Greg Garrett > Quotes

“The world is full of broken people who think they are surrounded by whole people.”
― Greg Garrett, Crossing Myself: A Story of Spiritual Rebirth

“What Baldwin believes about faith, I would argue, is that belief and action badly applied make us more dangerous, more limited, more blinkered in our vision. A bad religious understanding may breed jealousy, greed, and hatred. Bad faith may in fact be worse than no faith at all.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“Baldwin saw racism as damaging to all who are caught up in its lies. It was, though, Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color who were most powerfully affected by the construction and application of race, by the overwhelming weight of racism in the United States and elsewhere.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“Jonah, once he got turned around, brought a by-the-book message of doom to the people of Nineveh; God decided to convert it into a message of life. God wins. As Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “If Jesus’ own example is to be trusted, then following the Word of God may not always mean doing what is in the book. Instead it may mean deviating from what is in the book in order to risk bringing the Word to life.”6”
― Greg Garrett, No Idea: Entrusting Your Journey to a God Who Knows

“He argued then—as he did elsewhere for decades—that the future of America was precisely as bright as the future of Black people in America. That we would rise or fall together.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“One of the benefits of Baldwin’s lived experience—Black, gay, artistic, exile—was that it offered him the opportunity to evaluate and reevaluate an America that was primarily white, heterosexual, economically and politically ascendant, and supremely confident.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“In his explanation for rejecting the Nation of Islam in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin makes clear that despite their Muslim trappings, the organization feels too much like the Christianity he left; what he is suspicious of is dogmatism in any faith, particularly views of one’s own rightness and fitness that lead inexorably to hatred and violence, whether those views are espoused by white Christians or by Black Muslims.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“Churches can be havens for some within them—and hell for others.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“I will flatly say that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long (Garrett quoting “The Price May Be Too High,” New York Times, 2 February 1969).”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“We don’t like being held accountable. And we blame others. I never enslaved anyone. Despite Socrates’s dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living, the American experience remains largely unexamined, marked by an ignorance, blindness, and intellectual dishonesty against which another great American writer, Henry David Thoreau, railed in Walden.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“People need to believe in their innocence and will do much to preserve it. Historian Tyler Stovall notes in White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea that people don't consciously choose evil; they choose a myth or myths they can hide behind, that can allow them to avert their eyes from such a judgment.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“All the great villains in my life are also damaged; I can wish that they had responded to their brokenness without harming me or anyone else, yet harm often grows out of harm: hurt people hurt people.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel According to James Baldwin: What America's Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“Parker Palmer (who by now you’ve guessed is one of my discernment gurus) writes that when we are doing what we are supposed to be doing, we will know it because we will be energized by it, joyful in it. (Think of the apostle Paul’s fruit of the spirit in Galatians 5: love, joy, peace, and so on.) And when we are not doing what we’re supposed to be doing, we will be dragged down by it, disheartened by it, and perhaps, if we are not careful, destroyed by it. Simply put: Does the path you’re on bring you joy or pain? Note that the question is not, Is this what others think I should be doing? It’s not, Is this what makes me look good—or makes me a lot of money? It’s not even, Is this what other people whose walks with God I respect are doing? Does the path you’re on bring you joy or pain? I’m not talking, of course, about temporary hardships: internships, residencies, two-shift careers while you’re finishing something. I believe that most worthwhile things require hard work, the solving of difficult problems, stamina, faithfulness. In my three years of seminary I was challenged to my limits. I had never worked so hard, had to manage time so well. And I loved every minute of it. Okay, maybe not every minute—I can’t say I enjoyed Greek, or my hospital chaplaincy, although I understood why I was doing them. But even in those hard things I knew I was doing the right thing, and my life, in general, was filled with joy. And if you are doing even the most worthy of things, but it breaks you down instead of building you up, you may need to take notice. Once you set your foot on the path, ask yourself, “Is this the path of God’s joy for me?” If after a while you’re not sure you can answer that question in the affirmative, give some serious thought to whether or not you ought to continue. Merton’s prayer ends in this way: You will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always.5 As I’ve spent time thinking about who and what God is, I’ve come to believe that God’s job is not to make things easy for me. Not to give me a candy-coated existence. Not even to make me feel good about myself. But what has made my life possible—or at least, made it possible to continue living—is that I have felt God’s presence with me in good times and bad, and come to the genuine belief that if I try hard to live in God’s will instead of chasing my own, good things will happen. I rarely, if ever, know exactly what those good things will be, and sometimes they don’t seem particularly good in the moment. But that’s what faith is all about. Not a naive belief that God is going to give me what I want. Instead, it’s my own resolve to go on believing and trusting, and to keep my feet moving on the path, so that up around the next bend or over the next rise, maybe what God has in store for me will come into view.”
― Greg Garrett, No Idea: Entrusting Your Journey to a God Who Knows

“James Baldwin is as alive in this moment as he has ever been, his voice as clear and measured. And what does he have to teach us?

It is nothing less than a commitment to being fully alive, a way to be fully human, an awareness that love, freedom, and justice are the universal desires of every human being.

It is a commitment to look at our world and at our lives and to strive to tell nothing but the truth/”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“It was Augustine who famously said, “Love God, and do what you will,” and coming from a former hedonist like Augustine, you might expect that to be a license for bad behavior. But what he meant, very simply, was this: If you love God completely and totally, if your values are God-values, then the choices you make will tend to be in tune with His will for your life.”
― Greg Garrett, No Idea: Entrusting Your Journey to a God Who Knows

“least—God has already made a way in your life. You are the person you are, with the strengths, weaknesses, interests, and passions you have at this moment.”
― Greg Garrett, No Idea: Entrusting Your Journey to a God Who Knows

“James Baldwin is as alive in this moment as he has ever been, his voice as clear and measured. And what does he have to teach us?

It is nothing less than a commitment to being fully alive, a way to be fully human, an awareness that love, freedom, and justice are the universal desires of every human being.

It is a commitment to look at our world and at our lives and to strive to tell nothing but the truth.”
― Greg Garrett, Achille Talon - Intégrales - Tome 1 - Mon Oeuvre à moi - tome 1

“don’t rely on death to be the climax of your stories. Dying isn’t interesting. It’s what we do while we’re dying that matters.”
― Greg Garrett, No Idea: Entrusting Your Journey to a God Who Knows

“Baldwin was clear that the moral damage done to white people by racism was so killing, that white people experienced daily damage from oppressing just as—in a more direct way—Black people took daily damage from being oppressed.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“Race, the treatment and attitudes of people of color, and this nation's past, present, and future are, Baldwin said, interlinked. The issue of racism and the experiment we call America cannot be understood apart from each other, and America will rise or fall based on how it ultimately deals—or does not deal—with those interrelated issues.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity

“Ultimately he could not be part of an American Christianity that elevated white heterosexual men, while women, people of color, Indigenous people, and LGBTQ people were left to fight for scraps and to suffer deprivation and degradation.”
― Greg Garrett, The Gospel according to James Baldwin:What America’s Great Prophet Can Teach Us about Life, Love, and Identity