There is the story of a disciple who approached his teacher and asked, “It seems to me that by having good friends and advancing together with them, one has already halfway attained the way of enlightenment. Is this way of thinking correct?” The teacher replied, “This way of thinking is not correct. Having good friends and advancing together with them is not half the enlightened way but all the enlightened way.”
(Jim Palmer. Notes From Over The Edge)
"Central to the understanding and proclamation of the Christian gospel today, as in Jesus' day, is a re-visioning of what God’s own life is like and how the physical cosmos fits into it. It is a great and important task to come to terms with what we really think when we think of God. Most hinderances to the faith of Christ actually lie, I believe, in this part of our minds and souls."
(Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy)
"In the world of Faith the heavens above the city are friendly and
are the upper chamber of every house "
(Max Picard. The Flight From God)
"Ragamuffins do not complain about the feeble preaching and the lifeless worship of their local church. They are happy to have a place to go where they can mingle with other beggars at the door of God’s mercy."
(Brennan Manning. The Ragamuffin Gospel)
"The Kingdom Must Make Sense. But this cannot come about unless what Jesus himself believed, practiced, and taught makes sense to us. And his message must come to us free of the deadening legalisms, political sloganeering, and dogmatic traditionalisms long proven by history to be soul-crushing dead.
ends."
(Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy)
"The disappearance of Jesus as teacher explains why today in Christian churches——of whatever leaning—little effort is made to teach people to do what he did and taught. Once again, it is a natural
consequence of our basic message. Who among us has personal knowledge of a seminar or course of study and practice being offered in a "Christian Education Program” on how to "love your enemies, bless those that curse you, do good to those that hate you, and pray for those who Spit on you and make your life miserable"? Matt. 5:44"
(Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy)
"This is the ragamuffin’s secret, which nominal Christians do not understand, but for which martyrs have given their lives. For the sake of the kingdom of God, thousands upon thousands have had their possessions confiscated, homelands seized, and families, careers, and good names sacrificed. The nominal just don’t get it. They hear the Word of God, but it does not speak to them interiorly. The unseen world does not exist. The love story of the Bible is nice for children in Sunday school but not for rational adults. Faith is a relic of the Middle Ages. You can’t pay the rent, cook soup, or purchase a computer with religion. What matters is muscle, intelligence, connections, and stronger battalions. The rest is opium for the people. The nominal do not know the secret. The treasure is hidden from their eyes. The values and lifestyle of the ragamuffin rabble are simply incomprehensible. It is the ragamuffin alone who rightly comprehends what life is really all about. No effort is too great, no venture too daring, no sacrifice too painful for the sake of the kingdom. Her greatest risk is still too small."
(Brennan Manning. The Ragamuffin Gospel)
"Catherine LaCugna ends her giant theological tome with this one simple sentence; it’s taken her two-and-a-half inches of book to get to this one line, and its simplicity might overwhelm you, but I can’t end in any better place than she does: The very nature of God, therefore, is to seek out the deepest possible communion and friendship with every last creature on this earth.
That’s the job description of God. That’s what it’s all about. And the only thing that can keep you out of this divine dance is fear and doubt, or any self-hatred.
What would happen in your life—right now—if you accepted what God has created and even allowed? Suddenly, this is a very safe universe. You have nothing to be afraid of. God is for you. God is leaping toward you! God is on your side, honestly more than you are on your own."
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
"The very nature of God, therefore, is to seek out the deepest possible communion and friendship with every last creature on this earth."
(Catherine LaCugna. God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life)
"You can’t manufacture this by any right conduct, dear reader. You can’t make God love you one ounce more than God already loves you right now. You can’t. You can go to church every day for the rest of your life. God isn’t going to love you any more than God loves you right now. You cannot make God love you any less, either—not an ounce less. Do the most terrible thing—steal and pillage, cheat and lie—and God wouldn’t love you less. You cannot change the Divine mind about you! The flow is constant, total, and 100 percent toward your life. God is for you. We can’t diminish God’s love for us. What we can do, however, is learn how to believe it, receive it, trust it, allow it, and celebrate it, accepting Trinity’s whirling invitation to join in the cosmic dance. That’s why all spirituality comes down to how you’re doing life right now. How you’re doing right now is a microcosm of the whole of your life."
