Never Sing A Lesser Piece

"You must not sing the Haters
song," the Father-Spirit cried,
Be very careful, for I love you,
Troubador.

"Now," cried the World Hater,
"Let's do this tune at once.
I'll pipe, you sing. Think of
the thousand kingdoms that will
dance about our feet."

"No, Hater, I'll not sing your melodies,"
the Troubadour replied.

What then Singer will you sing?"

"The Ancient Star-Song of the Father-Spirit."

"Alone, without accompaniment?"

"Yes, Hater, all alone if need be."

"You need my pipe, man."

"You need my song instead."

"The music of your song is far
beyond this tiny pipe."

"Then, go! For I shall never sing
a lesser piece."

- The Singer. Calvin Miller 

"God has always been willing to work with a remnant, a critical mass, or what Genesis calls "ten just men.""

- Richard Rohr . The Naked Now 

Avoiding Honeymoons

"Classical spiritual writers warn us, after we have broken the Pleasure Principle and reached a mature level of discipleship, the old temptations will resurface with a Vengeance, just in subtler forms....

Their first warning concerns the danger of reverting to immaturity because of the longing for another honeymoon ........  One of the demons that we must wrestle with after we have made lifelong commitments is the powerful temptation to experience yet another honeymoon."

- Roland Rolheiser. Sacred Fire

Difference Between Tradition And Bad Habits

 "One of the biggest problems in this first step is discerning the difference between “tradition” and “bad habits.” A helpful metaphor in making the distinction is that of scaffolding. When we construct a church building we use scaffolding. But when the church is completed, we take down the scaffolding. How ridiculous it would seem if ten, twenty, or thirty years later the scaffolding was still up. Unfortunately, a lot of churches refuse to take the scaffolding down, clinging to it as if it were the church. They have confused the “scaffolding” of institutions with the “tradition” of the saints."

-Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

Unity is Just A Christian Talking Point

"Scilurus, the king of the Scythians, left eighty sons, and on his death-bed asked for a bundle of sticks, and bade his sons break it when it was tied together, and when they could not, he took the sticks one by one and easily broke them all up: thus showing them that their harmony and concord would make them strong and hard to overthrow, while dissension would make them feeble and insecure."

- Plutarch. Morals. 1st Century Greek Philosopher 

I'm Hopeful For The Future Church.

"I just know that God always have a church. It's OK with me if the church looks really different in the future. So I am not worried. I just want to be part of what God is doing in the world."

- Elaine Heath

Mystical Faithfulness

"The love of a man for his wife, his child, of the land where he lives and works, is for me the real meaning of mystical experience."

- Edward Abbey, 

Faithful as a Bear

We have also heard of servant girls who have refused the embraces of their masters, and of private individuals who have scorned an amour with queens, when Love has had dominion in their hearts.....
For a noble woman united by Love to her lawful husband would prefer the embraces of bears and dragons to those of any other man."

- Plutarch. Plutarch's Morals 

The God "Of Success"

"We still cannot imagine that today God really doesn’t want anything new for us, but simply to prove us in the old way. That is too petty, too monotonous, too undemanding for us. And we simply cannot be constant with the fact that God’s cause is not always the successful one, that we really could be “unsuccessful”: and yet be on the right road . But this is where we find out whether we have begun in faith or in a burst of enthusiasm."

~ Bonhoeffer Advent letter the confessing churches. 1938. After the Night of Broken Glass, wholesale persecution of Jews began. Many pastors of the "Confessig Church"  were taking confessions of devotion to Hitler, as a formality to not lose their jobs. The German Church Bishops ordered their pastors to swear obedience to Hitler.
(Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy)

No Deceptive Looks

"Let the world despise and leave me;
They have left my Savior, too.
Human hearts and looks deceive me;
Thou art not, like those, untrue.

~ Hymn "Jesus, I My Cross Have Taken Henry F. Lyte

Leave Your Church For Interested Fields

This question would come up in a very practical way for some of the ordinands who were dispatched to parishes not terribly interested in what they had to offer. It could be discouraging. Gerhard Vibrans was sent to a tiny village east of Magdeburg that seemed populated almost exclusively by dullards:

"My parish of six hundred souls at Schweinitz is a very poor one; on average only one or two people go to church there every Sunday. . . . [E] very Sunday, wearing my vestments, I make a pilgrimage through the whole village primarily to bring home to the people that it is Sunday. . . . The people try to comfort me by saying that I will get my salary even though no one goes to church."

He said that on Trinity Sunday no one at all showed up, “apart from the woman sexton.”Bonhoeffer’s response to Vibrans was simple, practical, and biblical: “If one village will not listen we go to another. There are limits.”He was echoing Jesus’injunction to the disciples that they shake the dust from their sandals and leave a village where they were not welcomed (Matt. 10: 14). But Bonhoeffer was not cavalier about it, and his heart went out to Vibrans, who had been about as faithful a servant as anyone could have imagined: “Your loyal observance of our advice almost puts me to shame. Don’t take it too literally or one day you might get fed up with it.”

Bonhoeffer visited the village and preached there. He later wrote Vibrans and said that he should write his congregation “telling them that this is possibly the last offer of the Gospel to them, and that there are other communities whose hunger for the Word cannot be satisfied because there are too few workers.”

~ Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy

Sraying in Union

"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