Luke Hartsock > Luke's Quotes

“No child can avoid emotional pain while growing up, and likewise emotional toxicity seems to be a normal by-product of organizational life—people are fired, unfair policies come from headquarters, frustrated employees turn in anger on others. The causes are legion: abusive bosses or unpleasant coworkers, frustrating procedures, chaotic change. Reactions range from anguish and rage, to lost confidence or hopelessness. Perhaps luckily, we do not have to depend only on the boss. Colleagues, a work team, friends at work, and even the organization itself can create the sense of having a secure base. Everyone in a given workplace contributes to the emotional stew, the sum total of the moods that emerge as they interact through the workday. No matter what our designated role may be, how we do our work, interact, and make each other feel adds to the overall emotional tone. Whether it’s a supervisor or fellow worker who we can turn to when upset, their mere existence has a tonic benefit. For many working people, coworkers become something like a “family,” a group in which members feel a strong emotional attachment for one another. This makes them especially loyal to each other as a team. The stronger the emotional bonds among workers, the more motivated, productive, and satisfied with their work they are. Our sense of engagement and satisfaction at work results in large part from the hundreds and hundreds of daily interactions we have while there, whether with a supervisor, colleagues, or customers. The accumulation and frequency of positive versus negative moments largely determines our satisfaction and ability to perform; small exchanges—a compliment on work well done, a word of support after a setback—add up to how we feel on the job.28”
― Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence

“Since time is no longer cyclical but one-way and irreversible, personal history is now possible and an individual life can have value.”
― Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels

“It would be a ridiculous and unwarranted presumption on our part if we imagined that we were more energetic or more intelligent than the men of the past—our material knowledge has increased, but not our intelligence.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“When they are sad and hurtful secrets, like my father’s death, we can in a way honor the hurt by letting ourselves feel it as we never let ourselves feel it before, and then, having felt it, by laying it aside; we can start to take care of ourselves the way we take care of people we love. To love our neighbors as we love ourselves means also to love ourselves as we love our neighbors. It means to treat ourselves with as much kindness and understanding as we would the person next door who is in trouble. Little by little then we begin to be able to look at each other’s faces, and at our own faces in the mirror, without the intervening shadows that unaired secrets cast.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“The reason I was so at peace in that room, I think, is that in it I remembered back before time and beyond space to the day when God in his glory made us and the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. By quieting our minds and keeping still, by praying less in words perhaps than in images, maybe most of all by just letting up on ourselves and letting go, I think we can begin to put ourselves back in touch with that glory and joy we come from and begin moving out of the shadows toward something more like light.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“the congregation just sat or stood on the sidelines watching the splendor of it but without, as far as my experience went anyway, having any very satisfactory part in it. I felt like a child with his nose pressed to a bakery shop window—impressed by what I saw but a little lonely and unnourished. The sermon, on the other hand, was one that I will long remember. It was preached by a huge monk in cloth of gold, and his point was that there are many people in this world who do not realize how impoverished they are spiritually. “Even a dog knows when it is uncomfortable” was a phrase he used, but we whose spiritual discomfort is apt to be so profound are in many cases entirely unaware of it.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“I think the very air would stop my mouth if I opened it to speak such words among just about any group of people I can think of in the East because their faith itself, if they happen to have any, is one of the secrets that they have kept so long that it might almost as well not exist. The result was that to find myself at Wheaton among people who, although they spoke about it in different words from mine and expressed it in their lives differently, not only believed in Christ and his Kingdom more or less as I did but were also not ashamed or embarrassed to say so was like finding something which, only when I tasted it, I realized I had been starving for for years.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“Regardless of how one approaches quadratos, it is not a mere re-working of the Gospel as it has been taught for many, many years. It is a genuine metamorphosis—one I believe to be entirely consistent with early Christianity’s view—but nonetheless, far different from Christian thought and interpretation of the last few centuries. However, the fourfold journey teaches us that growth often comes from necessity, and its arrival not only yields benefit, but also exacts cost, most often discomfort and adjustment, sometimes severe.”
― Alexander John Shaia, Heart and Mind: The Four-Gospel Journey for Radical Transformation

