Silencing What Was Seen

"At no time have governments been moralists. They never imprisoned people and executed them for having done something. They imprisoned people and executed them to keep them from doing something.....They improsoned all those POW's, of course, not for treason to the Motherland.... They imprisoned all of them to keep them from telling their fellow villagers about Europe. What the eye doesn't see, the heart does not grieve for."

- Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. 

Picking Berries But Seeing Little

"Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries."

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I Give Up Rather Than Be A Hypocrite

Priest..... nailed it. 

"On the day of my first vows in 1962, the preacher glared at us earnest and innocent novices and quoted the line, "Thou shalt be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect!" (Matthew 5:48). Most of the honest guys left within the first few years of seminary when they could not achieve this supposed perfection. That's sad because I think a lot of them would have been really good friars and priests, precisely because they wereso human, humble, and honest.

 

Many people give up on the spiritual life or religion when they see they cannot be perfect. They end up practical agnostics or atheists, because they refuse to be hypocrites. This is classic all-or-nothing thinking, characteristic of addicts. Many formal believers keep up the forms and the words, going to church and pretending to believe; but there is no longer the inner desire, love, joy, or expectation that is usually visible in people on the path of union.

Richard Rohr

Cheap Church Sunday Grace

" Luther had said that all we can do is of no avail, however good a life we live. He had said that nothing can avail us in the sight of God but "the grace and favour which confers the forgiveness of sin." But he spoke as one who knew that at the very moment of his crisis he was called to leave all that he had a second time and follow Jesus. The recognition of grace was his final, radical breach with his besetting sin, but it was never the justification of that sin. By laying hold of God's forgiveness, he made the final, radical renunciation of a self-willed life, and this breach was such that it led inevitably to a serious following of Christ. He always looked upon it as the answer to a sum, but an answer which had been arrived at by God, not by man. But then his followers changed the "answer" into the data for a calculation of their own. That was the root of the trouble. If grace is God's answer, the gift of Christian life, then we cannot for a moment dispense with following Christ. But if grace is the data for my Christian life, it means that I set out to live the Christian life in the world with all my sins justified beforehand. I can go and sin as much as I like, and rely on this grace to forgive me, for after all the world is justified in principle by grace. I can therefore cling to my bourgeois secular existence, and remain as I was before, but with the added assurance that the grace of God will cover me. It is under the influence of this kind of "grace" that the world has been made "Christian," but at the cost of secularizing the Christian religion as never before. The antithesis between the Christian life and the life of bourgeois respectability is at an end. The Christian life comes to mean nothing more than living in the world and as the world, in being no different from the world, in fact, in being prohibited from being different from the world for the sake of grace. The upshot of it all is that my only duty as a Christian is to leave the world for an hour or so on a Sunday morning and go to church to be assured that my sins are all forgiven."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Cost Of Discipleship 

Justification Of Sin Not From Sin

"Luther had said that grace alone can save; his followers took up his doctrine and repeated it word for word. But they left out its invariable corollary, the obligation of discipleship. There was no need for Luther always to mention that corollary explicitly for he always spoke as one who had been led by grace to the strictest following of Christ. Judged by the standard of Luther's doctrine, that of his followers was unassailable, and yet their orthodoxy spelt the end and destruction of the Reformation as the revelation on earth of the costly grace of God. The justification of the sinner in the world degenerated into the justification of sin and the world. Costly grace was turned into cheap grace without discipleship."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Cost Of Discipleship. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer On Monasticism

