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December 28, 2020 - January 24, 2021
The difficult pastoral art is to encourage people to grow in excellence and to live selflessly, at one and the same time to lose the self and find the self. It is paradoxical, but it is not impossible.
The before is the root system of the visible now. Our lives cannot be read as newspaper reports on current events; they are unabridged novels with character and plot development, each paragraph essential for mature appreciation.
If we are going to live appropriately, we must be aware that we are living in the middle of a story that was begun and will be concluded by another. And this other is God. My identity does not begin when I begin to understand myself. There is something previous to what I think about myself, and it is what God thinks of me. That means that everything I think and feel is by nature a response, and the one to whom I respond is God. I never speak the first word. I never make the first move.
What is God doing? He is saving; he is rescuing; he is blessing; he is providing; he is judging; he is healing; he is enlightening. There is a spiritual war in progress, an all-out moral battle. There is evil and cruelty, unhappiness and illness. There is superstition and ignorance, brutality and pain. God is in continuous and energetic battle against all of it. God is for life and against death. God is for love and against hate. God is for hope and against despair. God is for heaven and against hell. There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square foot of space is contested.
God created it. God sustains it. Giving is the style of the universe. Giving is woven into the fabric of existence. If we try to live by getting instead of giving, we are going against the grain. It is like trying to go against the law of gravity—the consequence is bruises and broken bones.
Birds have feet and can walk. Birds have talons and can grasp a branch securely. They can walk; they can cling. But flying is their characteristic action, and not until they fly are they living at their best, gracefully and beautifully. Giving is what we do best. It is the air into which we were born. It is the action that was designed into us before our birth. Giving is the way the world is. God gives himself. He also gives away everything
A prophet is obsessed with God, and a prophet is immersed in the now.
The work of the prophet is to call people to live well, to live rightly—to be human.
But it is more than a call to say something, it is a call to live out the message. The prophet must be what he or she says. The person as well as the message of the prophet challenges us to live up to our creation, to live into our salvation—to become all that we are designed to be.
A prophet lets people know who God is and what he is like, what he says and what he is doing. A prophet wakes us up from our sleepy complacency so that we see the great and stunning drama that is our existence, and then pushes us onto the stage playing our parts whether we think we are ready or not. A prophet angers us by rejecting our euphemisms and ripping off our disguises, then dragging our heartless attitudes and selfish motives out into the open where everyone sees them for what they are. A prophet makes everything and everyone seem significant and important—important because God made
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A prophet makes it difficult to continue with a sloppy or selfish life.
But a ruthless honesty will always leave us shattered by our inadequacy.
If we are not a little bit scared, we simply don’t know what is going on. If we are pleased with ourselves, we either don’t have very high standards or have amnesia in regard to the central reality, for “nobody’s getting by with anything, believe me” (Heb 10:31). Pascal said, “Fear not, provided you fear; but if you fear not, then fear.”
There is an enormous gap between what we think we can do and what God calls us to do.
The great masters of the imagination do not make things up out of thin air; they direct our attention to what is right before our eyes. They then train us to see it whole—not in fragments but in context, with all the connections. They connect the visible and the invisible, the this with the that. They assist us in seeing what is around us all the time but which we regularly overlook. With their help we see it not as commonplace but as awesome, not as banal but as wondrous. For this reason the imagination is one of the essential ministries in nurturing the life of faith. For faith is not a leap
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But the invention of pottery made it possible to store and carry. Then it was possible to stay in a place for a while because grain could be stored for next winter’s meal and water carried. Then cooking could be done and merchandise transported. The invention of pottery signaled a revolution and the revolution was what we call civilization—the Neolithic Age.
Try to imagine how life would change if we had no containers in which to store anything: no pots and pans, no bowls and dishes, no buckets and jugs, no cans and barrels, no cardboard boxes and brown paper bags, no grain silos and no oil storage tanks. Life would be reduced to what we could manage in a single day with what we could hold in our hands at one time. Pottery made it possible for communities to develop. Life was extended beyond the immediate, beyond the urgent.
I had supposed that I was there to be a pastor: to proclaim and interpret Scripture, to guide people into a life of prayer, to encourage faith, to represent the mercy and forgiveness of Christ at special times of need, to train people to live as disciples in their families, in their communities and in their work.
The task of a prophet is not to smooth things over but to make things right.
The function of religion is not to make people feel good but to make them good.
God does not want tame pets to fondle and feed; he wants mature, free people who will respond to him in authentic individuality.
