John Anders > Recent Status Updates

“We think that if we don't feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.”

I will now be starting every conversation with this epigraph from the beginning of part one:

"One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask."
Thomas Merton, No Man is and Island

Something to bring back to show
you have been there: a lock of God's
hair, stolen from him while he was
asleep; a photograph of the garden
of the spirit. As has been said,
the point of travelling is not
to arrive, but to return home
laden with pollen you shall work up into the honey the mind feeds on.

Excerpt from “Something”, p. 110

I am captivated:

“Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty and all embarrassment into laughter."
—Beldon Lane

With That Moon Language

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them,
"Love me."
Of course you do not do this out loud;
Otherwise,
Someone would call the cops.
Still though, think about this,
This great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye
That is always saying
With that sweet moon
Language
What every other eye in this world
Is dying to
Hear.

-Hafez (p. 17)

“So what else is new?
I am not my own friend.
Time cuts me in two.”

― Czeslaw Milosz, Selected and Last Poems 1931-2004, p. 98

“To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.”

final stanza of “The House of Christmas”

“1. The NT encourages us to get wisdom for life from the OT...
2. However, it's not true that the NT lies hidden in the OT, and that the OT is revealed in the NT. The OT tells us how God really related to people and really spoke to them. God did so in ways that were designed for them to understand; they were not obscure...
3. The OT thus isn't a sneak preview of Jesus. Jesus isn't all God has to say.”

“Prior to the question of the kind of choices we must make is the question of the kind of person we should be. Therefore, virtue is prior to decision, character to choice.”
― Stanley Hauerwas, Christian Existence Today

“I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose and would let us understand each other without exposing the author or reader to sublime agonies.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.“

‘John Calvin famously wrote of the universal, "total" depravity of the human will. We could get a better hearing for Calvin today if we chose instead the words of Ishmael [Moby Dick] to describe the human plight "sadly in need of mending." Not just in need of forgiveness, mind you, but of mending — rectification. In no other way can God's justice be worked out on a universal plane.’
― Fleming Rutledge

“A dear friend of mine whose [art] has come to nothing (publicly, that is) writes in a letter, "I remain loyal to the irrationality of it," which makes perfect piercing sense, because what else that most matters in life do we find and keep by way of reason? Love? God?”

― Christian Wiman

“There has never been a satisfactory account of the origin of evil, and there will be none on this side of the consummation of the kingdom of God. Evil is a vast excrescence, a monstrous contradiction that cannot be explained but can only be denounced and resisted wherever it appears.”

― Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p. 419

“I'm a Christian. Which means that I have faith. Or had it once, and with such enlivening force that to deny it now would be a denial of life itself.”

― Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone, p. 92

Wiman articulating something I’ve always carried in my soul but can never quite say:


“And if you are not lonely under this dividing and indifferent blue, if you do not feel, even amid your moments of happiness, some absolute inwardness that is absolute otherness, then, friend, you are either preternaturally enlightened or completely unconscious.”

There is always the thin pane of glass set up between us
And our desires.
We stare and state and stare, until the night comes
And the glass is superfluous.

R.S. Thomas, Selected Poems, p. 16
from The Minister, 1953

“God's apocalyptic war is fought with weapons of self-giving love and total identification with those who suffer "outside the camp" (Heb. 13:13), whoever they are.”

― Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p. 275

“Their eyes, having grieved all grief, were clear.”

—Elegy, Wendell Berry

“Afluent communities need to understand that they are enslaved by the pursuit of wealth, comfort, and status, often achieved at the expense of the poor.”

― Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, p. 226

“We are on safe ground to argue that the crucifixion of Jesus was the most secular, irreligious happening ever to find its way into the arena of faith.”
― Fleming Rutledge (p. 54)

😭
“By the grace of God, however, there may be readers who think they have no faith, or have inadequate faith. The very existence of such doubts are themselves a sign of the divine action that elicits the cry, "Help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24), words to which our Lord himself responded with immediate, sovereign favor. It is such readers that I have especially in mind.”

― Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, xvii

“Following Jesus is the baptismal yes that succeeds the no. We have renounced initiative and taken up obedience. We have renounced clamoring assertions in favor of quiet listening. We watch Jesus work, we listen to Jesus speak, we accompany Jesus into new relationships, to odd places and odd people.”

“[The church’s] message has seldom (hardly ever, in fact) been embraced by the mighty and powerful. . . To suppose that if we can just "place" Christian men and women in prominent positions of leadership, we are going to improve the efficacy of the community in its worship, missions, or evangelism, has no warrant in Scripture or history.”

TRAVELING AT HOME

Even in a country you know by heart
it's hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
can be the bud of a new direction. The
natural correction is to make intent
of accident. To get back before dark
is the art of going.

― Wendell Berry

“"Black-on-black crime" is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, p111

“But race is the child of racism, not the father. . .Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.”
p7

“Uncritical acceptance of any party line is an idolatrous abdication of one's core identity as Abba's child. Neither liberal fairy dust nor conservative hardball addresses human dignity, which is often dressed in rags.”
Brennan Manning

“Getting saved is easy; becoming a community is difficult —damnably difficult.”

“The gospel, while honoring our experience, doesn't begin with our experience. We don't begin a holy life by wanting a holy life, desiring to be good, fulfilled, complete, or wanting to be included in the grand scheme of things. We have been anticipated, and the way we have been anticipated is by resurrection, Jesus' resurrection. Living a holy life . . . begins with Jesus' resurrection.”

‘Our senses require healing and rehabilitation so that they are adequate for receiving and responding to visitations and appearances of Spirit, God's Holy Spirit, for, as Jean Sulivan says, "The fundamental insight of the Bible . . . is that the invisible can speak only by the perceptible."’

― Eugene H. Peterson, p. 197