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John
https://www.goodreads.com/johnmcgraw
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"The recursive intrusive thinking is enough to make the reader paranoid." — Aug 26, 2025 06:45AM
"The recursive intrusive thinking is enough to make the reader paranoid." — Aug 26, 2025 06:45AM
“I belong to a God capable of holding the ugliest parts of my anger.”
― This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
― This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“We confess that we have grown numb to the beauty of this world. We have not protected what is good and true and enchanting. We have forgotten how to marvel at the mundane with the same gravity as we would behold the mountain or valley. We have not looked up to witness the miracle of our architecture. And in our self-hatred, we have failed to delight in and honor the faces we pass each day, including our own. Forgive us our inattention, and in your mercy remind us that we are so much more than our pain. Guide our gaze toward the beautiful. Amen.”
― Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human
― Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human
“We train our focus on beauty here or there—this poem, that architecture—because it is easier than bearing witness to our own story. We begin to gravitate not toward beauty but toward illusion. In this state, you are not approaching what you seek. You are running from your own face. But this is not the way of wonder. Wonder requires a person not to forget themselves but to feel themselves so acutely that their connectedness to every created thing comes into focus. In sacred awe, we are a part of the story.”
― This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
― This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Isn't it something that in Genesis, God makes a home for things before God makes the thing? Not the fish first but the sea. Not the bird first but the sky. Not the human first but the garden. I like to think of God hunched over in the garden, fingernails hugging the brown soil, mighty hands cradling mud like it's the last flame in a windstorm. A God who says, Not out of my own womb but out of this here dust will I make you. Place has always been the thing that made us. We cannot escape being formed by it.”
― This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
― This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“I used to think that Christian contemplation was reserved for white men who leave copies of C.S. Lewis's letters strewn about and know a great deal about coffee and beard oils. If this is you, there is room for you here. But I am interested in reclaiming a contemplation that is not exclusive to whiteness, intellectualism, ableism, or mere hobby. And as a Black woman, I am disinterested in any call to spirituality that divorces my mind from my body, voice, or people. To suggest a form of faith that tells me to sit down alone and be quiet? It does not rest easy on the bones. It is a shadow of true contemplative life, and it would do violence to my Black-woman soul.”
― This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
― This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
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