“To brand the lambs – and to give them their vaccines and medicine – the ranch hands will pick a lamb up using both arms. The little guy will fight tooth and nail, wiggle and squirm, and there is nothing at all passive about him. All of the sheep in the pen will jump up and over each other to avoid the helping-hands of the ranchers.”
“Somehow in this universe of religion, we like to think of ourselves as God-Seekers, that we ourselves choose to look for God in order to find grace, like Mary in the garden looking for Jesus. Only, Jesus found Mary, and not the other way around.”
“Faith, the seeing of invisible things, the author to the Hebrews called it, the seeing of a path that is not there. As I walked, I found myself struggling off-trail at times because I’d strayed, trudging through thigh-deep snow.”
“I am no less than I am, more human than I’d like to be. And I, too, wonder why God – if it is God at all – cycles me through the wilderness as though I require or deserve some sort of Lenten-tainted life. To change me? To remind me of my humanity? To teach me to love others? Sometimes – sometimes – it feels like more than I need and far more than I deserve.”
“God of the table,
prepare a place for us
to love and be loved
to know and be known
to forgive and be forgiven.”
“Yes, George Bush parachuted out of an airplane on his 90th birthday. Did the jump draw him closer to God? Who knows, perhaps. After all, trying new things, getting off one’s duff in a holy way formed the basis of Jesus’ call to his disciples: stop fishing for fish and start fishing for people!”
“We have been given a similar opportunity to demonstrate that lovingkindness and sense of appreciation of the value of our neighbors’ lives. We have the opportunity to live by grace—in humble acknowledgement of the grace we ourselves have received, honestly acknowledging the profligate love that is at the root of such radical acceptance and forbearance.”
“Think about it. Some ancestor somewhere and sometime must have appreciated a single note or sound emitted from rough wood or metal and passed that appreciation and invention to another person, and to another generation, until at last an actual instrument took shape and form and capacity for scales.”
“Perhaps most of all, and I’ve been pondering this as well, God lives in the narrow space between you and me, even more so than abstractly within any one of us. I cannot, after all, contain God, nor is that what it means when I say, God lives, right here. That God lives here, and no place else.”
“Too many times, though, I’ve tried to capture God – using this methodology or some other. Capture, like the disciples tried to capture eternity at the Transfiguration, promising to erect tents as though experience with God could be possessed. Intellectually, we know experience cannot be possessed, I know it cannot be owned.”