"Of all the things we do, we have more freedom with respect to what we will think of, where we will place our mind, than anything else. And the freedom of thinking is a direct freedom wherever it is present.....
The deepest revelation of our character is what we choose to dwell on in thought, but constantly occupies our mind as well as what we can or cannot even think of."
Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy.
"Now we need to understand that what simply occupies our mind very largely governs what we do. It sets the emotional tone out of which our actions flow..."
Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"Love is an emotional response aroused in the willl by visions of the good."
~Dallas Willard
"The human heart must be plowed much more deeply."
Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
" .....to explicitly intend to make apprentices to Jesus could be quite upsetting to congregational life. Won't those who are mere members or converts find themselves in an embarrassing position? Second-class citizenship?
It is certainly true that the implicit understanding that nondisciple Christians have with their leaders and congregations will have to be brought to light and dealt with in some appropriate way."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
""Transformation usually includes a disconcerting reorientation.......
Change of itself just happens; spiritual transformation is an active process of letting go, living in the confusing dark space for a while, and allowing yourself to be spit up on a new and unexpected shore."
~ Richard Rohr
"We simply go along with the many "musts" and "oughts" that have been handed on to us, and we live with them as if they were authentic translations of the Gospel of Our Lord.
~ Henri Nouwen
"Much time is spent among Christians trying to smooth over hurt feelings and even deep wounds, given and received, and to get people to stop being angry, retaliatory, and unforgiving. But suppose, instead, we devoted our time to inspiring and enabling Christians and others to be people who are not offendable and not angry and who are forgiving as a matter of course. "Great peac," the psalmist says, "have they who love thy law. Nothing trips them up" (Psalm 119:165).
To intentionally make disciples is to open the door for people to become like that. That is why it is such a gift to humankind.
But really to intend this is no trivial matter, of course. It means a huge change of direction. The weight of the tradition of client, or consumer, Christianity, which now without thought dominates the local congregations and denominations of Christian people - indeed, the entire Christian culture - stands against any such intention- not consciously, perhaps, but just by the inertia of "how things are," of the daily rounds and what "has to get done."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"A gentle but firm non-cooperation with things that everyone knows to be wrong, together with a sensitive, nonofficious, nonintrusive, nonobsequious service to others, should be our usual overt matter."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"So as his disciple I am not necessarily learning how to do special religious things...... My discipleship to Jesus is, within clearly defined limits, not a matter of what I do, but of how I do it. And it covers everything, "religious" or not.
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"Not that the genuine presence of the Kingdom in a person can be hidden.... But it also cannot be canned, controlled, produced on demand, standardized, or brought to a point at which it can be dispensed by one human being to another."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"Great religion seeks utter awareness and full consciousness, so that we can, in fact, receive all.....
The purpose of prayer and religious seeking is to see the truth about reality, to see what is. And at the bottom of what is is always goodness. The foundation is always Love."
Richard Rohr
"Great religion seeks utter awareness and full consciousness, so that we can, in fact, receive all.....
The purpose of prayer and religious seeking is to see the truth about reality, to see what is. And at the bottom of what is is always goodness. The foundation is always Love."
Richard Rohr
"The God of scripture stoops and stoops and stoops and stoops. At the heart of the Gospel message is the story of a God who stoops to the point of death on a cross. Dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee doing everything it takes to convince a stubborn and petulant children they are seen and they are loved."
~Rachel Held Evans
"I’ve often said the Bible is the best book in the world and the worst book in the world. It is the worst when it is used for bullying and self-justification; it is the best when it is used for the healing of the world and for transformation of the self. Obviously, God intended the latter."
Richard Rohr
"A good and solid biblical teacher must come clean about their manner of interpretation early on, or you have no foundation for trusting what they say. Just saying, “It is in Scripture,” as most do, is largely meaningless, because anyone can find a workable “proof text” for whatever they want to believe somewhere in the Bible. This is why many have so little trust in Christians today."
Richard Rohr
"In so many places, there are signs of the Holy Spirit working at all levels of society. The church might well have done its work as leaven, because much of this reform, enlightenment, compassion, and healing is outside the bounds of organized religion. Only God is going to get the credit."
~ Richard Rohr
" Who teachers you? Whose disciple are you? Honestly
One thing is sure; you are somebody's disciple. You learn how to live from somebody else. There is no exceptions to this rule, for human beings are just the kind of creatures that have to learn and keep learning from others how to live. Aristotle remark that we owe more to our teachers than to our parents, for those our parents gave us life, our teachers taught us the good life."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy.
"I’ve come to see that what matters most is not our status but our trajectory, not where we are but where we’re going, not where we stand but where we’re headed. . . .
[Religion] is at its best when it leads us forward, when it guides us on our spiritual growth as individuals and in our cultural evolution as a species. Unfortunately, religion often becomes more of a cage than a guide, holding us back rather than summoning us onward, a buffer to constructive change rather than a catalyst for it."
~ Richard Rohr
"Another aspect of the phrase “from the bottom up” has to do with the biblical and Franciscan emphasis on the path of descent. Most of religion is ideological: it defines reality from the top down. It begins with a transcendent God up there in heaven, and then we try to explain everything down here in relationship to that transcendent God. But what Jesus actually taught was something much more akin to “from the bottom up.”
In other words, Jesus taught us to find God incarnate in this world, in our neighbor, in the Eucharist—that is, in the ordinary elements of this earth. That’s a very different notion of religion."
Richard Rohr
"Once we link salvation to moral worthiness or group belonging, the ego takes over and gets to decide who is worthy of salvation."
Richard Rohr
"Most of Christianity has been overly influenced by Plato, making body and soul enemies. I believe Christianity’s tragic flaw was not connecting salvation with creation itself."