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
"Without the free flow of the Holy Spirit, religion becomes a tribal sorting system, spending much time trying to define who’s in and who’s out—who’s right and who’s wrong. And surprise, we’re always on the side of right! What are the odds?
Yet refining, and any sorting that may or may not need to be done— that is the work of God. It’s not our problem. It really isn’t. Your problem isn’t to decide who is going to heaven and who is going to hell, especially when you realize those are mostly present-tense descriptions before they are ever future destinations. Your job is simply to exemplify heaven now. God will take it from there. Here is the remedy when you find it hard to exemplify heaven now: Let love happen. Remember, you cannot “get there”; you can only be here."
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
"Ken Wilber points out that much church organization is at the “mythic-membership” level of consciousness, which often breeds complacency to real human suffering, in-group smugness, and little else.
I’ve been a priest for over forty-five years now; sometimes when I look out over the crowd at Mass, I can see a passive resistance over much of the congregation’s faces. Even when I’m giving what I take to be a risky and life-giving message. They are conditioned to expect nothing. They’ve gotten so used to these gatherings not being meaningful that they no longer know how to allow them to touch their heart or change their mind. The Holy Spirit is again the Missing Person of the Blessed Trinity."
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
"Precisely because they aren’t trying to push or promote themselves, a true Spirit person often occurs as “terrifying.” They won’t manipulate you, and you always know you can’t manipulate them. Saints living in the circle (trinitarian) dance of love are often a scary anomaly. They are not subject to our usual system of rewards, punishments, and payoffs. They’re not in it for “filthy lucre,” like most of the rest of us are......
Many Spirit people strike fear in the hearts of the guardians of the status quo—or of any kind of privilege. Once you are in the “general dance,” as Thomas Merton called it, you have no need to make your attention-grabbing movements over in the corner."
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
"In the Divine Economy, all is useable, even our mistakes and our sin. This message shouts from the cross, and we still did not hear it!"
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
"Being is an active verb, and God is an event of communion? Could it be true? God does not decide to love, therefore, and God’s love can never be determined by the worthiness or unworthiness of the object. But God is Love itself. God cannot not love, because love is the nature of God’s very being."
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
"The Spirit’s passion is to bring her anointing of humanity in Jesus to full and personal and abiding expression in us [as unique persons], and not only in us personally, but in our relationship with the Father through the Son, and in our relationships with one another, and indeed with the earth and all creation…. 254 Until the whole cosmos is a living sacrament of the great dance of the triune God."
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
"Right at the heart of this alienation lies the absence of Jesus the teacher from our lives. Strangely, we seem prepared to learn how to live from almost anyone but him. We are ready to believe that the "latest studies" have more to teach us about love and sex than he does, and that Louis Rukeyser knows more about finances. "Dear Abby" can teach us more about how to get along with our family members and co-workers, and Carl Sagan is a better authority on the cosmos. We lose any sense of the difference between information and wisdom, and act accordingly.
Where we spontaneously look for "information" on how to live shows how we truly feel and who we really have confidence in."
(Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy)
Dallas Willard
"We have so persistently dissembled the power of the Gospel. . . that it is pardonable if those who judge of it by us
should doubt whether it is anything more efficacious and inspiring than the pathetic guesses which adorn the writings of philosophy."
(Canon B.F. Westcott. The Gospel Of Resurrection.)
"Our calling is not primarily to be holy men and women, but to be proclaimers of the gospel of God. The one all-important thing is that the gospel of God should be recognized as the abiding reality. Reality is not human goodness, or holiness, or heaven, or hell - it is redemption....
