David Titheridge

“The classroom was too tidy. I missed the texture of the weather, the smell of cooking, the jostle of shoulders and elbows on a crowded sidewalk. In the congregation, by contrast, everything was going on at once, random, unscheduled, accompanied too much of the time by undisciplined and trivializing small talk. Babies born squalling, people dying neglected, and in between the parenthesis of birth and death, lifetimes of ambiguity: adolescents making an unholy mess of growing up and their parents muddling through as guilty bystanders. Also, of course, heroic holiness, stunningly beautiful prayers, sacrificial love surfacing from the tangled emotions in a difficult family, a song in the night, glimpses of glory, the sullen betrayal of a bored spouse quietly redeemed from years of self-imprisoned self-worship by forgiveness and grace: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And all of this mixed together. In this world, sin was not a word defined in a lexicon. Salvation was not a reference traced down in a concordance. Every act of sin and every event of salvation involved a personal name in a grammar of imperatives and promises in a messy community of friends and neighbors, parents and grandparents, none of whom fit a stereotype.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir

“The theologian who has no joy in his work is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this science.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“Because he refused to take himself seriously and decided to take God seriously, Barth burdened neither himself nor those around him with the gloomy, heavy seriousness of ambition or pride or sin or self-righteousness. Instead, the lifting up of hands, the brightness of blessing.”
― Eugene H. Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

“The cellist confuses her. She doesn’t know what he hopes to achieve with his playing. He can’t believe he will stop the war. He can’t believe he will save lives. Perhaps he has gone insane,”
― Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo