Jerusalem Greer > Jerusalem's Quotes

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

“I’m just like this speed bump in the middle, slowing everyone down because I keep fucking up.”
― Eleanor Brown

“These were the kind [of letters] you save, folded into a memory box, to be opened years later with fingers against crackling age, heart pounding with the sick desire to be possessed by memory.”
― Eleanor Brown, The Weird Sisters

“The thing I love most about Advent is the heartbreak. The utter and complete heartbreak.”
― Jerusalem Jackson Greer, A Homemade Year: The Blessings of Cooking, Crafting, and Coming Together

“It is now, at Advent, that I am given the chance to suspend all expectation...and instead to revel in the mystery.”
― Jerusalem Jackson Greer, A Homemade Year: The Blessings of Cooking, Crafting, and Coming Together

“Confession: Having kids did not fix me. I was not somehow more whole, less botched-up, or more certain just because I had a kid... I was still me, with all my holes and problems and questions - only now I was also exhuasted and had a lot more laundry to do.”
― Jerusalem Jackson Greer, A Homemade Year: The Blessings of Cooking, Crafting, and Coming Together

“On Holy Saturday I do my best to live in that place, that wax-crayon place of trust and waiting. Of accepting what I cannot know. Of mourning what needs to be mourned. Of accepting what needs to be accepted. Of hoping for what seems impossible.”
― Jerusalem Jackson Greer, A Homemade Year: The Blessings of Cooking, Crafting, and Coming Together

“I want to be softened, not stiff. Pliable, not rigid. I don't want anyone to look at my life and think it is perfect or, worse, that I want them to think it is perfect. Instead, I want anything that is unapproachable or harsh in me to be scrubbed away by the salt and the sand, revealing the imperfections, the brokenness, the cracks. Not because I am proud of those parts, but because I know it is real. Like the Skin Horse or the Velveteen Rabbit, I am shabby because I live life, because I am loved, and because it is all work - living and loving and being loved, being transformed, being worn and faded”
― Jerusalem Jackson Greer, A Homemade Year: The Blessings of Cooking, Crafting, and Coming Together

“I am reminded that every day I have the chance to pick up a needle and some thread and add to the story. To stitch together something beautiful and unique, to patch a small scrap of fabric to the story, to the Story of God, that will be retold again and again for all of eternity.”
― Jerusalem Jackson Greer, A Homemade Year: The Blessings of Cooking, Crafting, and Coming Together

“Hanging laundry on a line is a very ordinary task. It is as ordinary as scraped knees and lost keys, as fixing the same simple dish for supper again, and again. Ordinary is most days, and Lord helps is if we overlook them.”
― Jerusalem Jackson Greer, A Homemade Year: The Blessings of Cooking, Crafting, and Coming Together

“You can coat that shit in sugar, but it's still shit.”
― Kyran Pittman, Planting Dandelions: Field Notes From a Semi-Domesticated Life

“You must remember, family is often born of blood, but it doesn't depend on blood. Nor is it exclusive of friendship. Family members can be your best friends, you know. And best friends, whether or not they are related to you, can be your family.”
― Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society

“The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they're organized for.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely.”
― Louisa May Alcott

“Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“The emerging woman ... will be strong-minded, strong-hearted, strong-souled, and strong-bodied...strength and beauty must go together.”
― Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl

“Keep good company, read good books, love good things and cultivate soul and body as faithfully as you can.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Rose in Bloom

“I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“God sent Jesus to join the human experience, which means to make a lot of mistakes. Jesus didn't arrive here knowing how to walk. He had fingers and toes, confusion, sexual feelings, crazy human internal processes. He had the same prejudices as the rest of his tribe: he had to learn that the Canaanite woman was a person. He had to suffer the hardships and tedium and setbacks of being a regular person. If he hadn't the incarnation would mean nothing.”
― Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith

“Let’s state it clearly: One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway.”
― Richard Rohr

“By virtue of Creation, and still more the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“Prayer is asking God to incarnate, to get dirty in your life. Yes, the eternal God scrubs floors. For sure we know he washes feet. So take Jesus at his word. Ask him. Tell him what you want. Get dirty. Write out your prayer requests; don't mindlessly drift through life on the American narcotic of busyness. If you try to seize the day, the day will eventually break you. Seize the corner of his garment and don't let go until he blesses you. He will reshape the day.”
― Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life: Connecting With God In A Distracting World

“Being and stability are regarded by our contemporaries as akin to death; they cannot live unless they act, fret, or distract themselves with this or that. Their spirit (provided we can still talk about a spirit in their case) feeds only on sensations and on dynamism, thus becoming the vehicle for the incarnation of darker forces.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“The nativity mystery “conceived from the Holy Spirit and born from the Virgin Mary”, means, that God became human, truly human out of his own grace. The miracle of the existence of Jesus , his “climbing down of God” is: Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary! Here is a human being, the Virgin Mary, and as he comes from God, Jesus comes also from this human being. Born of the Virgin Mary means a human origin for God. Jesus Christ is not only truly God, he is human like every one of us. He is human without limitation. He is not only similar to us, he is like us.”
― Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline: Essential Christian Theology from the Twentieth Century's Greatest Theologian

“For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“The body of the Word, then, being a real human body, in spite of its having been uniquely formed from a virgin, was of itself mortal and, like other bodies, liable to death. But the indwelling of the Word loosed it from this natural liability, so that corruption could not touch it. Thus is happened that two opposite marvels took place at once: the death of all was consummated in the Lord's body; yet, because the Word was in it, death and corruption were in the same act utterly abolished.”
― St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation

“We’re seeking — imperfectly at every turn, no doubt — an incarnational theology, a theology that brings radical good news of great joy for all the people, good news that God loves the world and didn’t send Jesus to condemn it but to save it, good news that God’s wrath is not merely punitive but restorative, good news that the fire of God’s holiness is not bent on eternal torment but always works to purify and refine, good news that where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.”
― Brian D McLaren