the ramble

“For the Pharisees, good meant disdaining, stigmatizing, excluding, and avoiding sinners. For Jesus, good meant forgiving the sinner and reconciling them to the community. For the Pharisees, good meant explaining why the poor and sick deserved to be poor and sick and blaming scapegoats for the bad status quo. For Jesus, good meant helping the poor and healing the sick and seeking through love to transform the status quo.”

“It strikes me…speaking as a thoroughly white guy, how messed up our approach is. Because when we talk about hell, it’s generally not to unsettle ourselves. It’s generally the opposite—to reassure ourselves, so we think, Aren’t we glad we’re insiders with God and going to heaven? Isn’t it a shame those other people are so bad and wrong and going to hell? It’s part of the system of them-us thinking.”

- The Last Word and the Word After That

.One.
“What do you suppose it means?” he asked. “‘DO WHAT YOU WISH.’ That must mean I can do anything I feel like. Don’t you think so?”
All at once, Grograman’s face looked alarmingly grave, and his eyes glowed.
“No,” he said in his deep, rumbling voice. “It means that you must do what you really and truly want. And nothing is more difficult…it’s your own deepest secret and you yourself don’t know it.”

.Two.
“The old folk in our tent camps tell the children about him when they’re naughty. They say he writes everything down in a book, whatever you do or fail to do, and there it stays in the form of a beautiful or ugly story.”

.Three.
“There are some things, however, that we cannot fathom by thinking about them, but only by experience.”

- The Neverending Story

“Friends, show me a man who hates himself, and I’ll show you a man who hates his neighbors more! He’d have to–you’d not grant anyone else something you can’t have for yourself–no love, no kindness, no respect!”

- The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society

“Now that might be fine for the folks in power, which generally wasn’t us black folks. The folks in power could afford to shift the focus away from injustice on earth. In fact, there were many distinct advantages to doing so, since they were perpetrators of a lot of it. If they talked about sin, it tended to be sexual sins, or drunkenness, that sort of thing—all personal or individual sins that they, being middle-class and living in nice suburban homes, found it easier to avoid and condemn or at least hide than some of us. They stayed pretty far away from systemic and social sins like racism and greed. If it wasn’t related to the individual and his precious little soul, it pretty much disappeared from view for them…that’s why black theology and feminist theology have been suspicious of the traditional approach to hell: because it distracts people from justice on earth. It kind of pacifies people so they’ll let injustice continue.” – Brian McLaren, The Last Word And The Word After That

“Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care.”

“I mean that to be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously. And a person who thinks himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God because he can’t accept who God is: a Being that is love. We learn that we are lovable or unlovable from other people”…”that is why God tells us so many times to love each other.”

“They loved me like a good novel. Like an art film, and this is how I felt when I was with them, like a person John Irving would write. I did not feel fat or stupid or sloppily dressed. I did not feel like I did not know the Bible well enough, and I was never conscious what my hands were doing or whether or not I sounded immature when I talked. I had always been so conscious of those things, but living with the hippies I forgot about myself. And when I lost this self-consciousness I gained so much more. I gained an interest in people outside my own skin.”

“The first generation out of slavery invented jazz music. It is music birthed out of freedom. And that is the closest thing I know to Christian spirituality. A music birthed out of freedom. Everybody sings their song the way they feel it, everybody closes their eyes and lifts up their hands.”

-Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller