Sarah Clarkson > Quotes

“Make no mistake, redemption is local. Our ordinary is where the kingdom of heaven comes.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“What we need is the healed capacity to imagine and believe the profound goodness of the future, to stand in the light of a happy ending whose power reaches into our present and draws us forward in hope.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“I saw a star and its light was like something woven of hope and music, and the shimmer of it was a voice crying out to my spirit to keep hold, to take joy, and for a moment the whole of my suffering seemed unmade. The darkness became the false thing and the joy of that light, it was the truest thing I had ever known.

How can we believe what beauty speaks to us in the darkness of mental illness and cancer and abuse and death?

Because beauty calls to us with the voice of God.

We are answered not with argument or angry demands for obedience but with the presence of Immanuel, God here with us in the shadows. What beauty reveals is the intimacy of the divine in our grief. God gives us beauty, not as his argument but as his offering - a gift that immersed us in something that allows us to touch hope, to taste healing, to tangibly encounter something opposite to disintegration and destruction. Where suffering has made God abstract and distant to us, where brokenness leaves us with unanswerable questions, beauty allows us to taste and see God’s presence as he breaks into the circles of our inmost grief to remake the broken world.

Beauty offers us a theodicy of encounter.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“Stories shape our existence because we recognize in a deep part of ourselves that life itself is a story. The tale of the world opens with a sort of divine "once upon a time" or "in the beginning... The gospel itself comes to us in narrative form and one of its great tenets is that we have the chance to join the story of the Kingdom come in this world, to be agents in the ongoing story of redemption, what Rowan William call the "freedom of a sort of authorship.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Book Girl: A Journey through the Treasures and Transforming Power of a Reading Life

“..I didn't yet understand that I could trust what a fallen leaf or an autumn feast, a lilting song or the coming of spring was speaking to me as true. I didn't see that these small glories had been offered to me as communion with my Maker.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“The real risk to faith is not to wrestle...”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“God’s goodness comes to us amidst the battle and dust of our own suffering, our own long defeat. God always arrives with healing. But he is humble and meek, a king who comes in through the back door of our hearts not to conquer and raze our imperfections away but to hold and heal us by the intimacy of his touch, his presence here with us in the inmost rooms of our suffering. The power of God is radically gentle, never rough with our needs or careless with our yearning. God is fixed upon the restoration of our whole selves and souls, not just the bits that everyone else can see. Yet the very tenderness of his power is something we sometimes treat as his weakness or cruelty because we crave a more visible result.

The healing kind of power is not the sort we’ve been taught to respect by existence in a fallen world where power just means brute force. We want the swift and the visible: illness zapped away, money in our hands, brilliant doctors, prosperous lives, and conversion stories by the thousands. We crave visibility and approbation and health and big crowds that make us feel important enough to forget the frail selves we used to be. When we pray for God to come in power to save us, we often picture a scenario in which God invades our lives as the ultimate mighty man to banish our frailty and make us something entirely other than we are, capable of the will and force whose lack we so deeply feel.

But God cradles and cherishes our frailty, and that is where the true power of his love is known. I always think it intriguing that in the Gospels Jesus seems far less interested in the faith and hope at work in broken people than merely the healing of their bodies. For I think God knows there is no real healing until our hearts are healed of their fear, our minds cleansed of doubt. Broken bodies, shattered hopes, suffering minds, terrible pasts - they leave us deathly ill with the twisted belief that love can never be great enough to encompass the whole of the story. We feel that we must subtract or conceal part of ourselves if we are ever to win the love of other people or God himself. We are diminished in our own eyes by our suffering, taught to despair of our dreams, to give up our hope that God will come with goodness in his hands.

