More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 3 - February 9, 2023
God is infinite and thus, by definition, unimaginable and impossible to conceptualize.
Hope is based upon God’s promise and God’s power.
God defends himself only by his patience and his beauty!
God is never silent because beauty, innocence, helplessness, and truth are never silent.
The God whom Jesus reveals is devoid of all violence and asks that we no longer do violence in God’s name.
There have been countless times we’ve turned away from an invitation. But that’s the beauty and wonder of God’s richness. God is not a petty creator, and creation is not a cheap machine with barely enough energy and resources to keep it going.
God is the unconditional love and forgiveness that Jesus reveals, but God is also the energy that lies at the base of everything that is.
Jesus promises us that if we take up his cross, God will reward us with an exuberance that no one can ever take from us.
The challenge of our lives is to live inside that energy in a way that honors it and its origins.
we agree to organize public life on the principle of rational consensus rather than divine authority (allowing, of course, for divine authority to influence rational consensus).
example, look at a highly secularized culture like that of the Netherlands: It is very weak in church attendance and explicit Christian practice. Abortion, drugs, prostitution, and pornography are tolerated and legal. But it takes care of its poor better than any other society in the world, and is recognized for its emphasis on generosity, peace, and the equality of women. These are not minor religious and moral achievements.
It is only when we realize that we are not in control and that our lives and our safety are in the hands of a great and loving power beyond us that we will bend our knees in gratitude and trust, both when we are joyous and when we are afraid.
Jesus tells her that she need not necessarily worship at either of those sites. Rather, the real temple, the real sacred place, the real privileged place where a ladder runs between heaven and earth, upon which angels ascend and descend, is inside her.
The real church is not always a building or a holy site, but a place of conscience and spirit inside a person, accessible to them without their having to travel to the Holy Land, Rome, London, Salt Lake City, Mecca, Lourdes, or the neighborhood church.
When we are grateful we more easily find the strength to forgive.
Moreover, just as gratitude undergirds genuine virtue, forgiveness undergirds genuine religion and morality.
Moreover, all of us have been wounded. No one comes to adulthood with his or her heart fully intact.
Metanoia invites us to move above our normal instincts, into a bigger mind, into a mind that rises above the proclivity for self-interest and self-protection that so frequently triggers feelings of bitterness, negativity, and lack of empathy inside us. Metanoia invites us to meet all situations, however unfair they may seem, with understanding and an empathic heart. Moreover, metanoia stands in contrast to paranoia. In essence, metanoia is “nonparanoia,” so Jesus’s opening words in the Synoptic Gospels might be better rendered: “Be unparanoid and believe that it is good news. Live in trust!”
The same holds true for everyone: we should never vent our frustrations on the very people for whom we are trying to carry tension.
Like Stephen, they sustained their love and faith amid bitter jealousy and hatred by staying connected to something outside the fiery forces that were consuming everyone else.
First, we can learn to forgive life a little more for its frustrations and we can learn to give ourselves permission to be more patient with life and with ourselves.
No one is born except into a mother’s arms. That’s an image we need to keep before us in order to imagine death in a healthier way.
More than any ideology in the world, they can provide us with the road maps, the GPS, the vision, and the hope we need for our journey.
