More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 28 - March 27, 2023
Contemplative life is not a solo enterprise; it is an invitation to a shared life with others.
In a commitment to stability, we withstand the disturbances and annoyances of others for the sake of union with God and union with each other.
The Cross of Christ isn’t just a bridge that gets us to God; it’s a sledgehammer that breaks down walls that separate us.
racial tensions in our country and world, the church must lead the way in proclaiming a message of hope, justice, and reconciliation.
The gospel we proclaim must be big enough to engage the realities of racial fragmentation.
“The Gospel must not only offer a personal salvation in the future life to those who believe; it must also transform all of the relationships of life here and now and thus cause the Kingdom of God to prevail in all the world.”
What this means is that God is not simply in the business of saving souls; he is in the business of creating a new family.
Dr. Cornel West said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”9
To do justice means that every person is taken seriously as a human being made in the image of God.
There can be no true reconciliation without justice. For relationships to be fully restored, things have to be made right. Justice is the presence of right verdicts and right relationships, and it’s characterized by undoing power abuses
The pursuit of justice more often is about taking up one’s cause with whoever is in power in whatever context and seeking to work collaboratively to bring about fairness, just policies, and equitable community life.
God sees all the color.
to imply that the residue of racism is nonexistent is to turn our eyes away from that which is painfully obvious to many. The
how can we make progress in the conversation on sexism if we refuse to take seriously the historical reality that brought us to this place? Likewise,
our level of offendability often reveals the level of our maturity.
While we are all called to listen to one another in the bond of peace, the ones who need to listen first and more often are those who have enjoyed the privileges of social power.
In the practice of lamenting, we pour out our souls to God and in turn receive grace and power to respond.
Psalms offer us language to access our souls for the purpose of working for a better world.
The sad truth about modern spirituality is that we often avoid feeling our own pain and in the process avoid feeling the pain of others.
To lament is not simply to cry out but also to discern God’s direction through the tears.
This can especially happen as we gather in worship with others during times of social unrest.
There are principalities and powers at work in the world; therefore, the church is in desperate need of reimagining prayer both in personal and congregational environments.
A person working for racial justice and reconciliation without a deep spirituality of prayer is missing an important part of the healing process.
Finally, reconciliation requires regular confession, repentance, and forgiveness.
Volf has said, “Forgiveness flounders because I exclude the enemy from the community of humans even as I exclude myself from the community of sinners.”15 Christians
We have confessed to being followers of Jesus without becoming truly shaped by the values he lived and died for. We have, in fact, applied our religion in ways that benefit ourselves but bring harm to millions.
God wants to form the world deeply for the work of healing, and this kind of forming requires interior examination.
To follow Jesus in this world requires us to embrace a fully human life,
Ronald Rolheiser warned, “The air we breathe today is generally not conducive to interiority and depth.”
We use God to run from God, and we use God to run from ourselves.
Sooner or later the stuff we ignore will explode when we least expect it.
Psalms reminds us and gives us permission to lay out our questions, doubts, fears, rage, unfiltered thoughts, praise, celebration, and joy to God.
The goal of self-examination is freedom—freedom from destructive thought patterns, inner messages, and the ways we wrongly perceive things.
Because God loves us unconditionally—along with our dark sides—we don’t need to dodge ourselves. In the light of this love the pain of self-knowledge can be at the same time the beginning of our healing.5
Parker Palmer described this inner life as being found in silence—as a “solitary process of reflection that helps us reclaim the ‘ground of our being’ and root ourselves in something larger and truer than our own egos.”6
When there’s no space to process our inner worlds, we find ourselves mindlessly and instinctually reacting to the world around us.
However, the degree to which we are able to hold all of ourselves together is the degree to which we live with integrity, joy, and peace.
How do we come to a place where we experience moments of breakthrough, healing, and wholeness? We put into practice self-examination. In
“emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held.”
feelings to be enlightening. She wrote, “Emotion is a more or less unconscious, but at the same time vitally important physical response to internal or external events—such things as fear of thunderstorms, rage at having been deceived, or the pleasure that results from a present we really desire. By contrast, the word ‘feeling’ designates a conscious perception of an emotion.”5
But we need our feelings to help us navigate our world as well as to discern God’s will.
1. What happened? 2. What am I feeling? 3. What is the story I’m telling myself? 4. What does the gospel say?
5. What counter-instinctual action is needed?
The world is in desperate need of people willing to examine their own selves before examining others.
In our relationships with each other, we model the community of the Trinity.”4 This longing for fellowship and belonging is stamped into the fabric of our souls.
As Dawn wrote, “I am convinced that, if the Church could provide more thorough affection and care for persons, many would be less likely to turn falsely to genital sexual expression for the social support they need.”7
Instead of the church being the community and place to help people make sense of their longings, the longings are seen as antithetical to a robust spirituality.
Throughout the centuries, the pernicious heresy of Gnosticism has reared its head, trying to convince us that our bodies, desires, and longings are not as important as our souls.
Many of us need to heed these words because we have erroneously believed that God is only pleased in the suppression of our passions.
When love and intimacy are replaced with the flippant swiping left or right on social networking sites like Tinder or with the use of pornography, we end up in a vicious cycle of want. Other people become objects for our gratification.