So God creeps in, gentle, and we know his touch because we are not discarded or dismissed, but healed. He comes to unravel our self-doubt, to untangle the evil we have believed, to call us back from the dark lands of our insecurity. He calls us by name and wakes us from sleep so that we rise to ask what this kind and precious King commands, and so often his command is simply to open our hands so that they may be filled with his goodness. For when God arrives as the healer, we learn anew that the anguished hopes we carry are held within God’s hand like the hazelnut of Mother Julian’s vision. The story he weaves for us may look radically different from what we thought we desired, but when it arrives, we will recognize it as the intimate gift of a love whose will for us is always so much greater than our own.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“We were not created for disaster nor formed for destruction, and to lament our pain is to honor the beauty God intended and yearn toward its restoration.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“Our humblest moments are the spaces in which God's reign returns to earth, and I believe that the beauty we claim and create in response to that in-breaking life can be a radical defiance of evil. We are called to courageous creation, for the making of beauty is our gentle and holy defiance of the forces of disintegration and the powers of darkness.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“God doesn’t offer explanation; but oh, he offers his own heartbreakingly beautiful self. God breaks into Job’s darkness by actually allowing himself to be summoned by Job’s cries for justice.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“We are asked to shape our lives, our time, our attention by habits and rhythms radically different from the windblown fury of the broken world. This means an entirely alternate shape of life, not just the subtraction of screens and distractions but the embrace of prayer, of daily wonder, of listening, of trust, of celebration that roots us moment by moment in that deep, watchful quiet that ushers us into the presence of God.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“The only possible defence for God against the charge of making a world riddled with suffering and violence is that He didn't,’ writes my Oxford tutor, Michael Lloyd.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“We live in an age that further drains and complicates our relationship with time by making our lives a ceaseless round of unbounded activity. In the modern world, we are increasingly less cognizant of the ancient rhythms of day and night, star and season, and less aware of the way those cadences influence our bodies and minds and allow us the boundaries of rest we need for healing. Electricity means we can banish the shadows and extend our days almost indefinitely. Insulated as we are by technologies of all sorts, caught up in the world of our screens, we are no longer as aware of cold and heat, summer and winter as a repeating symphony that reflects the real seasons of our own bodies and souls.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“He allows Job to question and grieve, to yearn and weep. But what he offers Job is not an explanation but an encounter. For Job is summoned to behold God’s goodness in the staggering pageant of creation, one so mighty in its loveliness that at its end, Job considers himself answered.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“Redemption was a word I couldn’t quite comprehend at that point. Having heard it all my life, I associated it with what happened to sin-blackened hearts, but I wasn’t sure what it meant for good little God-fighting girls like me. I hadn’t yet understood it as the goodness of God invading my most intimate moments of depression, taking the shards of my broken self and setting about the work of new and mended creation. I still thought redemption was one big event that God did, not the whole of my daily story transformed by his generous life. But one thing I knew. I could not find it unless I took God’s hands in mine once more.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“We are called to be a listening people. How can we be otherwise? In the beginning, before the tumult and song of history, before the spattered centuries of grieved desire and pain, before all the cries for love and justice unsettled the air and the world tumbled and twisted in a cacophony of anguished, ecstatic words, there was one radiant Word so beautiful it shattered the ancient and unformed darkness. This Word of God named and narrated us alive, spoke our battered, beautiful cosmos into being, and when it began it was wholly good.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“...what I mean by quiet: an openness to the presence of God at play in creation, at work in our hearts, directing our ways and drawing us into his story.”
― Sarah Clarkson

“What if I couldn't do anything I wanted? What if love for my child, health for my body, or care for my neighbor meant a boundary to what I could desire? Would that mean a Nietzschean descent into the despair of a self unrealized, or was there a different way to understand the significance of a life poured out in small, generous, faithful acts?”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“Whatever power I possessed was yielded to this child, willingly. With a whole of my being, I served her. The full possession of myself – my body, my time, my creativity, my hopes for the future – were things I did not think twice about offering to my child, and this was no means of manipulation. This was gift. Self poured out for the other. This was limit. I could not be any other. And it was one of the best things I had ever experienced.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“The food we eat, our use of the world, the justice we bring, the art we make, these are the spaces in which the potency of God's grace shows plainly in the lives of those who love him.”
― Sarah Clarkson

“We are called to faithfulness, to lives whose soil becomes the place where the stories of others are rooted. We are members one of another, and the way we deal with our sorrow and claim our hope will become the soil for the stories of our children and our spouses, our neighbors and our friends.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“Next to Scripture and the influence of my parents, great books have formed my worldview, developed my moral imagination and shaped my idea of virtue.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Book Girl: A Journey through the Treasures and Transforming Power of a Reading Life

“And the story they tell us is of a world so evil, so shattered and grieved that we wonder how goodness could ever have been. In the shadow sight it sets upon us, we think of things like beauty or hope, story or song as frivolities that only distract us from the single, great reality of our grief.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“draw us to the hearthside of your presence. Send silence to halt our frenzied ways and quiet to lead us homeward to where your love has laid a feast. Help us to recall the grace in which we already stand, the love that need never be asked for because it is already given, the home that has already been made in our hearts by your Spirit and waits for our weary arrival.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“A book girl is STORYFORMED, shaped in her very concept of self by the characters the has encountered on the written page, by the narratives that teach her what it means to be a woman. A book girl is one who has looked through imagined eyes vastly differences from her own so that her view of the world is broad and bright with countless varied perspectives. But a savvy book girl also knows that she who walks with the wise becomes wise, and the view points she inhabits imagination will shape the woman she becomes.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Book Girl: A Journey through the Treasures and Transforming Power of a Reading Life

“...and I am convinced that great children's books, in their clarity language, in the disciplined simplicity of their themes, bear as much insight into the workings of the human heart and its desires as the great adult classics. But they manage to do all that while being accessible to a a child's wonder and innocence.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Book Girl: A Journey through the Treasures and Transforming Power of a Reading Life

“One boy lost his battle there in the forest, but the other took up the fight in his honor, and, in the fierce pain of that memorial, I glimpsed the kind of beauty that is not so much the vision of something good as a defiance of the evil that is all you can see at the moment.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“A woman who reads is a woman who has been prepared to accept the truth that beauty tells, to embrace the good news that imagination brings, the promise of joy that greets us in the happy endings or poignant insights of the novels we love. She has learned to glimpse eternity as it shimmers in story or song, to receive the satisfaction of a happy ending as a promise. She has come to recognize the voice of love speaking in the language of image and imagination and to trust what it speaks as true.”
― Sarah Clarkson

“…it has been far too easy to fall into the assumption that quiet, rightly performed, guarantees serenity. As if, should we find struggle and anger and lament in our hush, we’ve done it wrong.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention

“Quiet is not an abstract thing we can pull down from the air but the formation of habit and time, a claiming of physical shapes and daily spaces. Quiet is not an idea but a form we choose and staunchly inhabit.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention