More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 14 - September 1, 2024
Whatever sense we make of this world, whatever value we place upon our lives and relationships, whatever meaning we ultimately give to our joys and agonies, must necessarily be a gesture of faith. Whether we consider the whole a product of impersonal cosmic forces, a malevolent deity, or a benevolent god, depends not on the evidence, but on what we choose, deliberately and consciously, to conclude from that evidence.
believe it to be the same with religious belief. . . . If we decide to leave the [questions] unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril.”
The call to faith is a summons to engage the heart, to attune it to resonate in sympathy with principles and values and ideals that we devoutly
hope are true and which we have reasonable but not certain grounds for believing to be true. There must be grounds for doubt as well as belief, in order to render the choice more truly a choice, and therefore the more deliberate, and laden with personal vulnerability and investment.
An overwhelming preponderance of evidence on either side would make our choice as meaningless as would a l...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
What we choose to embrace, to be responsive to, is the purest reflection of who we are and what we love. That is why faith, the
choice to believe, is, in the final analysis, an action that is positively laden with moral significance.
The call to faith, in this light, is not some test of a coy god, waiting to see if we “get it right.” It is the only summons, issued under the only conditions, which can allow us fully to reveal who we are, what we most love, and what we most devoutly desire. Without constraint, without any form of mental compulsion, the act of belief becomes the freest possible projection of what resides in our hearts.
The greatest act of self-revelation occurs when we choose what we will believe, in that space of freedom that exists between knowing that a thing is, and knowing that a thing is not.
If we linger in indecision, as does Buridan’s beast, we will not perish. We will simply miss an opportunity to act decisively in the absence of certainty, and show that our fear of error is greater than our love of truth.
life is not a lottery in which only the fortunate few born at the right time and place receive a winning ticket. God’s plan is wise enough, His love generous enough, that none will be left out.
God is a personal entity, having a heart that beats in sympathy with human hearts, feeling our joy and sorrowing over our pain.
Belief is fluid. So is doubt.
Evidence does not construct itself into meaningful patterns. That is our work to perform.
What this means is that in today’s environment, belief in God is an option one chooses among many options.
Perhaps because the idea of God is a more reasonable hypothesis than the endless stream of coincidences essential to our origin and existence here on earth: a planet precisely the right distance from the sun, so as to warm but not burn us; a rare, elliptical orbit, combined with just enough tilt to the axis, to give us endurable seasonal change; a nearby moon, of the perfect gravitational size to stabilize our rotation and provide the tides so essential to life’s rise; life-sustaining water, that violates the rule (true of other non-metallic substances) whereby it should contract when frozen,
...more
our minds are driven to answer questions that far transcend the bounds of our own lives. The human mind itself is far more powerful and capacious than any instrument necessary for mere self-preservation or the construction of huts or skyscrapers.
The best sense we can make out of this riddle is that there is an independent, existing principle of intelligence within us.
We believe this intelligence is impelled by an eternal identity and potential to move
toward greater understanding of a far larger domain than the place and time of our birth. This is more than an intellectual puzzle to us; we find ourselves in a world where we sense we are more than casual visitors or drive-through patrons. We have a home, an origin, a purpose in mortality, and a future in the cosmos, bound to larger realities than merely natural p...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.”
We cannot prove God exists, and certainly cannot prove that any god who exists is kind and merciful rather than cruel or indifferent. But we can say that only the first type of god is one we would want to worship. We reject out of hand any suggestion that mere cosmic authorship or raw power should itself call forth our loyalty or devotion.
shouldest set thine heart upon him?” The astonishing revelation here is that God does set His heart upon us. And in so doing, God chooses to love us. And if love means responsibility, sacrifice, vulnerability, then God’s decision to love us is the most stupendously sublime moment in the history
of time. He chooses to love even at, necessarily at, the price of vulnerability.
His freely made choice to inaugurate and sustain costly loving relationships is the very core of His divine identity.
It is not their wickedness, but their “misery,” not their disobedience, but their “suffering,” that elicits the God of Heaven’s tears.
which He placed His heart upon them. There could be nothing in this universe, or in any possible universe, more perfectly good, absolutely beautiful, worthy of adoration, and deserving of emulation, than this God of love and kindness and vulnerability.
The paradox of Christ’s saving sway is that it operates on the basis of what the world would call weakness. Christ aimed to “draw all men unto” Himself by His ignominious crucifixion, not His triumphant resurrection. We are drawn to the suffering Christ, not the victorious Christ. As the Christian martyr to Nazism Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a friend, “The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help. . . . The God of the Bible . . . wins power and space in the world by his weakness.”
The shadow of the cross is long enough to heal the past and anticipate the future,
We may inhabit realms as different as those of fish and fowl; we may swim while He soars, and breathe a different air. But when God speaks from heaven, or His angels minister, a wing breaks the water and heaven and the sea touch. We share the same universe, the same existence that continues through time. God’s love, His vulnerability, are a permanent condition of who He is. For God the Father, as for the Son, whatever power or influence He wields over the hearts of men, it is not the power or influence known to the world. Neither here nor hereafter will God exert “control or dominion or
...more
As surely as the dark gives meaning to the dawn, so does pain give meaning to pleasure, and sorrow to joy.
All that we love, all that we strive for, all that we relish, we know only by contrast.
All that exists in our world of meaning must exist in paired opposition.
“God’s power rests not on totalizing omnipotence, but on His ability to alchemize suffering, tragedy, and loss into wisdom, understanding, and joy.”
“He doeth not anything save it be for the benefit of the world; for he loveth the world.”
The motif of a joy so abundant it required the creation of a world to accommodate it is manifest in the same overabundance that fills all creation.
God is a God of superabundance,
If we are made in God’s image, we can see His joyful nature reflected in the arsenal of access He gave us, to a variegated world of color and sound and texture and taste and smell.
What greater motivation could there be for us to seek out and secure our own, our friends’, our families’ happiness, than to know it adds to His. Truly, God has
made us His central concern, and as long as humans live—He will share in all our sorrows. But He also shares in all our triumphs and joys. For He has set His heart upon us.
It is our own identity that we must struggle to discern, before we can rightly perceive our place in the cosmos and our relation to the Divine.
“Do you not think I strive—to know myself?” And like him, we find ourselves, “straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness.” Straining because we never feel completely at home in this world and because we sense we carry within us clues to our origins.
We can only seek what we have known, and knowledge of God, then, must be memory of God.
In turning to God, therefore, we are not converting—but reverting—to a holy model, “speed[ing] back to the eternal light, children to the Father.”
We bring the grammar of sacred things with us.
sound. If it is, then that very fact may imply that my birth and my beginning are two different things..
“The iron atoms in our blood carrying oxygen at this moment to our cells came largely from exploding
white dwarf stars, while the oxygen itself came mainly from exploding supernovas . . . and most of the carbon . . . came from planetary nebulas, the death clouds of middle-size stars..
Surprisingly, a poet and churchman writing over three centuries ago recognized this same fact. Before it acquired its present form, he wrote, the stuff of which the body is made was “in places unimaginably distant,” and has traveled “through the triangular passages of as many Vortices as we see Stars in a clear frosty night, and has shone once as bright as the Sun . . . insomuch that we eat, and drink, and cloath our selves with that which was once pure Light and Flame.” One could hardly accord our paltry mortal shell a greater...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
by guilt we mean the inward call to be truer to our better selves.
