God be in my head
and in my understanding.
God be in my eyes
and in my looking.
God be in my mouth
and in my speaking.
God be in my heart
and in my thinking.
God be at my end
and at my departing.
19th Century Russian IconChrist does not save us by acting a parable of divine love; He acts the parable of divine love by saving us. That is the Christian faith.
Pride makes us hate our equals because they are our equals; our inferiors from the fear that they may equal us; our superiors because they are above us.
-- St. John Vianney (the Curé d'Ars)
Artist: Fra AngelicoGood religion teaches us about a good God and encourages us to be like Him to the people of the world. Bad religion teaches us about a good God and encourages us to look down on the people of the world because they are not as good as God is.
Artist: Wilhelm Trübner Penetrate these murky corners
where we hide our memories
and tendencies on which we do not care to look,
but which we will not yield freely up to you,
that you may purify and transmute them.
The persistent buried grudge,
the half-acknowledged enmity
which is still smouldering,
the bitterness of that loss
we have not turned into sacrifice,
the private comfort we cling to,
the secret fear of failure which saps our
initiative and is really inverted pride,
the pessimism which is an insult to your joy.
Lord, we bring all these to you, and we review them
with shame and penitence
in your steadfast light.
Baptism is not a bath, but a funeral bier. If it was a bath, you would need it again and again. But since it is a death and new life, it is a once for all picture of the transformation that has taken place in our lives. Baptism is not about your goodness; it's about God's Grace.
Photographer: Argos'DadFaith is not the holding of correct doctrines, but personal fellowship with the Living God... What is offered to man's apprehension in any specific revelation is not truth concerning God but the Living God Himself.
...
The life of faith does not earn eternal life: it is eternal life. And Christ is its vehicle.
Artist: Anna AncherAll art that really draws us to look at it deeply is spiritual. Art accepts all the sadness, and transforms it implicitly affirming that beauty is essentially the presence of God.
Artist: Edward Burne-Jones
Artist: Margret Hofheinz-Döring-- Carmina GadelicaI've always loved the Celtic prayers that acknowledge the divine in every aspect of both being and action. The above is one example. Such a prayer is a good way to start off the new year and then to turn to frequently. This kind of praise and invocation (for it is both) help us avoid artificially compartmentalizing our lives into the wordly versus the spiritual.God to enfold me,
God to surround me,
God in my speaking,
God in my thinking.
God in my sleeping,
God in my waking,
God in my watching,
God in my hoping.
God in my life,
God in my lips,
God in my soul,
God in my heart.
God in my sufficing,
God in my slumber,
God in mine ever-living soul,
God in mine eternity.
Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.
As our awareness of blessing grows, so does our joy. When we bless something, we center our attention on a very holy moment, for the power of blessing will tend to focus our mind, regardless of where it may have been wandering. We are brought to joy.
-- Avram Davis in The Way of Flame
Detail from "The Worship of the Shepherds" window at Trinity Church, BostonThe glory of the star, the glory of the sun--we must not lose either in the other.We must not be so full of the hope of heaven that we cannot do our work on the earth;we must not be so lost in the work of the earth that we shall not be inspired by the hope of heaven.
Artist: Lorenzo CostaThe wonder is not that there should be obstacles and sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love. The idea of God that humans have in their being is the wonder of all wonders. They have felt in the depths of their lives that what appears as imperfect is the manifestation of the perfect; just as a person who has an ear for music realized the perfection of a song, while in fact he or she is only listening to a succession of notes.
Artist: BramantinoUp in the Negro church one Christmas the congregation were singing the "Peace on Earth." When the plaintive music stopped an old gray-haired Negro in a frock coat and wearing two pairs of glasses arose and began reading the old, old story of the men who were watching their flocks by night and of the babe who was born in the city of David. He became very excited as he read, and his voice trembled and he unconsciously put the words to measure and chanted them slowly. When he finished he looked up at the ceiling with eager misty eyes as though he could see the light of the heavenly messenger shining in upon him.
It is a beautiful story, this of the holiest and purest childhood on earth, beautiful even to those who cannot understand it, as dreams are sweet to men without hope. After all, if we cannot hear the carol and see the heavenly messenger, it is because our ears are deaf and our eyes are blind, not that we turn willfully away from love or beauty.
No one is antagonistic by preference. Almost any of us who doubt would give the little we know or hope to know to go down upon our knees among the lowly and experience a great faith or a great conviction.
If the grandfather of the grandfather of Jesus had known what was hidden within him, he would have stood humble and awe-struck before his soul.