“There is no4.18-5.12 fear in love, but love that is perfect casts out fear; because fear involves punishment, but one who is afraid is not made perfect in love. We love, because he loved us first.”
― Richmond A. Lattimore, The New Testament

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, because theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are they who sorrow, because they shall be comforted. Blessed are the gentle, because they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, because they shall be fed. Blessed are they who have pity, because they shall be pitied. Blessed are the pure in heart, because they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, because they shall be called the sons of God. 5.10-22Blessed are they who are persecuted for their righteousness, because theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are you when they shall revile you and persecute you and speak every evil thing of you, lying, because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because your reward in heaven is great; for thus did they persecute the prophets before you.”
― Richmond A. Lattimore, The New Testament

“Every single pattern asks the journeyer to begin and start some form of inquiry. Next comes a time of trial, often involving pitfalls, and sometimes trickery, but always bringing new and hard-won understanding. The gift of enlarged comprehension, wholeness, and greater perspective is third, sometimes coming suddenly, often with the sense of outside assistance. The fourth step requires actual practice of the wisdom gained, with some component of bringing that knowledge back to the community or those who follow after the journeyer.”
― Alexander John Shaia, Heart and Mind: The Four-Gospel Journey for Radical Transformation

“In that sense at least the rector of Saint Barnabas, a man named Robert MacFarlane, did not strike me as evangelical at all. His sermons were not seamless and armor plated but had spaces in them, spaces of silence as if he needed those spaces to find deep within himself what he was going to say next, as if he was giving the rest of us space to think for a moment about what he had just been trying to say last. There was never any doubt in my mind but that the faith he was laying out before us was a faith that, even as he spoke it, he was drawing out of the raw stuff of his own life. He spoke very quietly, and the church he spoke in was not brilliantly lit but full of shadow, full of secrets.”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“The conclusion that the myth-makers thought in much the same way as we still think in dreams is almost self-evident. The first attempts at myth-making can, of course, be observed in children, whose games of make-believe often contain historical echoes. But one must certainly put a large question-mark after the assertion that myths spring from the “infantile” psychic life of the race. They are on the contrary the most mature product of that young humanity.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“The first stage always called for “entering”; it involved ignorance and loneliness. The second always held pitfalls or trickery. The third brought dawning understanding, even ecstasy. The fourth held the final keys to maturation, which were carried back into the community in some way.”
― Alexander John Shaia, Heart and Mind: The Four-Gospel Journey for Radical Transformation

“It consisted essentially in a dialectical gymnastics which gave the symbol of speech, the word, an absolute meaning, so that words came in the end to have a substantiality with which the ancients could invest their Logos only by attributing to it a mystical value. The great achievement of scholasticism was that it laid the foundations of a solidly built intellectual function, the sine qua non of modern science and technology.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“like the Dove, the Lamb, and the Cock adorning our church towers. Yet all this does not alter the fact that in childhood we go through a phase when archaic thinking and feeling once more rise up in us, and that all through our lives we possess, side by side with our newly acquired directed and adapted thinking, a fantasy-thinking which corresponds to the antique state of mind. Just as our bodies still retain vestiges of obsolete functions and conditions in many of their organs, so our minds, which have apparently outgrown those archaic impulses, still bear the marks of the evolutionary stages we have traversed, and re-echo the dim bygone in dreams and fantasies.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“The reactivation of original perceptions is, however, only one side of regression. The other side is regression to infantile memories, and though this might equally well be called regression to the original perceptions, it nevertheless deserves special mention because it has an importance of its own. It might even be considered as an “historical” regression. In this sense the dream can, with Freud, be described as a modified memory—modified through being projected into the present. The original scene of the memory is unable to effect its own revival, so has to be content with returning as a dream.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“The next day he went to the archbishop and told him that he was resolved to go out into the world to preach the gospel of God’s unending mercy.”
― C.G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation

“My new book on moral intelligence calls these patriarchies “cultures of obedience,” and presents an ethics of virtues as a way to avoid such moral totalism.”
― John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You