"As Christianity spread, and the Church became more secularized, this realization of the costliness of grace gradually faded. The world was Christianized, and grace became its common property. It was to be had at low cost. Yet the Church of Rome did not altogether lose the earlier vision. It is highly significant that the Church was astute enough to find room for the monastic movement, and to prevent it from lapsing into schism. Here on the outer fringe of the Church was a place where the older vision was kept alive. Here men still remembered that grace costs, that grace means following Christ. Here they left all they had for Christ's sake, and endeavoured daily to practise his rigorous commands. Thus monasticism became a living protest against the secularization of Christianity and the cheapening of grace. But the Church was wise enough to tolerate this protest, and to prevent it from developing to its logical conclusion. It thus succeeded in relativizing it, even using it in order to justify the secularization of its own life. Monasticism was represented as an individual achievement which the mass of the laity could not be expected to emulate. By thus limiting the application of the commandments of Jesus to a restricted group of specialists, the Church evolved the fatal conception of the double standard -- a maximum and a minimum standard of Christian obedience. Whenever the Church was accused of being too secularized, it could always point to monasticism as an opportunity of living a higher life within the fold, and thus justify the other possibility of a lower standard of life for others. And so we get the paradoxical result that monasticism, whose mission was to preserve in the Church of Rome the primitive Christian realization of the costliness of grace, afforded conclusive justification for the secularization of the Church. By and large, the fatal error of monasticism lay not so much in its rigorism (though even here there was a good deal of misunderstanding of the precise content of the will of Jesus) as in the extent to which it departed from genuine Christianity by setting up itself as the individual achievement of a select few, and so claiming a special merit of its own."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Cost Of Discipleship 

Grace As An Idea

"Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian "conception" of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins. The Church which holds the correct doctrine of grace has, it is supposed, ipso facto a part in that grace. In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God.....

Instead of following Christ, let the Christian enjoy the consolations of his grace! That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of the repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.....

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiting repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.....

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock.

Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: "ye were bought at a price," and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. 

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The Cost Of Discipleship

Can't Shake My Community

"One of the hardest things about .... living in a developing country is the constant tug between the world you left and the world you are currently living in.  You can’t ever really shake either one."

- Stephie. Meet Me In The Middle

Why Should I Go Out?

Introvert conversation 

"What we really need to do is get you out into the real world with other people, not just stuck in this house so that you never leave." 

"Why should i leave when I have you to get me groceries?" 

- Movie "Bird Box"

Enforced Ignorance

" But what depths of enforced ignorance were achieved by the monstrous lies of the state. Even the most broad-minded of us can embrace only that part of the truth into which our own snout has blundered."

- Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago.  Vol 1, pg 242. 

The Cost To Moderate Muslims

We are not paying the greater sacrifice in the struggle against fundamentalism. Moderate Muslims pay the greatest price under terrorism, radicalism, and fundamentalism. 

They too are seen as people who need conversion to clearer thinking and understanding. It happened to half the Malian muslim population, in half the country, under the AQIM occupation (Al-Qaeda). Local peaceful Muslims who treat non Muslims of other faiths with a laissez-faire attitude, and not so strict with hijab were treated as bad, inadequate, fallen or failed muslims for not adopting their rigid fundamentalist stances. 

I can share several stories of murdered imams, murdered for refusing to preach violent and abusive doctrines. 

A full mosque of men who got up and walked out of a mosque in Timbucktu, when radicals arrived in the city and stood up to speak to the assembly on a Friday. When they stood up in place of their imam the men walked out in silent protest, not giving them the satisfaction of a listening ear. Keep in mind this arriving group of radicals had AK47s. Leaving was a risque. 

Yet admittedly, others side with the radicals, and some take up the call and end up helping and hiding the radical elements working into their community, making it almost impossible to root it out. A divided community cannot easily stand without a cost. 

Here is a story from Algeria.

