Lent (Day 12)

I am certain that underneath their upmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love.

John Steinbeck

Lent (Day 11)

Fasting is the soul of prayer, mercy is the lifeblood of fasting. So if you pray, fast; if you fast, show mercy; if you want your petition to be heard, hear the petition of others.

St. Peter Chrysologogus

So we pray because we were made for prayer, and God draws us out by breathing Himself in.

P. T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer

Lent (Day 10)

Earlier this week I heard a minister quote a spiritual genius: "All the problems in the world are caused by man's inability to sit quietly in a room by himself." We're restless and need action, which in a modern media world means information. We need the busy buzz--the Internet, TV, instant messages, magazines and newspapers, the beeps and boops and bops. Rudy's up in Iowa. Hillary's stuck. We want to be among the first to have this information and the first to share it. And we want it not because it's crucial but because it distracts us from the crucial. It takes our minds away from what is most important.

Peggy Noonan, For A Pot of Message

Lent (Day 9)

Lent is the time for trimming the soul and scrapping the sludge off a life turned slipshod. Lent is about taking stock of time, even religious time. Lent is about exercising the control that enables us to say no to ourselves so that when life turns hard of its own accord we have the stamina to yes to its twists and turns with faith and hope…. Lent is the time to make new efforts to be what we say we want to be.

Sister Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict: Insight For The Ages

Lent (Day 8)

The dark night of the soul is precisely that - a divinely initiated process of loss - so that the accretions of the world, the flesh, and the devil may be recognized and released. It is a process of detachment from disordered affections, a process of purgation and de-selfing. Though the dark night is perilous, with no guarantee of a good outcome, it holds the possibility of new beginnings. Out of the night the church could emerge into a dawn of freedom and fidelity.

Elaine A. Heath, The Mystic Way of Evangelism

Lent (Day 7)

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting it, not by giving in. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later.
That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Lent (Day 6)

We fast during Lent because fasting gets our attention. It is a necessary tool for rousing us from our day-to-day sleepwalking.

We fast during Lent because when we willingly give up something we delight in but do not, strictly speaking, need, we come closer to participating in, understanding, and reverencing the self-emptying act that is Christ on the Cross.

We give up something for Lent to align ourselves with the heart, will, and experience of Jesus. Fasting teaches us that we are not utterly subject to our bodily desires. And in sated and overfed America, fasting reminds us, sharply, of the poor.

Lauren Winner, Giving Up Sex For Lent

Lent (Day 5)

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

David Foster Wallace, This Is Water

Lent (Day 4)

Discipline in the spiritual life is the concentrated effort to create the space and time where God can become our master and where we can respond freely to God's guidance. Thus, discipline is the creation of boundaries that keep time and space open for God - a time and a place where God's gracious presence can be acknowledged and responded to.

Henri Nouwen, Bread For The Journey

Lent (Day 3)

What we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening.

No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world...[But] can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing?

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Lent (Day 2)

Compunction is a baptism of sorrow, in which the tears of the penitent are a psychological but also deeply religious purification, preparing and disposing him for the sacramental waters of baptism or for the sacrament of penance. Such sorrow brings joy because it is at once a mature acknowledgement of guilt and the acceptance of its full consequences: hence it implies a religious and moral adjustment to reality, the acceptance of one's actual condition. The acceptance of reality is always a liberation from the burden of illusion that we strive to justify by our errors and our sins. Compunction is a necessary sorrow, but it is followed by joy and relief because it wins for us one of the greatest blessings: the light of truth and the grace of humility. The tears of the Christian penitent are real tears, but they bring joy.

Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration

Lent (Day 1)

I have slowly become aware of what my Lenten practice might be. It might be the development of some type of "holy indifference" toward the many small rejections I am subject to, and a growing attachment to the Lord and his passion.

I am constantly surprised at how hard it is for me to deal with the little rejections people inflict on each other day by day...This atmosphere often leaves  me with a feeling of being rejected and left alone. When I swallow these rejections, I quickly get depressed and lonely; then I am in danger of becoming resentful...

But maybe all of this is the other side of a deep mystery, the mystery that we have no lasting dwelling place on this earth and that only God loves us the way we desire to be loved. Maybe all these small rejections are reminders that I am a traveler on the way to a sacred place where God holds me in the palm of his hand.

Henri J.M. Nouwen, Gracias! A Latin American Journal

The Wisdom of DFW

Recently came across this quote from David Foster Wallace. Wallace is speaking in specific reference to writers, but I think it can be applied to any group that is forever speaking insider language and refusing to engage outsiders.

"They've begun protecting their ego by talking more and more to each other."