to remember that the death penalty advocates and opponents in Ross and Lepper’s study didn’t know that they were interpreting information in a skewed way. Indeed, Ross says, each of us thinks that on any given subject our views are essentially objective, the product of a dispassionate, realistic accounting of the world. This is naive realism, though, because we are incapable of recognizing the biases that operate upon us. Think of the Dartmouth and Princeton football fans I told you about earlier. When they looked at identical film clips of a game, each side ‘saw’ a different reality. They did not know – and really, could not know – that their perception of the event didn’t match the reality of it because, for them, the perception was indistinguishable from its reality. How they ‘saw’ the game was how it really was.
“What’s dangerous about this naïveté is that it spins out into our appraisals of other people. We’re jarred and offended when other people don’t agree with what, to us, is so brilliantly clear. ‘If we think we see the world the way it is,’ Ross explains, ‘then we think that reasonable people ought to agree with us. And to the extent that people disagree with us, we conclude that they are not reasonable – they’re biased’… ‘If we let you look at other people’s responses, we find that exactly to the extent that the other person disagrees with you, you think they’re biased. You think their opinion reflects biases rather than rational consideration.'” (p. 152)

Do you think this may well explain our current Anglican inability to meet one another in a form of understanding that can lead to compromise?

C.S. Lewis speaks

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bls from The Topmost Apple posted this additional quote from C.S. Lewis in response to the Lewis quote I mentioned previously. It’s a good one!
C.S. Lewis (excerpted from the book, Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer):

“Novelty, simply as such, can have only an entertainment value. And they [conservative church goers, which he believes make up the majority] don’t go to be entertained. They go to use the service, or if you prefer, to enact it.”
“Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore. And it enables us to do these things best…when, through familiarity, we don’t have to think about it. As long as you notice, and have to count, the steps, you are not yet dancing but only learning to dance. A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling. The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God.”
“But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing from worshipping.”
“Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude the question, ‘What on earth is he up to now?’ will intrude. It lays one’s devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, ‘I wish they’d remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks.”
“Thus my whole liturgiological position really boils down to an entreaty for permanence and uniformity. I can make do with almost any kind of service whatever, if only it will stay put. But if each form is snatched away just when I am beginning to feel at home in it, then I can never make any progress in the art of worship. You give me no chance to acquire the trained habit…”

She then commented, “The ‘trained habit of prayer’ is, to me, the most crucial aspect of this; how can we advance in this if we aren’t given the opportunity? If we can’t make progress of this sort, we are lost and it’s pointless to go to church at all, IMO.”
Amen!

We do not want stagnation, but…

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“Rightly or wrongly, men are conservative in their religious habits, changes comes slowly and after much thought and a period of uncertainty. Indeed, the strength of religion in human history has been due to its conservative tenacity… Much that was stated dogmatically in the nineteenth century is now having to be modified. Before changes are again made in this age we need to be certain that they are based on more secure foundations. We do not want stagnation in the life of our Church, but stability. In the restlessness and rootlessness that characterize our contemporary society changes and reforms are to be embraced with due circumspection. In Christian worship and its art the element of tradition cannot be entirely eliminated or ignored, since it is based not merely on conservatism, but also on the wisdom and experience of the past.” [emphasis mine]
(Cyril R. Pocknee, The Parson’s Handbook Revised Edition: 1965, pg xix. [First edition by Percy Dearmer, 1899])
Note: “Conservative” here, if not abundantly apparent, is “to conserve” and should not be associated with any ideological or socio-political or socio-religions notions.

New, old, nothing new – all things new

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Quote attributed to Thomas Merton (I say, attributed, because it wasn’t referenced and I haven’t found it yet):

“That which is oldest is most young and most new. There is nothing so ancient and so dead as human novelty. The ‘latest’ is always stillborn. What is really NEW is what was there all the time. I say, not what has repeated itself all the time; the really “new” is that which, at every moment, springs freshly into new existence. This newness never repeats itself. Yet it is so old it goes back to the earliest beginning. It is the very beginning itself, which speaks to us.”