A Reprieve and a Return

Thank you for allowing me the break from this addiction/burden that I needed. Starting my second year at college and getting everything lined up that needs to be lined up has been more taxing on me than I thought it would, though I feel great about where I am. I took this Friday night, after some casual Wii playing with some friends, to spend with God and reflect on where I am and find guidance for where I am going. In my journal gazing, I ran across some timely words:

"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."
-- John Shedd

"Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn't really matter."
--unknown

Words

It's been far too long since the words of Frederick Buechner graced this blog. This one's from Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation, page 93.

Words--especially religious words, words that have to do with the depth of things--get tired and stale the way people do. Find new words or put old words together in combinations that make them heard as new, make you yourself new, and make you understand in new ways. "Blessed are the meek" are the words of the English translators--words of great beauty and power--but over the years they have become almost too familiar to hear any more. "Heureux sont les debonnaires" are the French words--blessed are the debonair--and suddenly new beauty, new power, flood in like light. Blessed is Fred Astaire in white tie and tails. Blessed is Oliver Hardy in rusty black suit and derby hat as he picks his dapper way toward the unseen banana peel on the sidewalk. Blessed is my old friend as she tries to let me win at Aggravation, rattling her dice in the cup which the pills that keep her alive come in. Arrange the alphabet into words that are true in the sense that they are true to what you experience to be true. If you have to choose between words that mean more than what you have experienced and words that mean less, choose the ones that mean less because that way you leave room for your hearers to move around in and for yourself to move around in too.

I Wish I Said That... Part 1

Spring has sprung, and therefore in its honor (or just in mother nature's honor in general) I have decided to post one of my favorite quotes. Courtesy of Frederick Buechner.

"I go about my business, and it goes about its business, but though we are in countless ways removed from each other, we are by no means uninvolved with each other. When the leaves start to change in September, something in me starts to change with them. When some sorrow rises in my throat or some gladness makes my heart beat faster, the very indifference of the landscape becomes a kind of bond between us because it is I who am the one it is indifferent to, and my sorrows and gladnesses are reduced to size by its endless capacity for ignoring them. So there is Buechner being himself say the hills and fields, the horses and birds, the rain, the snow, the sun. And there you are being yourself too, I say back. Such vast and unconditional acceptance of each other is not the same thing as love, I realize, any more than upekha is the same thing as agape, but it is not altogether unrelated either. In deep and mysterious ways, I think neither of us would be quite the same without each other."

More thoughts on springing soon enough.

Del Toro on Fairy Tales

"I believe that fairy tales are ultimately about two things: facing the dragon or climbing back to our world inside."

Director Guillermo Del Toro

(ok, so I'll admit...the concept behind Pan's Labyrinth is growing on me...)

Food for the Mind

Here are a few quotes that have been crawling throughout my brain in the last few weeks, courtesy of William via MERGE.

"If we are afraid to be different from the world, how can we make a difference in the world?" -- Father Jenkins (emphasis added)

Or more simply put:

"If you want to serve the age, betray it." -- Brendan Kennelly (emphasis added)

Tired of It All?

"I'm not trying to save the world....


I'm trying to save myself....


from APATHY"


--Rob Bell's wife

I've talked to several people lately and find that they share a truth that I have buried deep inside myself. Sometimes it's really hard to get passionate about something and sustain that passion, to want to love the poor, to want to serve the weak, to want to know those in need. The danger is not that they will not be taken care of...God's got that one. The danger is that we will not get the opportunity to be a part of it. Apathy is the enemy. Don't sleep through a revolution.

Frederick Buechner Quote

I have recently finished Now and Then, a memoir by one of my new favorite authors, Frederick Buechner. He has a knack for writing all of the things that you've wanted to say but never been able to put into words. I highly suggest his writing. I want to highlight an extended quote from the book that I found quite interesting and ponderment-worthy.

"For that reason only the most radical dissenters attended, and it was one of those -- a lean, freckle-faced senior -- who turned to me once, thin-lipped with anger, and said, "So what's so good about religion anyway?" and I found myself speechless. I felt surely there must be something good about it. Why else was I there? But for the moment I couldn't for the life of me think what it was. Maybe the truth of it is that religion the way he meant it--a system of belief, a technique of worship, an institution--doesn't really have all that much about it that is good when you come right down to it, and perhaps my speechlessness in a way acknowledged as much.

"Unless you become like a child, Jesus said, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and maybe part of what that means is that in the long run what is good about religion is playing the way a child plays at being grown up until he finds that being grown up is just another way of playing and thereby starts to grow up himself. Maybe what is good about religion is playing that the Kingdom will come, until--in the joy of your playing, the hope and rhythm and comradeship and poignance and mystery of it--you start to see that the playing is itself the first-fruits of the Kingdom's coming and of God's presence within us and among us."

--pg. 73, HaperCollins Publishers