April 18, 2009

• the magic is still there

  i read “Irrestistible Revolution” again. it is still amazing.

  “Love without courage and wisdom is sentimentality, as with the ordinary church member.

  Courage without love and wisdom is foolhardiness, as with the ordinary soldier.

  Wisdom without love and courage is cowardice, as with the ordinary intellectual.

  but the one who has love, courage, and wisdom moves the world. –Ammon Hennacy

  “So live real good, and get beat up real bad. Dance until they kill you, and then we’ll dance some more. That’s how this thing seems to work.” –Shane Claiborne

  “Don’t choose issues; choose people. Fall in love with a group of people who are marginalized and suffering, and then you won’t have to worry about which cause you need to protest. Then the issues will choose you.” –Shane again.

  “What is, therefore, our task today? Courage. not, even that is not challenging enough to be the whole truth. our task today is recklessness. For what we Christians lack is not psychology or literature…we lack a holy rage–the recklessness which comes from the knowledge of God and humanity. The ability to rage when justice lies prostrate on the streets, and when the lie rages across the face of the earth…a holy anger about the things that are wrong in the world. to rage when little children must die of hunger, when the tables of the rich are sagging with food. to rage against complacency. To restlessly seek that recklessness that will challenge and seek to change human history until it conforms to the norms of the Kingdom of God.” –Kaj Munk, killed by the Gestapo in 1944

  “Longing is the most powerful part of any human personality. It fuels our search for meaning, for wholeness, for a sense of being truely alive. However we may describe this deep desire, it is the most important thing about us, our heart of hearts, the passion of our life. and the voice that calls to us in this place is none other than the voice of God.” –John Eldredge “Sacred Romance”

  “Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of–something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling of the something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? you have never had it. all the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been hints of it–tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fullfilled, echos that died away just as they caught your ear. but if it should really become manifest–if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself–you would know it. beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “here at last is the thing i was made for.” we cannot tell each other about it. it is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unapeaseable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer know wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”    –C.S.Lewis

  where is it? what is it? i want it. i need it.  

  • 1:02 pm
  • 1 Comment