Richard Rohr
"Christian denominations and world religions are realizing they are more alike than different. Consciousness is evolving. Christian theologians are predicting that this century will open up Trinitarian and practice-based spirituality, with a focus on the Holy Spirit, which many call “the forgotten member of the Trinity.” And we have a pope in Francis who is truly a man of the Gospel instead of a mere church man, someone at the top who genuinely cares about those at the bottom and our precious common home, the earth."
Richard Rohr
"Let’s be honest: religion has probably never had such a bad name. Christianity is now seen as “irrelevant” by many and often as part of the problem more than any kind of solution. Some of us are almost embarrassed to say we are Christian because of the negative images that word conjures in others’ minds. Young people especially are turned off by how judgmental, exclusionary, impractical, and ineffective Christian culture seems to be. The church seems hostile toward most science (the objective outer world) and thus unable to talk about its inner dimensions with any authority."
Richard Rohr
"..... And we must be frank: in their behavior and impact upon the world, Christians are not much different than other people.
The majority of Christians are not highly transformed people, but tend to reflect their own culture more than they operate as any kind of leaven within it. I speak especially of American Christians, because I am one."
Richard Rohr
"Teaching is ineffective because it is not Life Centered; there is no life because there is no example; there is no example because empty words have taken the place of faith and charity."
Carlo carretto
"Jesus doesn't loose any slep that we will forget that the eucharist is sacred. He is anxious that we forget it is ordinary. That it is a meal shared among friends."
(Father Greg Boyle. Interview with Krista Tippett. On Being podcast nov 22)
"I think that we are afraid of the incarnation. Part of it, the fear that drives us is that we have to have our sacred in a certain way. It has to be goldplated and cost of millions cost of thousands, there is something.... i don't know.
And so we have wrestled the cup out of Jesus' hand and replaced it with a chalice. Becuse who doesn't know that a chalice is more sacred than a cup. Never mind that Jesus never used a chalice."
(Father Greg Boyle. Interview woth Krista Tippett. On Being podcast nov 22)
"When they arrived back home, one of the girls ran into the house and exclaimed, “Hurrah ! There’s a war!” She was promptly slapped. The Bonhoeffers (parents) were not opposed to war, but neither would they celebrate it."
~ Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
"Most of what is wrong in human affairs simply can't be dealt with by law."
~Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"All one has to do to identify those who would mislead us he's watch what they do and pay little attention to what they say. What they do will be the unerring sign of who they are on the inside. Trees and plants manifest their nature in their fruit..... And what people do reveals, when thoroughly and honestly considered, the kind of person they really are."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"You don’t have to figure it all out or get everything right ahead of time. You just have to stay on the full journey. None of us know how to be perfect, but we can practice staying in union, staying connected."
~ Richard Rohr
"Safety and security is not a gospel value. We worship a God who becomes vulnerable in human form and dies rather than participate in the violence between brothers and sisters."
Andy Doyle. Bishop of Texas.
(Interview on Newsworthy With Norsworthy Podcast Nov 13, 2017)
"You can either take your own spiritual journey or someone else will take you on theirs."
~Ray Bryant
"But Luther brought Germans to a fuller engagement with their faith through singing too. He wrote many hymns—the most well-known being “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”—and introduced the idea of congregational singing. Before Luther, no one outside the choir sang in church."
(Eric Meraxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy Paperback)
"As long as I am condemning my friends or relatives, or pushing my "pearls" on them, "I" and their problem."
(Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy)
"Before Luther’s Bible, there was no unified German language. It existed only in a hodgepodge of dialects. And Germany as a nation was an idea far in the future, a gleam in Luther’s eye . But when Luther translated the Bible into German, he created a single language in a single book that everyone could read and did read. Indeed, there was nothing else to read. Soon everyone spoke German the way Luther’s translation did."
(Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy)
"What is needed at the end of this great prayer is a ringing affirmation of the goodness of God and God's world. If your nerves can take it, you might (occasionally?) try Whoopee!" I imagine God himself will not mind."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"We need to focus our circle of responsibility. . . . That means letting go of the things you can’t control—which includes the decisions that popes, bishops, pastors, councils, and church boards may make. . . . [If] you can’t get your congregation to care about homeless people, you can get involved yourself. If you can’t get your congregation to treat gay folks with respect, you can do so around your kitchen table. If you can’t get your church to focus on cross-racial relationships, you can take a step this Sunday and visit a church where you’re the minority, and from there, begin to build relationships. You don’t need anyone’s vote or permission to do these things: you only need to exercise your own responsibility and freedom. . . "
~Richard Rohr
"...... right now I don’t want to know where I will be next year. In the past couple years, the unknowns have been what have shaped me into the person I am today. The unknowns have forced me to have faith.
Unknowns bring us to places that we never expected to be."
Emily Backode
(Taught Frazee's kids in Kadiolo, Mali.)
"Condemnation always involves some degree of self-righteousness and of distancing ourselves from the one we are condemning....."
The decision to step aside from it, neither giving it nor receiving nor receiving it, is a major turning point in one's life."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"Without the single-minded attentiveness of prayer we will rarely hear anything worth repeating or catch a vision worth asking anyone else to gaze upon."
(The Spiritual Life. John H. Westerhoff & John Eusden)
"For too long we have thought of the Christian Life is essentially either involvement in political, economic, social concerns that wear us out and result in depression or activity which keeps the church intact and doctrinally pure. Our primary orientation cannot be an institution or some great cause or even other people, but first and forever to God......"
"Without the single-minded attentiveness of prayer we will rarely hear anything worth repeating or catch a vision worth asking anyone else to gaze upon."
(The Spiritual Life. John H. Westerhoff & John Eusden)
