Cynthia

“But which should come first, grace or responsibility? The answer is that both come first. All we can do is get out of the way and then the soul takes its natural course.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater

“I’ve squandered plenty of  ink arguing against the notion that God had to kill Jesus because we were bad. But when Caitlin said that Jesus died for our sins, including that one, I was reminded again that there is nothing we have done that God cannot redeem. Small betrayals, large infractions, minor offenses. All of  it. Some would say that instead of the cross being about Jesus standing in for us to take the really bad spanking from God for our own naughtiness (the fancy theological term for this is substitutionary atonement), what happens at the cross is a “blessed exchange.” God gathers up all our sin, all our broken-ass junk, into God’s own self and transforms all that death into life.”
― Nadia Bolz-Weber, Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People

“And then I awoke, and just as Auden did when he awoke from his dream of the croquet match, I felt that I had been vouchsafed a vision. It was a feeling of utter elation and goodwill—in other words, a feeling of agape. I felt bathed in the warm, golden glow of this feeling. Some year later my wife and I were having dinner with psychiatrist friends in an Edinburgh restaurant. The talk turned to dreams, and I recounted my dream. Unfortunately, as I did so, there was a lull in the conversation at nearby tables, with the result that others heard what I had to say. At the end there was silence. Then one of the psychiatrists said: “I know what your dream is about.” A pin could have been heard to drop. “Mrs. MacGregor is your mother.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You

“it evokes so powerfully what we all must have felt as children—the conviction that things are better elsewhere if only we could get there. The powerlessness of the child is what makes that so poignant: children are trapped in the world created for them by adults, and for most children the possibility of escape is remote. The same idea is present in the Freud poem, where he talks about the child … unlucky in his little State, some hearth where freedom is excluded, a hive whose honey is fear and worry … The sympathetic effect of these lines is immediately apparent. Yes, we all knew people like that when we were ourselves children.”
― Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You