the.slow.down

I ran across this on a friend’s blog via another guys blog, so i can take no credit, though I thought, a provocative quote…

More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them. It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence. Still, it is not as simple as it seems. My own desire to be useful, to do something significant, or to be part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress. But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn’t be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simply like them, but truly love them.

- henri nouwen

“A church which pitches its tents without constantly looking out for new horizons, which does not continually strike camp, is being untrue to its calling… [we must] play down our longing for certainty, accept what is risky, live by improvisation and experiment.”
- Hans Kung

Going through The Way of the Heart by Nouwen again. The first time that i read this book it was pretty dry to me, didn’t connect for some reason. my immaturity? absorption in other things? who knows? but this time around it holds a power i don’t remember being there. and maybe it’s b/c of the solitude of the last wlt, but regardless it is so good.

i just finished the section on solitude and it was really quite powerful.

“flee, be silent, pray always” - story from abba arsenius, p. 5

“Society… was regarded [by the Desert Fathers] as a shipwreck from which each individual man had to swim for his life… These were men who believed that to let oneself drift along, passively accepting the tenets and values of what they knew as society, was purely and simply a disaster”
- thomas merton, the wisdom of the desert, p. 11

Continue reading ‘quotes from the way of the heart by Henri Nouwen’

ch. 4 - apprehending God
“To most people God is an inference, not a reality. He is a deduction from evidence, which they consider adequate but He remains personally unknown to the individual.”

“For millions of Christians God is no more real than He is to the non-Christian.”

“But why do th every ransomed children of God themselves know so little of that habitual, conscious communion with God which Scripture offers? The answer is because of our chronic unbelief. Faith enables our spiritual sense to function. Where faith is defective the result will be inward insensibility and numbness toward spiritual things.”

“O God, quicken to life every power within me, that I may lay hold on eternal things. Open my eyes that I may see; give me acute spiritual perception; enable me ot taste Thee and know that Thou are good. Make heaven more real to me than any earthly thing has ever been. Amen.”

Ch. 5 - The Universal Presence
kind of obvious Christian Doctrine here, but really brought to life in the chapter in terms of how it effects how i think about me walking with God.

“These are truths believed by every instructed Christian. It remains for us to think on them and pray over them until they begin to glow within us.”

“Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.” Gen 28:16

“Jacob had never been for one small division of a moment outside the circle of that all-pervading Presence. But he knew it not. That was his trouble, and it is ours. Men do not know that God is here. What a difference it would make if they knew.”

“Always, everywhere God is present, and always He seeks to discover Himself to each one.”

“Our pursuit of God is successful just because He is forever seeking to manifest Himself to us.”

“It is for increasing degrees of awareness that we pray, for a more perfect consciousness of the divine Presence.”

[of all the great saints, despite their significant differences....]
“Without attempting anything like a profound analysis, I shall say simply that they had spiritual awareness and that they went on to cultivate it until it became the biggest thing in their lives. They differed from the average person in that when they felt the inward longing they did something about it. They acquired the lifelong habit of spiritual response.”

“Failure to see this is the cause of a very serious breakdown in modern evangelicalism. The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old has now no place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. We now demand glamour and fast-flowing action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told hbay a religious adventurer lately returned from afar.

The tragic results of this spirit are all about us: shallow lives, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit. These and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul.”

rereading resident aliens, such a good book, tons of good bits and well developed thoughts.

some noted ones:
Having no use for such bourgeois virtues as tolerance, open-mindedness, and inclusiveness (which the revolutionary knows are usually cover ups that allow the powerful to maintain social equilibrium rather than to be confronted and then to change), revolutionaries value honesty and confrontation- painful thought they may be.
p. 63

To be saved is to be on the road again. Too often, we depict salvation as that which provides us with a meaningful existence when we achieve a new self-understanding. Here, with our emphasis on the narrative nature of the Christian life, we are saying that salvation is baptism into a community that has so truthful a story that we forget ourselves and our anxieties long enough to become part of that story, a story God has told in Scripture and continues to tell in Israel and the church.
p. 59

Engagement with Jesus, as the misconceptions of his first disciples show, is necessary to understand Jesus. In a sense, we follow Jesus before we know Jesus. Furthermore, we know Jesus before we know ourselves. For how can we know the truth of ourselves as sinful and misunderstanding, but redeemed and empowered without our first being shown, as it was shown to his first disciples?
p. 55

We would like a church that again asserts that God, not nations, rules the world, that the boundaries of God’s kingdom transcend those of Caesar, and that the main political task of the church is the formation of people who see clearly the cost of discipleship and are willing to pay the price.
p. 48

Yoder also notes that the confessing church will be a church of the cross. As Jesus demonstrated, the world, for all its beauty, is hostile to the truth. Witness without compromise leads to worldly hostility. The cross is not a sign of the church’s quiet, suffering submission to the powers-thhat-be, but rather the church’s revolutionary participation in the victory of Christ over those powers. The cross is not a symbol for general human suffering and oppression. Rather, the cross is a sign of what happens when one takes God’s account of reality more seriously than Caesar’s. The cross stands as God’s (and ours) eternal no the powers of death, as well as God’s eternal yes to humanity, God’s remarkable determination not to leave us to our own devices.
The overriding political task of the church is to be the community of the cross.
p 47

The confessing church is not a synthesis of the other tow approaches, a helpful middle ground. Rather, it is a radical alternative. Rejecting both the individualism of the conversionists and the secularism of the activists and their common equation of what works with what is faithful, the confessing church finds its main political task to like, not in the personal transformation of individual hearts or the modification of society, but rather in the congregation’s determination to worship Christ in all things.
p. 45

But our endurance and our abiding joy in the work of serving Christ
at Bethlehem Baptist is not based on:
- the excitement of newness, because the new will one day be old,
- the largeness of numbers, because the numbers will one day be small,
- the pleasure of good partners, because one day we will be alone,
- the commendation of others, because the day of criticism will come,
- the reward of money, because it will one day vanish like the grass,
- the thrill of emotional highs, because the emotional lows will come.

i thought this was good…

“The confessing church is not a synthesis of the other two approaches [activist church & conversionist church], a helpful middle ground. Rather, it is a radical alternative. Rejecting both the individualism of the conversionists and the secularism of the activists and their common equation of what works with what is faithful, the confessing church finds its main political task to lie, not in the personal transformation of individual hearts or the modification of society, but rather in the congregation’s determination to worship Christ in all things.”