And peace? Yes, God gives peace. But it is not a peace that gets along with everyone by avoiding the hint of anything unpleasant. It is not a peace achieved by refusing to talk about painful subjects or touch sore spots. It is a peace that is hard won by learning to pray. There is evil to combat, apathy to defeat, dullness to challenge, ambition to confront.
There are persons all around us, children and parents, youth and adults, who are being trampled and violated, who are being hurt and despised. Any preaching of peace that turns its back on these is a cruel farce.
What is wrong is to evaluate the worth of words and deeds by their popularity. What is scandalous is to approve only what is applauded. What is disastrous is to assume that only the celebrated is genuine.
We must learn to live by the truth, not by our feelings, not by the world’s opinion, not by what the latest statistical survey tells us is the accepted morality, not by what the advertisers tell us is the most gratifying lifestyle. We are trained in the biblical faith to take lightly what the experts say, the scholars say, the pollsters say, the politicians say, the pastors say. We are trained to listen to the Word of God, to test everything against what God reveals to us in Christ, to discover all meaning and worth by examining life in relation to God’s will.
Truth is inward: we must experience within ourselves that which we profess. Truth is social: we must share with others what we profess.
The first requirement in a personal relationship is to be ourselves.
What we do in secret determines the soundness of who we are in public. Prayer is the secret work that develops a life that is thoroughly authentic and deeply human.
The mark of a certain kind of genius is the ability and energy to keep returning to the same task relentlessly, imaginatively, curiously, for a lifetime.
Some people may wonder: why was the light of God given in the form of language? How is it conceivable that the divine should be contained in such brittle vessels as consonants and vowels?
Commands assume freedom and encourage response. Addressed by commands we are trained in response-ability.
He reveals in a form that is accessible to us: get a scroll—the word is to be written on everyday material, parchment or papyrus, the same kind of material we use for sending thank-you notes and making up shopping lists. Then the process is outlined: write develops into hear which develops into turn which develops into forgive.
Amnesia is replaced by recognition. Distraction is gathered into attention. Jeremiah dictates. Baruch writes. The syntax gives shape and the metaphors give focus to God’s word.
CROWDS LIE. THE MORE PEOPLE, the less truth.
Approval by the masses is accreditation. But a rudimentary knowledge of history corroborated by a few moments of personal reflection will convince us that truth is not statistical and that crowds are more often foolish than wise. In crowds the truth is flattened to fit a slogan. Not only the truth that is spoken but the truth that is lived is reduced and distorted by the crowd.
Every time we reject the habits of the crowd and practice the disciplines of faith, we become a little more alive.
The essential meaning of exile is that we are where we don’t want to be.
The aim of the person of faith is not to be as comfortable as possible but to live as deeply and thoroughly as possible—to deal with the reality of life, discover truth, create beauty, act out love.
Will I focus my attention on what is wrong with the world and feel sorry for myself? Or will I focus my energies on how I can live at my best in this place I find myself? It is always easier to complain about problems than to engage in careers of virtue.
Exile reveals what really matters and frees us to pursue what really matters, which is to seek the Lord with all our hearts.
I must register a certain impatience with the faddish equation, never suggested by me, of the term identity with the question, “Who am I?” This question nobody would ask himself except in a more or less transient morbid state, in a creative self-confrontation, or in an adolescent state sometimes combining both; wherefore on occasion I find myself asking a student who claims that he is in an “identity crisis” whether he is complaining or boasting. The pertinent question, if it can be put into the first person at all, would be, “What do I want to make of myself, and what do I have to work with?”
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Patriotism was used to muddle the sense of morality: “Our beloved country is being attacked and we must be loyal to it; in times of crisis it is not right to criticize your leaders. It is disloyal, an act of treachery.”
The simple fact that he had friends says something essential about Jeremiah: he needed friends. He was well developed in his interior life. It was impossible to deter him from his course by enmity or by flattery. He was habituated to solitude. But he needed friends. No one who is whole is self-sufficient. The whole life, the complete life, cannot be lived with haughty independence. Our goal cannot be to not need anyone. One of the evidences of Jeremiah’s wholeness was his capacity to receive friendship, to let others help him, to be accessible to mercy. It is easier to extend friendship to
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All acts of hope expose themselves to ridicule because they seem impractical, failing to conform to visible reality. But in fact they are the reality that is being constructed but is not yet visible. Hope commits us to actions that connect with God’s promises.
The way the message was delivered was as important as that it was delivered.
We cannot be whole human beings if we cut ourselves off from the environment which God created and in which he is working.
