apenitentialprayer - Tumblr blog

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But I need you to release me from my past so I can embrace a-better-version-of-myself.

Matthew Kelly's The Rocking Chair Prophet, page 117

A Broader Understanding of Forgiveness

Christians often describe forgiveness very narrowly. We typically understand forgiveness as pardoning someone for the harm they caused. This is an inadequate understanding of forgiveness. Forgiveness can look like pardoning harm, but that's like defining hospitality as inviting friends to your house party. Hospitality can look like that, but hospitality is clearly so much more than that. And it is out of a spirit of hospitality that you would invite your friends. So out of a spirit of forgiveness, you can pardon someone for the harm they caused you, but forgiveness is much more than that. If pardoning harm is all Jesus meant by forgiveness, then Jesus would have gone around pardoning those guilty of the greatest harm. Jesus didn't do that. Instead, Jesus went to those who had the greatest amount of harm done to them and forgave them. We must see forgiveness with a wider lens if we want to understand what Jesus was doing. The Jewish tradition informed the way Jesus and his followers thought about forgiveness. Judaism and early Christianity scholar Bruce Chilton explains that the Jewish conception of forgiveness is best understood as a release from the "incapacitating shackle" of sin. Sin constrains. Forgiveness releases. Chilton goes on to say that the "current, weakened conception of forgiveness as merely overlooking or forgetting the harm one has suffered is a far cry from the Judaic sense of liberation from the consequences of one's own deeds." [...] To forgive someone is to set them free to live beyond what was held over them. Forgiveness could look like releasing someone from the resentment you held over them as we commonly think of it, but it can also look like releasing someone from a debt you held over them, no longer requiring payment. The important part is the release, and forgiveness functions as a cycle of release. Reconciliation occurs when forgiveness so transforms a situation that the oppressor releases the victim of their mistreatment and the oppressed releases the oppressor from their resentment. Reconciliation occurs when both parties are released. Until both parties are released, reconciliation cannot be achieved.

- Damon Garcia (The God Who Riots: Taking Back the Radical Jesus, pages 79-80, 98). Italics original, bolded emphases added.

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トウネン

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Watchful Peace, The Return of the King by John Howe

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The Earth has always been, for me, a living being, one with whom I share a lot of things. And when I think about it, when I model it and so on, I have it in my head, you know, like a living being. So I have a very close relationship with Earth, that I consider a little bit like my mother. And that has colored my scientific life; I wanted to know, I wanted to understand, I wanted to find out about it, and the remarkable thing about science is you ask questions to the Earth, or to another object in the universe, and if you ask properly the question, you get answers and you begin a dialogue. And I've been entered, I entered into a dialogue with the Earth since I was young, and I've never stopped doing that.

- Dr. Xavier le Pichon (On Being: The Fragility at the Heart of Humanity)

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choices made in anger is such a crazy image. if you know what i'm talking about

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هُوَ الَّذي أَنزَلَ السَّكينَةَ في قُلوبِ الْمُؤْمِنِين It is He who bestows tranquility into the hearts of the faithful

— Qur'ān 48:4

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Needle Felted and Embroidered Art Hoops

Yuliya Krishchik on Etsy

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#There are way more than these#But these are the traditional homelands of these traditions

The six nations where Oriental Orthodoxy, one of the oldest branches of Christianity, has its presence.

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Sharlot M. Hall at the Grand Canyon, 1911. Image hand-colored.

I'm not unwomanly —don't you dare think so— but God meant woman to joy in His great, clean, beautiful world — and I thank Him that He lets me see some of it not through a window pane.

Sharlot Hall, in a letter addressed to Matt Riordan, dated September 10th, 1910.

Sharlot did not regard herself solely as a poet, or even as the journalist which she later became. She had a deep affection for the Southwest, an affection which led her not only to describe its natural features in vivid detail, but to want to preserve what she clearly perceived by the turn of the century to be its vanishing heritage. A pioneer in recognizing the need to record the ways of earlier generations, she collected Arizona artifacts, early documents, and oral histories. She tracked down pioneer Arizona miners, cattlemen, sheepherders, and prospectors, no matter how many miles she had to drive, alone or with a guide, over roads that were often only dim trails in the desert. Narrow-minded neighbors regarded this activity with scandalized horror. When the Territory of Arizona made the business of collecting Arizona history official, Sharlot saw no reason why sex should make a difference in the choice of the appointee. And after a sharp battle, with the help of influential friends of both sexes, Sharlot became Territorial Historian, the first woman to hold office in Arizona. The trail she broke in gaining this official appointment made it easier for other women, some of them her friends, to follow even into elective offices after Arizona became a state in 1912.

- Margaret Maxwell (A Passion for Freedom: The Life of Sharlot Hall, pages 1-2)

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Wild to me that in his book about Erasmus, Michael Massing includes on a list of "dumb" theoretical theological questions that the Scholastics debated about was whether the Father hated the Son. Because, yeah, okay, maybe how long Christ was in Mary's womb or whether God could have assumed the nature of a piece of flint may not be pressing questions...

... but whether or not the Father loves the Son has deep implications for the entirety of the Christian faith, Mr. Massing

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Henrik Olrik - A nun at morning in her cell (1863)

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‘Beauty and the Beast’ by Marianna and Mercer Mayer, 1978

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“𝐈𝐟 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐚𝐭 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧, 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐂𝐡𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐇𝐢𝐦𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 𝐢𝐧 𝐇𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐟𝐚𝐫 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐊𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐝𝐨𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐧.”

- St. Gabriel of Georgia

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'Tis Nature's law That none, the meanest of created things, Of forms created the most vile and brute, The dullest or most noxious, should exist Divorced from good, a spirit and pulse of good, A life and soul to every mode of being Inseparably linked.

William Wordsworth (The Old Cumberland Beggar: A Description, lines 73b-79a)

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“The essence of sin is concern with the limited goods of this world rather than the infinite good of God. The world itself was created good, but inherent in it is the danger of worldliness, the tendency to prefer its limited pleasures to infinite joy. “The world comes from God, but worldliness comes from the Devil.’ Creation is good, but our attachment to worldly goods is sinful.”

— Jeffrey Burton Russel (The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, page 69)