More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 1, 2014 - October 1, 2017
In The Cost of Discipleship Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes it clear that grace is free, but it is not cheap. The grace of God is unearned and unearnable, but if we ever expect to grow in grace, we must pay the price of a consciously chosen course of action which involves both individual and group life.
Grace is free, but not cheap:
The first pitfall is the temptation to turn the Disciplines into law.
The second pitfall is the failure to understand the social implications of the Disciplines.
A third pitfall is to view the Disciplines as virtuous in themselves. In and of themselves the Disciplines have no virtue, possess no righteousness, contain no rectitude. It was this important truth that the Pharisees failed to see. The Disciplines place us before God; they do not give us Brownie points with God. A fourth and similar pitfall is to centre on the Disciplines rather than on Christ.
A fifth pitfall is the tendency to isolate and elevate one Discipline to the exclusion or neglect of the others.
The sixth pitfall is to think that the twelve Disciplines mentioned in Celebration somehow exhaust the means of God’s grace.
The seventh pitfall is the most dangerous. It is the temptation to study the Disciplines without experiencing them.
Repentance and obedience are essential features in any biblical understanding of meditation. The psalmist exclaims, ‘Oh, how I love thy law! It is my meditation all the day . . . I hold my feet from every evil way, in order to keep thy word. I do not turn aside from thy ordinances, for thou hast taught me’ (Ps. 119:97, 101, 102).
Once they learned a little about God, they realised that being in his presence was risky business and told Moses so: ‘You speak to us, and we will hear; but let not God speak to us, lest we die’ (Exod. 20:19). In this way they could maintain religious respectability without the attendant risks.
When Jesus told his disciples to abide in him, they could understand what he meant for he was abiding in the Father. He declared that he was the good Shepherd and that his sheep know his voice (John 10:4).
The wonderful verse ‘I stand at the door and knock . . .’ was originally penned for believers, not unbelievers (Rev. 3:20). We who have turned our lives over to Christ need to know how very much he longs to eat with us, to commune with us. He desires a perpetual Eucharistic feast in the inner sanctuary of the heart.
Eastern meditation is an attempt to empty the mind; Christian meditation is an attempt to fill the mind.
Thomas Merton writes, ‘Meditation has no point and no reality unless it is firmly rooted in life.
you feel that we live in a purely physical universe, you will view meditation as a good way to obtain a consistent alpha brainwave pattern. But if you believe that we live in a universe created by the infinite-personal God who delights in our communion with him, you will see meditation as communication between the Lover and the one beloved.
Let me suggest we take an experiential attitude towards spiritual realities. Like any other scientific endeavour, we form a hypothesis and experiment with it to see if it is true or not. If our first experiment fails, we do not despair or label the whole business fraudulent. We re-examine our procedure, perhaps adjust our hypothesis, and try again. We should at least have the honesty to persevere in this work to the same degree we would in any field of science. The fact that so many are unwilling to do so betrays not their intelligence but their prejudice.
The history of religion is the story of an almost desperate scramble to have a king, a mediator, a priest, a pastor, a go-between.
everyone. All who acknowledge
are the universal priesthood of God and as such can enter the Holy of Holies and converse with the living God.
Albert the Great says, ‘The contemplation of the saints is fired by the love of the one contemplated: that is, God.