“But when the feeling of shame is violated by a coercive and perfectionistic religion and culture—especially by shame-based source figures who mediate religion and culture—it becomes an all-embracing identity. A person with internalized shame believes he is inherently flawed, inferior and defective.Such a feeling is so painful that defending scripts (or strategies) are developed to cover it up. These scripts are the roots of violence, criminality, war and all forms of addiction.”
― John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You

“our emotions are innate and that “they are only good or evil as the end to which they are used.” There is an innate and a learned component to all emotion. “Therefore,” Pocaterra writes, “there must be two shames, one natural and free from awareness and the other acquired.”
― John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You

“Darwin knew that the mother of the blush was shame. For Darwin, shame defines our essential humanity. Silvan Tomkins views shame as an innate feeling that limits our experience of interest, curiosity and pleasure.”
― John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You

“Many discussions of virtue, and many discussions of faith, begin from where we presently are, as muddled, sinful, half-believing human beings, and explore the ways in which virtue (including "faith" in some sense) can help us move forward to become the people God wants and intends us to
become. In this, as in many areas of theological exploration, I find it helpful to start instead from the far end, from the ultimate goal. I propose that we begin with the picture of what God intends us to be, and has promised that we shall be, and to work back from there to where we are. This is, I suppose, rather like the procedure adopted by some management consultants: to ask where the company ought to be twenty years from now, to imagine that we are already at that moment of presumed or anticipated success, and then to ask the question, How did we get here? What steps did we take on the way?”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“Aristotle spoke of the goal or end, the telos, of human moral behavior. We are on a journey toward that point, which he called EObaiµovia. That has normally been translated as "happiness"; but the meaning Aristotle had in mind was not the one that word often suggests in today's Western world (the feeling of contentment or pleasurable excitement) but the more organic one of becoming our full and true selves, discovering in practice the best and highest activity of which humans are capable.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“We can become, in other words, people for whom the romantic or existentialist dream might eventually begin to come at least partially true. But this is not, or not for the most part, something straightforwardly and completely given in baptism and in initial Christian faith.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“Thus, most obviously, the cardinal virtue of justice, giving to each person what is his or her due, is transformed into &y&rrq, giving to each not simply what is due but more besides, including "justice" itself (since &y&rrii will
never wrong anyone, as Paul says elsewhere 13 ), but going beyond it into generosity, giving to each in the way God gives to each, that is, lavishly and without thought for cost.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“Here "faith" and its cognates mean, more or less, faithfulness, loyalty, reliability, trustworthiness, and even, in consequence, something like our word "integrity": the quality of being so fully in tune, all through one's thinking and acting, that others know they are with someone on whom they can lean all their weight. (This is perhaps part of what Revelation means in calling Jesus the "faithful" witness.)23 More particularly, to put it anthropomorphically, someone of utter faithfulness is someone on whom God knows that he can lean all his weight.24 In this sense, of course, none of us (except Jesus himself) is fully trustworthy in the present life.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“The gospel, as Paul knew, is folly to pagans. Trusting it would appear, not as a virtue, but as a vice. "Faith" of this Pauline sort can therefore come about only in response to the grace and revelation of the God of Abraham, the God who raised Jesus from the dead.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“Such a dream would be the moral or even emotional equivalent of a poor person suddenly winning the lottery: without effort, suddenly all your problems are over! Just pray about it and there won't be any more moral battles!
But virtue is not like that, and Christian moral living is not like that either. The romantic dream of an inner transformation that will make moral effort unnecessary is untrue both to the New Testament and to worldwide and millennia-long Christian experience.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays

“And, once again, this contextualizing of Christian virtue within the redemptive eschatological framework underscores the great revolution in virtue ethics that took place from Paul onward, or as Paul would say, from the cross of Jesus Christ onward: the dethroning of pride and the enthroning of humility and gratitude.”
― J. Ross Wagner, The Word Leaps the Gap: Essays on Scripture and Theology in Honor of Richard B. Hays