News from the Great Beyond

Not my words...

... but if I take the time to search for my own today, I'll pretty much be wrecked for the morning.

Our lives are given a certain dignity by their very evanescence.  If there were never to be an end to my quiet moments at the brook, if I could sit on the rock forever, I would not treasure these minutes so much.  If our associations with the people we love were to have no termination, we would not value them as much as we do.  Human love is an extraordinary gift, but like all flesh it is corruptible.  Death or distance separates all lovers.  My awareness of my husband is sharpened by impermanence.

Would we really value anything we could have forever and ever?

~ Madeleine L'Engle
from Glimpses of Grace: Daily Thoughts and Reflections

Relevant to the Moment

Found within a novel by Madeleine L'Engle...

The earth will never be the same again.
Rock, water, tree, iron share this grief
As distant stars participate in pain.
A candle snuffed, a falling star or leaf,
A dolphin death, O this particular loss
Is Heaven-mourned; for if no angel cried,
If this small one was tossed away as dross,
The very galaxies then would have lied.
How shall we sing our love's song now
In this strange land where all are born to die?
Each tree and leaf and star show how
The universe is part of this one cry,
That every life is noted and cherished,
And nothing loved is ever lost or perished.

Thinking of you, Paul and Jennifer...

A Quote

                                       I heard a man of brilliance

                                                    cry out

             that God has withdrawn from nations when they have turned from Him,

                                and surely we are a stiff-necked people;

                                           why should He not withdraw?

                              But

                               then

                                          I remember Jonah accusing God

of overlenience, of foolishness, mercy and compassion.

                                             We desperately

                                 need

                                        the foolishness of God. 

                                                                           -Madeleine L'engle

A Quote

Sometimes I feel as though I were born in a circus, come out of my mother's womb like a man from a cannon, pitched toward the ceiling of the tent, all the doctors and nurses clapping in delight from the grandstands, the band going great guns in trombones and drums.  I unfold and find flight hundreds of feet above the center ring, the smell of popcorn in the air, the clowns gather below amazed at my grace, and all the people chanting my name as my arms come out like wings, and I move swan-like toward the apex, where I draw my arms in, collapse my torso to my legs, roll over in perfection, then slowly give in to gravity.  My body falls back toward earth, the ground coming up quick, the center ring growing enormous beneath my falling weight.  And this is precisely when it occurs to me that there is no net.

And I wonder,What is the use of a circus? and Why should a man bother to be shot out of a cannon? and Why is the crowd's applause so fleeting? and ....Who is going to rescue me? 

 -the opening Author's Note from Searching for God Knows What  by Donald Miller

A Quote

Madeleine L'Engle 1918-2007
"Remember the cherubim from "A Wind in the Door"? How he insisted on being called a cherubim (instead of a cherub) because he was "nearly plural"? Remember all his many eyes and wings? That was L'Engle -- all eyes and wings, constantly moving. Different things to different people, at different stages of understanding. A million surfaces, all of them true." -Laurel Synder

Madeleine L'engle was truly a living mystery.   Read the context of this quote at http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/09/10/lengle/index.html

A Quote

"To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, not even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery.  It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist."  -Cardinal Suhard

A Quote

Low-sunk life imagines itself weary of life, but it is death, not life it is weary of. -George MacDonald

Worst fortune cookie fortune. EVER.

Today, Songstress and I decided to have lunch at one of the local all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets near our home (there's a bunch!).  As usual, most of the food was pretty decent, but I had no idea what lameness was lurking just beyond that helping of General Tso's Chicken.

When our fortune cookies arrived, Songstress opened hers to show me some nifty saying about how everything good in life stems from having determination, yadda yadda yadda.  I opened my cookie to find this saying staring back at me:

DO OR DO NOT.  THERE IS NO TRY.

Some of our faithful readers (hi Moms!) may recognize that quote.  For those of you who don't, read the rest of the post after the jump.

Words to Ponder

"Under the influence of modernity, the Church became obsessed by definitions and seamless doctrine. Modernity was based on a scientific and rational reasoning that everything coud be proven by human experimentation and that this exploration of the scientific field could come up with a superior world and a greatly improved human being.  In many ways, this worldview  was seen as a huge threat to the mystery of faith.  Modernism was driving out the mysteries and belief in a supernatural unseen world, one that was being replaced by a world that could be explained in clear scientific terms.  That Christianity should be taken captive by such a system of thought seems a little incongruous, but it led to a couple of centuries of clear systematic theology, apologetics and an overemphasis on the word spoken and written in the communication of the Christian truth.  Most of these things in themselves are great aids to Christianity's case in the world, but the loss of mystery, experience and any artistic representation of the Gospel was detrimental.

The Bible uses a wide array of creative ways to communicate truth:  law, history, poems, songs, literature, lament, prophesy, proverbs, dreams, angels, miracles, parables, preaching, epistles and visions. When the evangelicals of the world decided that the Word preached was God's most efficient way of communicating, they overlooked the fact that when Jesus was born, God was saying, among other things, that those ways were not sufficient and that the Word had to become flesh (John 1:1, 14).  God's Word is much more than words.  Modernity coerced Christianity into taking the flesh and making it into words again.  Art suffered.  It was not a clearly defined and conclusive  kind of rationalism.  It left feelings hanging.  Stories or songs might stress some points of theological truth and fail to cover other aspects of the Gospel.  They missed the fact that Jesus left the crucial doctrine of atonement out of the Parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32).  Jesus, in fact, was much more an artist than a preacher, preferring stories to open the truth and in sometimes oblique ways promising the disciples that those with ears to hear would hear.  It could be said that the only writer in the Scripture with any interest in theological definition is the apostle Paul, and though we thank God for him and the theological explanation of his letters, we must never lose the balance between this and art."

-- Steve Stockman, Walk On:  The Spiritual Journey of U2

A Quote

It is a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally.  It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.  It stops us from taking anything for granted. -Madeleine L'engle