Ella McKinlay

“The first thing that we realize from the Psalms is that in prayer anything goes. Virtually everything human is appropriate as material for prayer: reflections and observations, fear and anger, guilt and sin, questions and doubts, needs and desires, praise and gratitude, suffering and death. Nothing human is excluded. The Psalms are an extended refutation that prayer is being ‘nice’ before God. Not at all–it is an offering of ourselves, just as we are.

(Eat This Book)”
― Eugene Peterson

“Spirituality means, among other things, taking ourselves seriously. It means going against the cultural stream in which we are incessantly trivialized to the menial status of producers, and performers, constantly depersonalized behind the labels of our degrees or our salaries. But there is far more to us than our usefulness and our reputation, where we’ve been and who we know; there is the unique, irreproducible, eternal, image-of-God me. A vigorous assertion of personal dignity is foundation to spirituality.

(Eat This Book)”
― Eugene Peterson

“The saint isn’t someone who makes us think, ‘That looks hard; that’s a heroic achievement of will’ - with the inevitable accompanying thought, ‘That’s too hard for me’ - but someone who makes us think, ‘How astonishing! Human lives can be like that, behaviour like that can look quite natural’ - with perhaps the thought, ‘How can I find what they have?’

(Silence and Honeycakes)”
― Rowan Williams

“It is difficult to recapture… the incongruity of a person self-designated as Son of Man, hanging pierced and bleeding on a cross. The incongruity is … even more offensive when this Son of Man has dinner with a prostitute, stops off for lunch with a tax collector, wastes time blessing children when there were Roman legions to be chased from the land, heals unimportant losers and ignores high achieving Pharisees and influential Sadducees. Jesus juxtaposed the most glorious title available to him [the Son of Man] with the most menial of lifestyles in the culture. He talked like a King and acted like a slave…

He was, in fact, Son of Man ‘given dominion and glory and kingdom’, he was, in fact, completely at home in the ordinary, the everyday, the common. He did not give an inch in either direction: he was very God, very man.

(Reversed Thunder)”
― Eugene Peterson