This is THE interpretation, dear people. John Eliot Gardiner simply cannot be beat when it comes to Baroque interpretation. Same for the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists.
And the opening strains of this oratorio (that timpani bit at the very beginning) simply announce "Christmas!" to me like nothing else. I will play my CD of this while I trim my tree on Friday. It's a tradition I absolutely love!
I think maybe I've blogged this before somewhere. It seems as good a time as any for a repeat.
Artist: John Leech I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on their journeys.
~
-- Charles Dickens from A Christmas Carol
None of us avoids crisis. All of us have trouble in the course of our lives. Because this is so, the great difference between people does not lie between those free from trouble and the rest of us. The great difference appears between those people who are vanquished by their problems and those people who find in their problems something worthwhile that redeems the rest.
"Wedding of Mary and Joseph" (between 1650 and 1700) It takes grace in our time to keep our minds open to wonder, to be ready for the tug from God, the push from the Spirit, and the revelation of deep things from the hearts of ordinary people. It takes grace, but it is a great gift.
God broods over us in the icons. And so we are summoned to look at them every day for they bring life, food, and grace into our bodies. There is a shining forth in our flesh that emerges with undivided attention and devotion. We come to drink in the icon and to be taken and held by it. We stand before the eye of God, or sit, or kneel, and we bow and kiss the icon, touching our fingers to our forehead, lips, shoulders, and heart as we greet and acknowledge that we are there — before All That Is, before God, the Holy One. Always the icon seeks to bring us to prayer and attentive adoration.
I listened to many versions of this carol on YouTube today because I wanted to bring you a good one that I have not posted before on this blog. This one (by the Mediæval Bæbes) is excellent. An even better version (I would assert) can be found on The Anchorhold (another of my blogs).
Artist: Claude MonetI heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.
-- Anne Lamott
We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. And the incognito is not always easy to penetrate. The real labor is to remember to attend. In fact to come awake. Still more to remain awake.
-- C.S. Lewis
Luminosity.
The Ave Maria by Franz Bieble was originally written for men's voice but this arrangement is also simply luscious.
Artist: Francesco Guardi While you have a thing it can be taken from you... but when you give it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. It is yours then for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always. That is to give.
-- James Joyce
Sometimes people get the mistaken notion that spirituality is a separate department of life, the penthouse of existence. But rightly understood, it is a vital awareness that pervades all realms of our being... Wherever we may come alive, that is the area in which we are spiritual.
Artist: Carol Popp de SzathmarySilence is like a river of grace inviting us to leap unafraid into its beckoning depths. It is dark and mysterious in the waters of grace. Yet in the silent darkness we are given new eyes. In the heart of the divine we can see more clearly who we are. We are renewed and cleansed in this river of silence. There are those among you who fear the Great Silence. It is a foreign land to you. Sometimes it is good to leap into the unknown. Practice leaping.
Artist: Sperindio CagnolaIn the final analysis, the questions of why bad things happen to good people transmutes itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it happened.
Artist: Jan van EyckThe things that we love tell us who we are.
Artist: El GrecoLanguage is so weak in explaining the fullness of the mystery. That is why the absolute silence of mediation is so supremely important. We do not try to think of God, talk to God or imagine God. We stay in that awesome silence open to the eternal silence of God. We discover in meditation, through practice and taught daily by experience, that this is the natural ambience for all of us. We are created for this and our being flourishes and expands in that eternal silence.I think the distinction between a pre-linguistic and a post-linguistic stated is an important one, actually.
“Silence” as a word, however, already falsifies the experience and perhaps deters many people, because it suggests some negative experience, the deprivation of sound or language. People fear that the silence of meditation is regressive. But experience and tradition teach us that the silence of prayer is not the pre-linguistic but the post-linguistic state in which language has completed its task of pointing us through and beyond itself and the whole realm of mental consciousness. The eternal silence is not deprived of anything nor does it deprive us of anything. It is the silence of love, of unqualified and unconditional acceptance.
Artist: Antoni KarwowskiI never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
After that I liked jazz music.
Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.
I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened.
I've just today come across several passages from this book. (One reviewer said it read like the diary of a born again Woody Allen!)
I think I want to read it.
~~~
Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art....It is a privilege to be alive in this time when we can choose to take part in the self-healing of our world.
Artist: Briton Rivière Something of God...flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.
Where, except in the present, can the Eternal be met?
This moment contains all moments.
I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.
Looking for God--or Heaven--by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters...
It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from.
As the end of another year draws close, what are the powers that you and your [fellow] church members fear, consciously or unconsciously? What "philosophies" and "false teachings" undermine Christian faith today, especially in your own setting? What is the power that helps you get through your day and the struggles of your life? Does the universe, does creation itself, feel out of control to you?...I found the above questions right here.
The image of a king may seem a bit outdated for people in post-modern democracies. Do you think it is still relevant for the church today? Is there another image that works better for you? How might our understanding of Jesus' being "raised up" expand beyond what happened on one Easter morning to a comprehensive understanding of his place over everything, not just our individual, personal lives, or the community, or the church in every age, but all of creation, in all time?
There are many recordings of this on YouTube. I've listened to quite a few and this is definitely the best so far. The tempo is almost miraculously sublime and the diminuendo at the very end is shimmeringly perfect. Do listen!
Artist: Max SlevogtI have shared with you before how much I respect and value the works of Frederick Buechner. I really appreciate this passage because the misconception is widespread that we must believe certain doctrines about Jesus rather than placing our faith in him, setting our hearts on him.Believing in him is not the same as believing things about him such as that he was born of a virgin and raised Lazarus from the dead. Instead, it is a matter of giving our hearts to him, of come hell or high water putting our money on him, the way a child believes in a mother or a father, the way a mother or a father believes in a child.
Artist: Mikhail NatarevichThe doing of something productive regardless of the outcome is an act of faith. The doing of a small something when a large something is too much for us is perhaps especially an act of faith. Faith means going forward by whatever means we can.
— Julia Cameron (from Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance)
When Christians draw lines between themselves and others, Jesus remains a relentless and scandalous crosser of these lines. He quietly slips to the other side. Whenever an attempt to imprison him is made he disappears from sight and appears elsewhere. Thus is lived out the paradoxical nature of Christian identity. A Christian is simultaneously a member of a community and an outsider. It is as if Jesus still prefers to be with the outcast, however wrong their beliefs or behavior, rather than with those who are self-righteously sure that only they are right. The intolerant Christian isolates himself or herself from the Christ of universal tolerance. Jesus' truth is greater than all the opinions about him put together.
Artist: Van GoghLet go of the private dream for the dream of God. Most of us live in the past, carrying our hurts, guilts and fears. We have to face the pain we carry, lest we spend the rest of our lives running away from it or letting it run us. But the only place you'll ever meet the real is now-here. It's the hardest place for us to live, the place where we're most afraid to live, because it feels so empty and boring. Now-here almost always feels like nowhere, and that's precisely where we must go.Desmond Tutu also talks about the dream of God.
If God said,
"Rumi, pay homage to everything
that has helped you
enter my
arms,"
there would not be one experience of my life,
not one thought, not one feeling,
not any act, I
would not
bow
to.-- Rumi
Artist: Gustave CaillebotteGood for the body is the work of the body,
good for the soul is the work of the soul, and
good for either is the work of the other.
Margret Hofheinz-Döring/Galerie Brigitte Mauch GöppingenJust these two words He spoke
changed my life:
“Enjoy Me.”
What a burden I thought I was to carry--
a crucifix, as did He.
Love once said to me, "I know a song,
Would you like to hear it?
And laughter came from every brick in the street
And from every pore
in the sky.
After a night of prayer, he
changed my life when
He sang,
"Enjoy Me."
Artist: Niko PirosmaniIf you don't find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further.
Artist: Wilhelm Krause When the storm is over and night falls and the moon is out in all its glory and all you're left with is the rhythm of the sea, of the waves, you know what God intended for the human race, you know what paradise is.
Artist: Carl Ludwig Becker Like when you sit in front of a fire in winter — you are just there in front of the fire. You don't have to be smart or anything. The fire warms you.
-- Desmond Tutu (on communion with God)
"Ascent of the Blessed" by Hieronymus Bosch By Your resurrection from the dead, O Christ, death no longer has dominion over those who die in holiness. So, we beseech You, give rest to Your servants in Your sanctuary and in Abraham's bosom. Grant it to those, who from Adam until now have adored You with purity, to our ancestors, brothers and sisters, to our kinspeople and friends, to all those who have lived by faith and passed on their road to You, by a thousand ways, and in all conditions, and make them worthy of the heavenly kingdom.
-- from the Byzantine Divine Liturgy
All Saints icon-- Anne RiceWe have to become saints. We have to become like Christ. Anything less is simply not enough.
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