"“Oh my God, oh my God,” the wizened Muslim woman in front of me says, looking skyward. “Ya rabi, ya rabi.” During Algeria’s dark decade, Fatma Bisikri’s husband, an Arabic teacher, went to do the grocery shopping in Ben Achour, the poorest area of Blida where they lived. He was stabbed and then shot to death by two masked terrorists. I think Fatma, now seventy-one, is finished with her story when she tells of running through the streets without her shoes to find her husband. But this is only the first chapter. Two years later, someone pounded on her door at night. She did not want her daughter to open the door, but her daughter did. Three or four armed men in the recognizable “uniform” of the fundamentalist armed groups—baggy seroual under a long qamis—pushed their way in. “I do not want to talk about this,” Fatma tells me in her small, strained voice. Then she keeps talking. I am grateful for the presence of my friend Lalia. There is too much grief to absorb alone here at the office of Djazairouna, the Association of Families of Victims of Islamist Terrorism. When Fatma Bisikri continues telling us her history, Lalia begins to cry. “Smhana, smhana.” “Forgive us, forgive us.” Fatma says the armed men dragged six of her nine children, aged thirteen to thirty, from the house. She held onto the legs of one fighter, sliding along, until he kicked her to the ground. Then she ran out after them, screaming: “Give me back my children.” The fundamentalists put a knife to her throat. “What are you looking for?” one barked. Even her maternal instincts could not overcome the fear they knew how to provoke. She retreated into the house. Not a single neighbor came out to help. There had recently been eleven killings in a home nearby. Terror had become mundane. At first light, in a torrential rain, Fatma Bisikri went to look for her six children. All too soon, she found them. The fundamentalists had cut their throats and dumped their bodies in a oued, a nearby riverbed. The smallest details are what make a crime against humanity all too personal. They are what finally make Fatma Bisikri sob. Not long before that macabre night, one of her young sons had been crying that they had lost their father and did not have new clothes for the Eid holiday, as other children did. His older sister, a teacher, managed to buy him new pants. He was wearing them when he was murdered. Why did this happen? Later, someone suggested to Fatma that it was because her daughter refused to stop teaching despite being ordered to do so by the local fundamentalists in their crusade against education. Or it could have been because people in the area had previously given succor to the terrorists, thinking they were fighting for religion, but then stopped helping them due to the jihadists’ local atrocities. None of these theories can answer the big why, or ease this mother’s continuing agony. After the murders, Fatma applied for a new place to live to get away from the mouth of hell her home now seemed to be. However, she has never been given other housing. So Fatma Bisikri remains alone in the same location with the view of the oued where she found her children’s bodies. She wants to sleep in a different place, but she has nothing. “Andi walou.”"
- Karima Bennoune. Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here. 

Religions Living At Peace?

"Some of the journalists I met confront fundamentalism head-on. Others document it, analyze it, challenge it, and survive it. Radik Amirov personifies an alternative to it. He transcends narrow categories, being Tatar and Russian, tolerant and interested in tradition, a citizen and a believer, a Muslim and a modern journalist."

- Karima Bennoune. Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here. 

The Same Prophets?

"Radik Amirov heads a press club called The East, which offers media resources related to what he terms “the internal and external Muslim world,” both in Russia and beyond. This is part of what he thinks Muslims must do—more work to offer their own self-representation on the Internet, radio, and TV. Part of the story that needs to be told, Radik thinks, is the long, proud history of Muslims living in peace with Christians and Jews in Russia, and fighting together against Napoleon and the Nazis. “There were no religious wars throughout this time.” Amirov sees himself as representative of the mainstream Muslim population here. “We are normal,” he laughs, again echoing Said Bitsoev. “Most Muslims are like me. There are lots of journalists and politicians and people of culture and postmen among Muslims.” Asserting that he represents the majority with his open views on religion and coexistence, he still argues that, as a population, “We must work on ourselves and avoid the fundamentalist mentality.” It is wonderful to hear someone both speaking positively about his community and also accepting its responsibility. He recently edited L’chaim Tatars, a book of true stories about what he argues are historically congenial relations between Muslims and Jews in his native Tatarstan and in other parts of the former Soviet Union. The cover of the small, hardback volume he gifts me is decorated with a crescent and a Star of David. “We have the same Prophets, the same values, rules and traditions,” ...

Yet another chapter memorializes good things Jews and Muslims have done for one another. It tells the story of a Jewish doctor who cured a Muslim boy, and then his parents saved Jewish boys during World War II. The Muslim boy in question, Abu-Bekir Shabanovich, grew up to become mufti of Belarus. For Radik, this history stands in stark contrast to today’s “war of civilizations.”