God cannot deliver me while my interest is merely in my own character."
Oswald Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest"Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel...." 1 Cor 1:17. Paul states here that the call of God is to preach the gospel. But remember what Paul means by "The Gospel", namely, the reality of redemption in our Lord Jesus Christ. We are inclined to make sanctification the goal of our preaching..... We are not commissioned to preach salvation or sanctification - we are commissioned to lift up Jesus (See John 12:32) it is an injustice to say that Jesus Christ labored to make me a saint, Jesus Christ labored in redemption to redeem the whole world and to place it perfectly whole and restored before the throne of God."
"It is a failure to understand Jesus and his words as reality and vital information about life that explains why, we do not routinely teach those who profess allegiance to him how to do what he said was best.......
Whatever the ultimate explanation of it, the most telling thing about the contemporary Christian is that he or she simply has no compelling sense that understanding of and conformity with the clear teachings of Christ is of any vital importance to his or her life,and certainly not that it is in any way essential."
~ Dallas Willard. The Diving Conspiracy
“I am a hole in a flute that the Christ’s breath moves through— listen to this music.”
Fourteenth-century Sufi mystic Hafiz
"I don’t think you can understand Scripture in any honest way unless you know that its primary arc is a salvation of history and creation itself, and today’s individualism is regressive. All the covenants are with the people collectively— the “house” and the future. Individuals like Abraham, Noah, and David are only the instruments."
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance )
"The Indwelling Spirit is this constant ability of humanity to keep going, to keep recovering from its wounds, to keep hoping and trying again. I think one thing we love so much about young children is their indomitable hope, curiosity, and desire to grow. They fall down, and soon they’re all grins again. Another generation is going to try again to live life to the fullest. But too often, by the time they’re my age they don’t smile so much at all, and we ask, “What happened between six and sixty?”
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
"(Jesus words) They are essentially subversive of the established arrangements and ways of thinking. That is clear from the way they first entered the world, their initial effects, and how they are preserved in the New Testament writings and live on in his people. He himself described his words as "spirit and life" (John 6:63) They invade our real world with a reality even more than it is, which explains why human beings then and now have to protect themselves against them."
(Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy)
"All that is not the love of God has no meaning for me. I can truthfully say that I have no interest in anything but the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. If God wants it to, my life will be useful through my word and witness. If He wants it to, my life will bear fruit through my prayers and sacrifices. But the usefulness of my life is His concern, not mine. It would be indecent of me to worry about that."
(Brennan Manning. All is Grace )
"So I told him, told him everything, about my disgust with my own motives and my thoughts of walking away from it all. In that moment he said a powerful thing, a life-changing thing: “You are on the threshold of receiving the greatest grace of your life. You are discovering what it means to be poor in spirit. Brother Brennan, it’s okay not to be okay.”My gut reaction was, This guy’s a loon. But then he led me to the first Beatitude as translated from the New English Bible: How blessed are those who know that they are poor, the kingdom of Heaven is theirs."
(Brennan Manning. All is Grace)
"The village didn’t have running water, so each morning I would ride out in a donkey-driven buckboard with a water tank in the back. I would later return with the prized possession, water. To say I was popular with the people is an understatement. One of my realizations in such an earthy atmosphere was that many of the burning theological issues in the church were neither burning nor theological. It was not more rhetoric that Jesus demanded but personal renewal, fidelity to the gospel, and creative conduct."
(Brennan Manning. All is Grace)
"Life has no real opposite; death is merely a transitioning, which takes trust every time we walk through it."
Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance
"By and large, what human beings want is resurrection without death, answers without doubt, light without darkness, the conclusion without the process."
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
"In the second person of the Trinity, we have the visible epiphany of the Unmanifest One. First in the form of creation itself— which is “the Christ” in our shorthand— and secondly in personal form, whom we call “Jesus.” Someone who reverences the first epiphany (apophatic, sat) is surely best prepared to rightly reverence the second— kataphasis, chit. Up to now, we’ve led many people to love Jesus, but many less were led to recognize, honor, and love the Christ. The major future task of Christian theology and practice is to finally join the two together."
(Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance)
“The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing... not healing, not curing... that is a friend who cares.”
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.”
~ Henri J.M. Nouwen
The temptation to consider power an apt instrument for the proclamation of the gospel is the greatest temptation of all.
~ Henri Nouwen
"During President Trump’s speech in Warsaw, Poland, on Thursday, he memorialized Pope John Paul II’s momentous 1979 visit to the city.
For many historians, the Polish-born pope’s Mass in Victory Square, more than anything else, set in motion the events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall a decade later and the dissolution of the Soviet Union soon thereafter. The people in attendance knew exactly what President Trump meant when he spoke of how the millions of Poles attending that Mass “did not ask for wealth. They did not ask for privilege. Instead, one million Poles sang three simple words: ‘We want God.’”
The Dangers of Arrogant Ignorance, by Jonah Goldberg. July 7, 2017 12:00 AM. National Review
"For Christians, "guilt by association" is NOT A THING. If your friendships aren't diverse enough to bewilder others, you're doing it wrong."
Jonathan Martin
"God for us, we call you Father.
God alongside us, we call you Jesus.
God within us, we call you Holy Spirit.
You are the eternal mystery that enables, enfolds, and enlivens all things,
Even us and even me."
~Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance
"Most of us do not know the ground of silence before speaking, the spaciousness around words, the inner repose after words, the humility that words should require."
~Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance
"This now-evident pattern is why so many of our contemporary spiritual teachers say that most of our problems are psychological in their manifestation, but spiritual in their solution. Most Christians of the Middle Ages more easily trusted the spiritual solution than we do, but they seldom had the vocabulary to describe the psychological manifestations as we do today. We articulate the psychological dimensions so well, and in so many ways, that contemporary people are trapped in sophisticated and helpful descriptions of the manifestations but have no One to surrender it all to. There is no Receiver Station, because we jumped off the divine waterwheel and withdrew from the dance."
~Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance
"People accuse me of all kinds of things, both wonderful and terrible. They’re usually half-right, of course. But invariably, they’re talking about themselves, and they can’t see it. This principle of likeness has positive and negative manifestations— what you see over there is what you are in here. Always. Mistrustful people don’t know how to trust themselves or anybody else, and so they lay it on you."
~Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance
"Hateful people see hatred everywhere else, have you noticed that? They’re always thinking someone’s out to screw them over, someone’s trying to hurt them. They create problems wherever they go. We call them “high-maintenance” people."
~Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance
"If you are still a black-and-white, rigid thinker who needs certitude and control at every step—well, the Trinity will feel out of reach. Grace shows up where logic breaks down, so you won’t go very far. No matter what passage is given to you, you will interpret it in a stingy, vengeful, controlling way—because that’s the way you do life."
~Richard Rohr. The Divine
"God cannot not see his Son Jesus in you. You are the body of Christ. You are bone of God’s bone, and that’s why God cannot stop loving you. That’s why no amount of effort will make God love you any more than God loves you right now. And despite your best efforts to be terrible, you can’t make God love you any less than God loves you right now."
~Richard Rohr. The Divine Dance.
"The trouble with so much conventional religion is this cultural attitude of, “Well, I’ll forgive when they’ve earned it, when they’ve proven themselves.”That’s not forgiveness—that’s a deal! God loves you precisely in your obstinate unworthiness, when you’re still a mixture of good and bad, when you’re gloriously in flux. You’re not a perfectly loving person, and God still totally loves you. When you can participate in that mystery of being loved, even as the mixed bag that you are, you can receive the gift of the forgiveness. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the only magnetic center that knows how to forgive other people—especially when people have really screwed you, really betrayed you, really abandoned you, really humiliated you. And sooner or later, this happens to all of us."
~Richard Rohr. The Divine
