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The future of the church is silence. The eyes that see, and the face that blesses. Ecosystems of worship. For whom beauty is arresting. 

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Integrity

"The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson...illuminate(s) the interconnection of integrity and basic trust:... 'healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.' 

"Integrity is the capacity to affirm the value of life in the face of death, to be reconciled with the finite limits of one's own life and the tragic limitations of the human condition, and to accept these realities without despair. Integrity is the foundation upon which trust in relationships is originally formed, and upon which shattered trust may be restored. The interlocking of integrity and trust in caretaking relationships completes the cycle of generations and regenerates the sense of human community which trauma destroys." --Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery, p. 154

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"I love the Bible."

"In the late 1990s when I taught at Wheaton College...well-known Christian author and philosopher Dallas Willard came to the campus to speak in chapel. He also graciously agreed to speak to one of my doctoral classes in clinical psychology. I can't remember what he talked about, but I do remember this: at the end of our time, one of the students asked him what brings him hope and encouragement in life. 

Dallas answered quickly, as if he had known the answer for many years. 'I love the Bible,' he said. He went on to describe how much he enjoys reading the Bible, how many Bibles he has worn out over the years, and how precious he finds the words of Scripture.

I don't think my students could see it, but I was sitting close to Dallas as he answered the student's question, and I saw tears welling in his eyes. His answer, so vivid to me after all these years, struck me as beautiful and true. Oh, how I long to love Scripture as Dallas Willard does. How beautiful the lives of those who cherish God's Word. I find Dr. Willard's example inspiring as I do the work of Christian counseling. 

Lord, help me to love Scripture as Dallas Willard does. Let it shape my life for good so that I sit in wisdom and kindness with those who face pain and struggle." --Psychology, Theology, and Spirituality, Mark R. McMinn, p. 152

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vocation: becoming fully human

"Over the years I have come to think of this as the vocation of becoming fully human. To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else's hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that 'I'm only human' does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as a blessing and not a curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality...'The glory of God is a human being fully alive,' wrote Irenaeus of Lyons some two thousand years ago." --Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, p. 117

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Can You Be Present to World of Need?

In this age of information overload, there is a premium on the skill of maintaining presence, of mindfulness and of awareness. The call for contemplative activism has never been so great.

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Hospitality, Generosity, and Forgiveness vs. Cheap Grace

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Vocation: listening to and with our hearts

"The English word 'vocation' is derived from the Latin vocare, 'to call' and vox, 'voice.' The meaning centers on a 'voice calling.' John Neafsey, a clinical psychologist and senior lecturer in the department of theology at Loyola University Chicago, says that 'vocation is not only about "me" and my personal fulfillment, but about "us" and the common good.' He goes on to explain that "authentic vocational discernment, therefore, seeks a proper balance between inward listening to our heart and outward, socially engaged listening with our heart to the realities of the world in which we live. These come together in our heart's response to the needs and sufferings of the world." --Phileena Heuertz, Pilgrimage of a Soul: Contemplative Spirituality for the Active Life, p. 177

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Forgiveness and Mental Health

"Research (Baskin & Enright, 2004; Enright, 2001) shows that people who forgive someone who has hurt them seem to reap significant mental health benefits….Forgiveness takes conscious effort, whereas the defensive mechanisms of resentment or revenge are somewhat automatic. Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. Forgiveness involves the person who was hurt. Reconciliation takes both people and requires a change in the person who did the hurting. Forgiving can be liberating. Carrying around a desire for revenge or a need to avoid someone is not healthy. Hostility and aggression are linked to a multitude of health problems. However, people who are able to forgive benefit through a decreased in anxiety, depression, and hostility and an increase in hope, self-esteem, and existential well-being….Empathy motivates forgiveness: people who feel empathy for the person who offended them are more able to forgive than people who do not. People are also more likely to forgive an offender if the offender apologizes--because the apology encourages empathy. In sum, an apology leads to empathy, and empathy mediates forgiveness" --Jose B. Ashford & Craig Winston Lecroy, Human Behavior in the Social Environment, p. 560 

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to "tune" your own instrument

"Certainly the degree to which you can really be of help to others, if that is what you believe is most important, depends directly on how balanced you are yourself. Taking time to "tune" your own instrument and restore your energy reserves can hardly be considered selfish. Intelligent would be a more apt description." -- Jon Kabat Zinn, Full-Catastrophe Living, p. 35. 