(Radik Amirov, who is president of Russia’s League of Muslim Journalists when I meet him in 2010, and press secretary to Moscow mufti Ravil Gainutdin)

- Karima Bennoune. Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here. 

Lazy Russian Believers?

"In that capacity, he observed the problems facing Russian Muslims up close. He says they have to be less passive. “Unfortunately, most of us are sitting and waiting for Allah to help us.” The mainstream Muslim population has lost a lot of time in the last fifteen years in the battle against fundamentalism, according to Amirov. “We could have organized good madrasas or a good Muslim university.” Instead, the Muslim leadership here was bogged down by infighting. The lack of moderate Muslim schools at home in Russia saw young people leave to get their “Muslim education” in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. He does not have a high opinion of what some of these students learned. “They came back completely different people. They said you should not greet Christians, that you should hate Jews.” A friend of his returned and tried “to teach me how to live.” They found themselves “on different sides of the barricades.”

(Radik Amirov, who is president of Russia’s League of Muslim Journalists when I meet him in 2010, had been press secretary to Moscow mufti Ravil Gainutdin)

- Karima Bennoune. Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here. 

Church Curmudgeon

“I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as a ‘surly, ill-mannered, bad-tempered fellow’. Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon.”

- Edward Abbey 

Get Out Of Your Tin Car

"What can I tell them? Sealed in their metallic shells like molluscs on wheels, how can I pry the people free? The auto as tin can, the park ranger as opener. Look here, I want to say, for godsake folks get out of them there machines, take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs, look around; throw away those goddamned idiotic cameras! For chrissake folks what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? eh? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not? Jesus Christ, lady, roll that window down! You can't see the desert if you can't smell it. Dusty? Of course it's dusty—this is Utah! But it's good dust, good red Utahn dust, rich in iron, rich in irony. Turn that motor off. Get out of that peice of iron and stretch your varicose veins, take off your brassiere and get some hot sun on your old wrinkled dugs! You sir, squinting at the map with your radiator boiling over and your fuel pump vapor-locked, crawl out of that shiny hunk of GM junk and take a walk—yes, leave the old lady and those squawling brats behind for a while, turn your back on them and take a long quiet walk straight into the canyons, get lost for a while, come back when you damn well feel like it, it'll do you and her and them a world of good. Give the kids a break too, let them out of the car, let them go scrambling over rocks hunting for rattlesnakes and scorpions and anthills—yes sir, let them out, turn them loose; how dare you imprison little children in your goddamned upholstered horseless hearse? Yes sir, yes madam, I entreat you, get out of those motorized wheelchairs, get off your foam rubber backsides, stand up straight like men! like women! like human beings! and walk—walk—WALK upon your sweet and blessed land!

- Edward Abbey 

Rule Of Law Means I Die?

"If I should object to force I will be arrested. If I object to arrest I will be clubbed. If I defend myself against clubbing I will be shot. These procedures are known as The Rule of Law."

Edward Abbey, The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel

Get Out Of Your Car

"You can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamn contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbrush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you'll see something, maybe."

- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Sacred Million Year Old Things

" If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human vanity alone? Contempt for the natural world is contempt for life. The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature. Anything becomes permissible. We return once more to the nightmare cultures of Hitler, Stalin, King Philip II, Montezuma, Caligula, Heliogabalus, Herod, the Pharaohs; Christ sacrificed himself in vain."

- Edward Abbey, Beyond the Wall: Essays from the Outside

Let Us Chop Wood

"High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring."

- Edward Abbey 

Little Talk Of Tiny Heros

"Philosophy without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a hundred books, a thousand theories, a million words. Now as always we need heroes. And heroines! Down with the passive and the limp."

- Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

Cockeyed Ambition To Conquer

"The children are innocent until proven guilty. For their sake, not ours, we must soldier on, muddling our way toward frugality, simplicity, liberty, community, until some kind of sane and rational balance is achieved between our ability to love and our cockeyed ambition to conquer and dominate everything in sight."

- Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

No Management Zones?

"Simply because humankind have the power now to meddle or 'manage' or 'exercise stewardship' in every nook and cranny of the world does not mean that we have a right to do so. Even less, the obligation."

- Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

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, 

More Democracy

"Anarchism? You bet your sweet betsy. The only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy. Much more."

- Edward Abbey,

Teamwork As Stupidity

"One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork."

-Edward Abbey

Our Institutions Are Too Big?

 "Our institutions are too big; they represent not the best but the worst characteristics of human beings. By submitting to huge hierarchies of power, we gain freedom from personal responsibility for what we do and are forced to do - the seduction of it - but we lose the dignity of being real men and women. Power corrupts; attracts the worst and corrupts the best. ... Refuse to participate in evil; insist on taking part in what is healthy, generous, and responsible. Stand up, speak out, and when necessary fight back. Get down off the fence and lend a hand, grab a-hold, be a citizen - not a subject."

- Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

Leadership

 "Grown men do not need leaders."

- Edward Abbey 

Some institutions hold people as peretual infantiles. 

Just Disappear

  "I suppose each of us has his own fantasy of how he wants to die. I would like to go out in a blaze of glory, myself, or maybe simply disappear someday, far out in the heart of the wilderness I love, all by myself, alone with the Universe and whatever God may happen to be looking on. Disappear - and never return. That's my fantasy."

- Edward Abbey

Let Them Get Eaten?

 "A venturesome minority will always be eager to set off on their own, and no obstacles should be placed in their path; let them take risks, for godsake, let them get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried alive under avalanches - that is the right and privilege of any free American."

- Edward Abbey 

More Eating Places Needed

"Wilderness is the place where you can still get eaten."

- Edward Abbey

What I Stand For?

"I stand for what I stand on."

- Edward Abbey

When Guns Are Outlawed

"When guns are outlawed, only the Government will have guns. The Government - and a few outlaws. If that happens, you can count me among the outlaws."

- Edward Abbey 

Grapes Are Enough

"Our Lord's miracle in turning water into wine comes as no surprise to those who know that it is God who did it. At the wedding that day he made wine in the six waterpots he had had filled with water; but he does the same thing every year in the vines. The servants put the water in the jugs, and he turned it into wine. In just the same way the Lord turns into wine the water that the clouds drop. Only that does not amaze us, because it happens every year...."

- Augustine. 

Two Legged Thanks Giving

"Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs?"

- Chesterton

God Leaps Out Of The Frame

"Said a boy of missionary parents attending school in this country as he looked at a picture of his father. “I want my father to step out of that frame.” 

That's exactly what God did for is in Christ. He steps out of the frame of the universe and comes to us personally, intimately. This is the Truth which Christians celebrate at Christmas."

- William (Bill) Weale. Charlottetown. 

Depressed Radicals

"Unfortunately, toxicity in radical communities is not a bug. It is a feature. The ideology and norms of radicalism have evolved to produce toxic, paranoid, depressed subjects."

- Conor Barnes. "Sad Radicals". (Dec 11, 2018) Quillette.

He Will Always Be God With Us.

"...because despite mans repeated "no", God constantly says "yes". He will always be God-with-us."

Pope Francis. Homily at the Christmas Eve Mass in St. Peter's Basilica, 2018.

Earth Is Crammed Full With Heaven

"Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God, But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries."

~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Does My Life Matter?

"Let me ask you something. Is what I do back home important?

Does it matter?

I really don’t do much other than working and caring for my family and friends . . . “

Sarayu interrupted him. “Mack, if anything matters then everything matters.

Because you are important, everything you do is important. Every time you forgive, the universe changes; every time you reach out and touch a heart or a life, the world changes; with every kindness and service, seen or unseen my purposes are accomplished and nothing will ever be the same again.”"

(The Shack. William P. Young)

Nothing To Loose!

"For me, everything is about Jesus and Father and the Holy Spirit, and relationships, and life is an adventure of faith lived one day at a time.  Any aspirations, visions and dreams died a long time ago and I have absolutely no interest in resurrecting them (they would stink by now anyway).  I have finally figured out that I have nothing to lose by living a life of faith."

