Filed under: quotes
“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
- C.S. Lewis
Filed under: quotes
Fourteen thousand members and me
Watch the preacher up on the screen
I have never shaken his hand
My two-dimensional pastor man
Welcome to America
Doesn’t matter if I am here
In this crowd I could disappear
Pastor man is all that we need
Preaching via satellite feed
I can watch it all from my pew
Until the presentation is through
You will have to pardon me
But this cannot be all there is
I can’t imagine God would be
Happy about this
Smiling people up on the stage
Everyone prefers it that way
Smiling people out in the crowd
No questioning or doubting allowed
Welcome to America
Where everyone is pretty and clean
Where everything’s rehearsed and routine
You will have to pardon me
But this cannot be all there is
I can’t imagine God would be
Happy about this
What if Jesus disagrees
With how you measure your success
Would you find a way to still believe
He’s happy about this?
What if He’s not happy about this?
The Church is now the Body of Christ
And every part is equally prized
The eye can never say to the hand
“All we need is this preacher man”
Would you notice if I was gone?
How easy would it be to move on?
You will have to pardon me
But this cannot be all there is
I can’t imagine God would be
Happy about this
The crowds don’t necessarily
Mean that God is truly blessed
It’s dangerous to just believe
That He’s happy about this
by Ross King, Perhaps I’ve Said Too Much
Filed under: quotes
Many find Jesus’ teaching on enemy love and forgiveness a stumbling block to faith. Because we find it too difficult to practice, we dismiss it as unrealistic and utopian. We should think again, and we should pray that it is not unrealistic, because this congruence of Jesus—the consistency between his teaching on forgiveness and his action on the cross—is really our only hope. It is all that stands between us and the consequences of our monumental frailty. Thank God today that Jesus died as he lived, because with those words, “Father, forgive…” he forgives us all, and he forgives us still.
- Peter Storey
Listening at Golgotha: Jesus’ Words from the Cross
I just watched the documentary Beauty Academy Kabul.
Most of the Americans, I am sad to report, were incredibly ,incredibly annoying, and dare I say embarassing? (You’d have to watch it to see what I mean…)
The Afghan Women, on the other hand, were inspiring, and all together beautiful.
from A Dream Within a Dream
by Edgar Allan Poe
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand–
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep–while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
Filed under: quotes
The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
- Albert Einstein , The Merging of Spirit and Science
Filed under: quotes
Beautiful is the moment in which we understand that we are no more than an instrument of God; we live only as long as God wants us to live; we can only do as much as God makes us able to do; we are only as intelligent as God would have us be.
- Archbishop Oscar Romero
From his last homily, March 23, 1980
