לְהִשְׁתּוֹקֵק

oh L-rd,

i will tear the heart of my soul in two
and You must lay therein
You must lay yourself
in the wounds of my soul.

-mechtild of magdeburg.

hidden.

"where are you? do you know that the heart has a dungeon? bring light! bring light!"

-mary oliver.

kingdom.

"the ascetics of qumran and the pharisees thought that the kingdom would come because they were not as other men. Jesus taught that it would not come until they recognised that they WERE as other men." 

-a.n. wilson.

take no rest and give no rest.

"upon your walls, o Jerusalem,
I have set watchmen,
who shall never be silent
by day or by night.
o you, the L-RD's remembrancers,
take no rest
and give no rest to Him,
until He establish Jerusalem
and make her renowned on earth."

-isaiah 62.

judge not.

"Both pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged."

-abraham lincoln.

the old poets of china

wherever i am, the world comes after me.
it offers me its busyness.  it does not believe
that i do not want it.  now i understand
why the old poets of china went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

-mary oliver.

deep beneath our asking.

"How can we pray to you, holy and hidden God, whose ways are not our ways, who reigns in awful mystery beyond the realm of space and time?  Yet how can we not pray to you, Mighty Father, who knows what it is to be man because you have walked among us as man, breaking with us the bread of our affliction and drinking deep of the cup of despair? 

Hear, O God, the prayers of all your children everywhere: for forgiveness and healing, for courage, for faith; prayers for peace among the desperate nations. Whether you give or withhold what we ask, whether you answer us in words that burn like fire or in silence that burns like fire, increase us in the knowledge that you are always more near to us than breathing, that your will for us is love.

And deep beneath our asking, so deep beneath that we are all but deaf to it ourselves, hear, O God, the secret song of every human heart praising you for being what you are, rejoicing with the morning stars that you are our God and we are your children.  Make strong and wild this secret song within until it bursts forth at last to your glory and our saving.

Through Jesus Messiah our Lord.

Amen."

-a prayer by frederick buechner.

grace.

"how silently, how silently the wondrous gift is given..."

on earth as it is in heaven.

"Our task is to seek and find Christ in our world as it is, not as it might be.  The fact that the world is other than it might be does not alter the truth that Christ is present in it and that His plan has been neither frustrated nor changed.  Indeed, all will be done according to His will.  Our advent is a celebration of this hope."

-thomas merton.

Hurricane.

It didn't behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn't stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn't
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

-mary oliver.

together at the same time.

"No one can look at God and at the reality of the world with undivided gaze as long as God and the world are torn apart.  Despite all efforts to prevent it the eyes still wander from one to the other.  Only because there is one place where God and the reality of the world are reconciled with each other, at which God and humanity have become one, is it possible there and there alone to fix one's eyes on God and the world together at the same time.  This place does not lie somewhere beyond reality in the realm of ideas.  It lies in the midst of history as a divine miracle.  It lies in Jesus Messiah the reconciler of the world."

-dietrich bonhoeffer.

-----

"therefore, let us fix our eyes on Jesus..."

(amen).

the old way.

"Dear brethren, our real trouble is not doubt about the way upon which we have set out, but our failure to be patient, to keep quiet.  We still cannot imagine that today God really doesn't want anything new for us, but simply to prove us in the old way.  That is too petty, too monotonous, too undemanding for us.  And we simply cannot be constant with the fact that God's cause is not always the successful one, that we really could be 'unsuccessful': and yet be on the right road.  But this is where we find out whether we have begun in faith or in a burst of enthusiasm."

-dietrich bonhoeffer.

on love.

"my mistake had been to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a given person."

-alain de botton.

untamed.

"Holy One,
   untamed
       by the names
            i give you,
in the silence,
   name me
that i may know
   who i am,
hear the truth
   you have put into me..."

-ted loder.

seen.

"why do you say, o jacob,
why declare, o israel,
'my way is hid from the L-RD,
my cause is ignored by my God?'
do you not know?
have you not heard?
the L-RD is God from of old,
creator of the earth from end to end,
He never grows tired or weary,
His wisdom cannot be fathomed.
He gives strength to the weary,
fresh vigor to the spent."

-isaiah 40.

the sheen.

"He has come. He has given all there is to give, and he has done it because we need him totally. To understand this is to seek his glory and praise. It is to let the sheen wear off everywhere else."


-lisa fleischaker.

remember.

"have no dread or fear of them.  none other than the L-RD your God, who goes before you, will fight for you, just as He did for you in Egypt before your very eyes, and in the wilderness, where you saw how the L-RD your God carried you, as a man carries his son, all the way that you traveled until you came to this place.  yet for all that, you have no faith in the L-RD your God, who goes before you on your journeys- to scout the place where you are to encamp- in fire by night and in cloud by day, in order to guide you on the route you are to follow."

-deuteronomy 1.

12.

help, o L-RD!
for the faithful are no more;
the loyal have vanished from among men. 

men speak lies to one another;
their speech is smooth;
they talk with duplicity.

may the L-RD cut off all flattering lips,
every tongue that speaks arrogance.
they say, "by our tongues we shall prevail;
with lips such as ours, who can be our master?"

"because of the groans of the plundered poor and needy,
I will now act," says the L-RD.
"I will give help," He affirms to him. 

the words of the L-RD are pure words,
silver purged in an earthen crucible,
refined sevenfold.

You, o L-RD, will keep them,
guarding each from this age evermore. 
on every side the wicked roam
when baseness is exalted among men.

psalm 12.

קָוָה

i am beginning to understand that this aching, clawing, relentless longing in me is the realest prayer i have, my truest prayer of all.

the same degree.

  "I know that nothing strengthens community like a common enemy.  I know that when religious people are feeling overwhelmed by a world with little use for their ancient truths, they can find new meaning by identifying a great evil to oppose.  I know that the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are especially vulnerable to the formation of "oppositional identity," both because the stories of their struggles with their enemies have been made sacred in their scriptures and because monotheists - one-true-God people - have never wasted much charity on those who do not acknowledge their one true God. 
   Here is a law as reliable as gravity:  the degree to which we believe our faith is what makes us human is the same degree to which we will question the humanity of those who do not share our faith.
  'We have just enough religion to make us hate one another,' Jonathan Swift once observed, 'but not enough to make us love one another.'  Because we are human, which is to say essentially self-interested, we are always looking for ways to add a little more authority to our causes, to come up with better reasons to fight for what we want than 'Because I want it, that's why.'  If we can convince ourselves that God wants it too - even if that means making God in our own image so we can deny the image of God in our enemies - then we are free to engage in combative piety.  We are free to harm others not for our own reasons but in the name of God, which allows us to feel holy about doing it instead of just plain bad.
   In his award-winning book, Exclusion & Embrace, Bosnian-born theologian Miroslav Volf says, 'it may not be too much to claim that the future of our world will depend on how we deal with identity and difference.' Citizens of the United States, which is presently the most religiously diverse nation on the face of the earth, would do well to pay attention to that claim.  As children of the covenant and inheritors of the gospel, we might also understand that we have the resources to do so."

-barbara brown taylor.