The Promise of Despair Quotes

“It is when we are up against death, when we find ourselves in despair, that the God of cross is near to us. It is through suffering and despair that God is made known to us, for God is found on the cross.”
― Andrew Root, The Promise of Despair: The Way of the Cross as the Way of the Church

“when discipleship is following the crucified God, then doubt is not a roadblock but the very lifeblood of faith, for it pushes us to honestly place our doubts before God and each other. Faith is the courage to dialogue with despair while trusting in the love of God.”
― Andrew Root, The Promise of Despair: The Way of the Cross as the Way of the Church

“Up against deep hurt, loss, yearning, and brokenness we are often thrust into silent loneliness.....The church often matters to so few people because the church has not been able to face reality. It has been the place of positive denial. But the church cannot be a place of love, the Love known through the crucified God, unless it is willing to abandon its hyperpositivity, abandon its need to be safe and clean, ad instead seek to wrestle in the dirty pathos of human yearning.”
― Andrew Root, The Promise of Despair: The Way of the Cross as the Way of the Church

“The only criterion necessary to belong to the church is to know impossibility, suffering, yearning, brokenness, and failure. Only those who have had such experiences (which is everyone) are welcome. For it is only through our loss, yearning, and brokenness that the suffering God of Jesus Christ encounters us, and it is only through these experiences that we can really be in relationship with others. A church that cannot admit it is filled with those who suffer is a community that cannot share relationship with others, for relationships that are rich and transformative are relationships built through our shared loss, yearning, and brokenness, through despair.”
― Andrew Root, The Promise of Despair: The Way of the Cross as the Way of the Church

“The church can never be the community of perfect, trouble-free people; the church cannot be a club of the moral elite. If the church is a church of the cross, of the Love of Father and Son, it cannot be the community of denial in positivity. How is it that the church has gotten the reputation for being a people where you need to be perfect to be part of it? Where you have to have your crap together to belong? It is the utter opposite; only those who are willing to admit that their crap is in utter disarray (even if it looks orderly) are those who can be in, and lead, the church.”
― Andrew Root, The Promise of Despair: The Way of the Cross as the Way of the Church