Faith....is commitment

Faith...is not about propositions, but about commitment. It does not mean that I intellectually subscribe to the following list of statements, but that I give my heart to this reality. Believe, indeed, comes to us from the Old English belove, making clear that this too is meant to be heart language. To say "I believe in Jesus Christ" is not to subscribe to an uncertain proposition. It is a confession of commitment, of love.

Diane Eck

Encountering God

Persist!

”We are made to persist. That's how we find out who we are.”

Tobias Wolff

Becoming Me

"Instead of making vows about how my spiritual life will be perfectly well organized until I die, I seek to surrender my will for just this day. I look for small graces. I try to engage in little acts of service. I pray briefly to accommodate my limited attention span. I look for ways of being with God that I already enjoy. I try to go for half an hour without complaining. I try to say something encouraging to three people in a row. I put twenty dollars in my pocket that I will give away during the day. I take a five-minute break to read a page of great thoughts." (P. 71).

John Ortberg: The Me I Want to Be - Becoming God's Best Version of You

Delivering us from fear

O Lord, we beseech thee to deliver us from the fear of the unknown future; from fear of failure; from fear of poverty; from fear of bereavement; from fear of loneliness; from fear of sickness and pain; from fear of age; and from fear of death. Help us, O Father, by thy grace to love and fear thee only, fill our hearts with cheerful courage and loving trust in thee; through our Lord and Master Jesus Christ.

Akanu Ibaim
“Fear of the Unknown” in An African Prayer Book

Not being silent

I swore never to be silent whenever, wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

Forgive without end

Never tire of forgiving, and so give the devil no hold. Be merciful and compassionate, spontaneously and wholeheartedly. The Lord forgives you all day long; in the silence of your heart, then, do the same, untiringly and sincerely.

- Pierre-Marie Delfieux, from The Jerusalem Community Rule of Life

Where edges meet

I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than if you were at the middle of either one. Anne Fadiman
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Marriage - more than just for the couple

The inflections of community are important because they get at the very meanings of marriage. Marriage is a gift God gives the church. He does not simply give it to the married people of the church, but to the whole church, just as marriage is designed not only for the benefit of the married couple. It is designed to tell a story to the entire church, a story about God’s own love and fidelity to us.

Lauren F. Winner
Girl Meets God

Suffering

People who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.

- James Baldwin, from his book The Fire Next Time

Knowing, loving another

To be intimate with another person, we must always be imagining the other’s feelings, hopes, desires. We have to imagine those desires as best we can, knowing all the while that we cannot ever know even our closest friends and beloveds completely.... The day we believe we know everything there is to know about our intimate beloved is the day our love will cease to grow. We can always go more deeply into the mystery of each other. There is always more to know. Stephanie Paulsell
“Friendship and Intimacy” in On Our Way

What prayer isn't

Prayer is no panacea, no substitute for action. It is, rather, like a beam thrown from a flashlight before us into the darkness. It is in this light that we who grope, stumble, and climb, discover where we stand, what surrounds us, and the course which we should choose.

- Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, from his book Man's Quest for God

The Divine Embrace

[The divine embrace] is the place where I so much want to be, but am so fearful of being. It is the place where I will receive all I desire, all that I ever hoped for, all that I will ever need, but it is also the place where I have to let go of all I most want to hold on to. It is the place that confronts me with the fact that truly accepting love, forgiveness, and healing is often much harder than giving it. It is the place beyond earning, deserving, and rewarding. It is the place of surrender and complete trust. Henri J. M. Nouwen
The Return of the Prodigal Son

Living dangerously

To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely -- to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.

- Cornel West, from his book Democracy Matters

Community

The cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community. The resurrection is a symbol of God's triumph over all the forces that seek to block community. The Holy Spirit is the continuing community creating reality that moves through history. He who works against community is working against the whole of creation.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
"An Experiment in Love" from A Testament of Hope

Good news to the poor

The gospels record that Jesus preached good news to the poor, and an essential part of that good news was that they were to be poor no longer.

- Dorothy Day, quoted in Dead Man Walking by Helen Prejean