(Paul Young)

Grandiose People Cannot Creat Peace

"In the secular sphere, it has manufactured artificial ledgers of perfection that have clearly changed from age to age, class to class, and culture to culture. Perfectionism discourages honest self-knowledge and basic humility, which are foundational to spiritual and psychological growth. It has made basic social tranquility a largely unachievable goal. Grandiose people cannot create peace."

Richard Rohr

 

Most Leadership gurus we are trying to emulate here are "Grandiose", in my opinion.

Participating In The Healing Of People

"A few years back I was the featured speaker at the Indiana Governor’s Prayer Breakfast. I found myself sitting with the then youngest (thirty-six years old) governor in the country, Evan Bayh. He’s also a very devout Christian. He turned to me and said, “Brennan, you’re in just about every nook and cranny of the United States. You’re in every college and university, from Campus Crusade to Young Life, and in an incredible number of churches as well. What do you hear the Spirit of God saying to the American church?”I said, “Well, Governor Bayh, if there’s one thing I hear with growing clarity, it’s that God is calling each and every Christian to personally participate in the healing ministry of Jesus Christ.”

Healing is a response to a crisis in the life of another person. It’s enough of a response, a satisfactory response to a crisis in the life of another."

( Brennan Manning. The Furious Longing Of God)

Pretending Is Exhausting

"The ego doesn't want to surrender to its inherent brokenness and poverty. Yet the truth is, realizing your imperfection is the beginning of freedom and grace. There is such freedom in no longer pretending to be something we're not."

~ Richard Rohr

Mission Work Is A Gift Not A Burden

"People often say to me: “Rob, it’s such a sacrifice, what you do,” and in many ways it is. But that’s not to say that missions work isn’t also fascinating, enriching and – on many occasions – just great fun! What you give up back home before coming on the field, God gives back to you in so many different ways – and more."

(Rob Baker. Adventures in Music and Culture : Travels of an Ethnomusicologist in West Africa)

The Illusionary You

"Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him."

(Thomas Merton)

Don't Waste Your Life Defending Your Ego

Best line I've read in weeks... "Don't waste much time defending your ego"

"Whenever you are offended, it's usually because your self-image has not been worshiped or it has been momentarily exposed. The false self will quickly react with a vengeance to any offenses against it because all it has is its own fragile assumptions about itself.

Narcissists have a lot of asserting and defending to do, moment by moment. Don't waste much time defending your ego. The True Self is untouchable, or as Paul puts it "it takes no offense" (1 Corinthians 13:5)."

~Richard Rohr

No Naked Head Pictures

Diverse cultures with different views on the human body.

"That reminds me of an amusing cultural story told by my mate Eric, a missionary in West Africa. Eric was visiting a village in his early mission days and saw three African ladies preparing a meal together. “Could I take a photo of you, please?” he asked (it’s always good to check first). The ladies looked at each other doubtfully, then one replied: “Wait a moment – we don’t have our heads covered. We must cover our heads before you can take your picture.” And with that, the three ladies removed their tops and wrapped them round their heads, ready for the photo! In great embarrassment, all Eric could do was to take a ‘pretend’ photo of these three bare-chested ladies and thank them for their trouble. True story. Culture is indeed a fascinating thing!"

(Rob Baker. Adventures in Music and Culture: Travels of an Ethnomusicologist in West Africa)

A Lifetime Of Talking Too Much

"I’m just loving shutting up. It’s honestly been simmering inside of me for quite a while. My entire life has been filled with too much talk. From myself as well as those around me. I’ve been noticing that most of us, when we talk, fill the air with… more air. "

~ Drew Marshall - Practicing silence one day a week for six months, then walked the 800km Camino De Santiago pilgrimage in silence starting on his 50th birthday.

www.Camnoconfessions.com

Armpit of Africa?

“You’re going to the armpit of Africa,” the prim doctor said, as I rolled up my sleeve for the first injection. “We can only do so much for you.” She was as thorough as she was adamant."

(To Timbuktu For a Haircut. Rick Antonson)