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for others or for the world

"He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas." -- Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action, p. 164.  

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Love: crazy and strong

"Ordinarily, the only person whom we really love , who touches our very roots, has the capacity to drive us crazy, and it may be only this person who has the capacity to help us find our deepest strengths." --Augustus Y. Napier, The Family Crucible, p. 159

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Reading List (2013)

January:

1. Rob Bell and a New American Christianity - James K. Wellman Jr.

2. The Magician's Nephew - C. S. Lewis

3. Simply Jesus - N. T. Wright

February 

4. A People's History of Christianity - Diana Butler Bass

5. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis

6. The Way of the Pilgrim - translated by R. M. French

7. Celebration of Discipline - Richard Foster

March

8. The Ragamuffin Gospel - Brennan Manning

9. What We Talk About When We Talk About God - Rob Bell 

10. The Horse and his Boy - C. S. Lewis

April 

11. All is Grace - Brennan Manning 

12. Dissident Discipleship - David Augsburger 

13. Love Wins: For Teens - Rob Bell

14. Prince Caspian - C. S. Lewis

May

15. The Enneagram - Richard Rohr

16. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy - Eric Metaxas

17. Tuesday's With Morrie - Mitch Albom 

June 

18. Chasing Francis - Ian Morgan Cron

19. The Same Kind of Different as Me - Ron Hall & Denver Moore

July

20. The Pastor - Eugene Peterson

21. Prototype - Jonathan Martin 

August

22. Teen 2.0 - Robert Epstein, Ph.D.

September 

23. A Keeper of the Word - William Stringfellow & Bill Wylie Kellerman

October

24. The Gift of Therapy - Irvin D. Yalom, M.D.

November 

25. Peace is Every Step - Thich Nhat Hanh

December 

26. Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor E. Frankl

27. Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse

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focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small

"I know there is poor and hideous suffering, and I've seen the hungry and the guns that go to war. I have lived pain, and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks for early light dappled through leaves and the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives. Why would the world need more anger, more outrage? How does it save the world to reject unabashed joy when it is joy that saves us? Rejecting joy to stand in solidarity with the suffering doesn't rescue the suffering. The converse does. The brave who focus on all things good and all things beautiful and all things true, even in the small, who gives thanks for it and discover joy even in the here and now, they are the change agents who bring fullest Light to all the world. When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows, How can this not be the best thing for the world? For us? The clouds open when we mouth thanks." --Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts, p. 58

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"The more one forgets himself, the more human he is."

"By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic 'the self-transcendence of human existence.' It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself--be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself--by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love--the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself." --Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p. 110

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"It cuts through everything."

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confident and joyful in the judgement and mercy of God forever and ever

"The resurrection is impregnated with all that has gone before; these encounters of Christ with death and its powers in history mean that his triumph over death is effective not just at the terminal point of a person's life (death) but throughout one's life, during this life in this world, right now. This power is effective in the times and places in the daily lives of human beings when they are so gravely and relentlessly assailed by the claims of principalities for an idolatry that, in spite of all disguises, really surrenders to death as the reigning presence in the world. His resurrection means the possibility of living in this life, in the very midst of death's works, safe and free from death. 

But what of all these notions and speculations about a life after dying, after the day of the undertaker? The Christian, the one living by the authority of and in the freedom of the resurrection, is saved from fond and wishful thinking about that, Christians have no anxiety about their disposition after their lives in this world: in fact, they know little or nothing about the matter; but they know all that they need to know, which is that the reality and truth of the resurrection has been in the present life so radically verified and realized that they are confident and joyful in leaving themselves in the judgement and mercy of God, in all things, forever and ever." --William Stringfellow, Free In Obedience