quotes and lines from chapters 6-8. it's a lot to soak in.
Since the Holy One is ultimately unknowable, we can only
stutter and stammer about an omnipotent deity who, with effortless ease,
created a star 264 trillion miles away.
Personal responsibility replaces personal response to God,
and we come engrossed in our efforts to grow in holiness.
Moralism and its stepchild, legalism, pervert the character
of the Christian life.
God’s distance must be complemented by his nearness.
We can no more catch a hurricane in a shrimp net or Niagara
Falls in a coffee cup than we can grasp the infinity of God’s reality.
Transcendence means that God cannot be confined to the
world, that he is never this rather than that, here rather than there. Immanence, on the other hand, means that God
is wholly involved with us….he is here in his mysterious nearness.
Faith + Hope = Trust
Trust means the willingness to become absolutely empty of
all terrifying and comforting images of God that we have held, so that the gift
of God in Jesus Christ may come to us on God’s terms.
…to seek the experience simply for the sake of experience is
to seek self, not God.
The quiet certitude of the believer translate simply as “I
know that I know that I know,” however dimly and through a glass darkly.
Every authentic
spiritual experience is an experience of unrestricted, unconditional being in
Love. –Bernard Lonergan
Our trust in Jesus grows as we shift from making
self-conscious efforts to be good to allowing ourselves to be loved as we are
(not as we should be).
Self-absorption fades into self-forgetfulness, as we fix our
gaze on the brightness of the Lord.
Trust does not demand explanations but turns to the One who
promised, “I will not leave you orphans.”
Like faith and hope, trust cannot be self-generated. I cannot simply will myself to trust. What outrageous irony: the one thing I am responsible for throughout
my life I cannot generate. The one thing
I need to do I cannot do.
What does lie within my power is paying attention to the
faithfulness of Jesus….pay attention to Jesus throughout my journey,
remembering his kindness.
We can endure the unwanted intrusion of evil when we have
experienced a theophany – an insight into the reality of go.
…I shake my head in grateful surprise at the miracle of his
grace at work in me…
honesty with others and with self is a precious commodity
seldom found in either world at large or the church.
Familiarity does not exclude respect
I want a relationship with the Abba of Jesus, who is
infinitely compassionate with my brokenness and at the same time an awesome,
incomprehensible, and unwieldy mystery.
We should sow compassion toward our neurotic selves and our
neurotic neighbors.
Don’t ever be so foolish as to measure my Father’s
compassion with your compassion. Don’t
ever be so silly as to compare your thing, pallid, wavering, capricious human
compassion with mine, for I am God as well as man.
Faith God without hope in his promises is tainted trust.
Clarity, reassurance, and proof cannot create trust, sustain
it or guarantee any certainty of its presence.
The 3 greatest obstacles to trust are amnesia, inertia and
manana. We are all subject to
forgetfulness of God’s faithfulness in the past, laziness to act on the divine
promise, and postponing until tomorrow what Jesus is asking of us today:
childlike abandonment in trust. -Edward
Farrell
The most common form of presumption is the expectation that
God will directly and secretly intervene in human affairs.
