Holy Week (Day 3)

    Heaven and earth, and their coming together, are what Holy Week is all about. One of the hardest theological lessons for us is that when ancient Jews said 'heaven', they didn't mean a place far off up in the sky. They meant God's sphere of reality, the place where God lives, and where His future purposes are kept in store. 'Heaven' isn't a purely future entity. It is God's sphere, as 'earth' is ours. And the point is that God's sphere and ours intersect. They overlap, they interlock, sometimes they even merge...the vital connection between Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and indeed Easter Day itself, is that Jesus is now the place where heaven and earth meet.

    -N.T. Wright

Holy Week (Day 2)

    We find Jesus, on the way to the cross, drawing together upon himself the great evils of the world, the imperial systems with their...demands, and the great hopes of the world, hopes for God to release the slaves, to raise the dead, to set the world to rights. The scriptures give us the grounding for this hope; the power of God assures us that it will come. That message provides both the deeply personal meaning of Holy Week for each one of us and the deeply political meaning for today in a world that still groans under the slavery of the empire's...demands. But the way to resurrection is precisely through death, the death which Caesar demands as the price for declaring a different empire, the death through which Jesus offers to God that which is God's, his own life, his own obedience, his own Image.

    -N.T. Wright

Holy Week (Day 1)

"Jesus is calling us to go forward with him into the rest of this week.  He is calling us to see him as the Servant who has put things right by his death…this is our God, our Servant King; he calls us now to follow him.” -N.T. Wright

Lent (Day 40)

Fasting is intended to cleanse the body, clear the mind, create some time and space, nourish the spirit, and focus the heart. Prayer is for confession, repentance, turning back to God, and asking for both discernment and courage. -Jim Wallis


As we enter into Holy Week and wrap up Lent, as we head toward Easter and a renewed commitment to resurrection life, I am reminded that our new life in Christ is not about things made easier, but us made better. Not better translated as successful, stronger, faster, but as healed and whole. And this process of being made better is the prayer and fasting process that Wallis speaks of, particularly the courage. Wallis' words are a reminder and a challenge; Easter isn't the end so much as the beginning. Let us enter into Holy Week ready for new life to begin.

Lent (Day 39)

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless. -G.K. Chesterton

Lent (Day 38)

    It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.


    -C.S. Lewis

Lent (Day 37)

    Entering the darkness that surpasses understanding, we shall find ourselves brought, not just to brevity of speech, but to perfect silence and unknowing.
    Emptied of all knowledge, man is joined in the highest part of himself, not with any created thing, nor with himself, nor with another, but with the One who is altogether unknowable, and in knowing nothing, he knows in a matter that passes understanding.

    -Dionysius the Areopagite

Lent (Day 36)

In a detective story, do you wonder why we root for the detective to win?...Maybe it's not just for revenge or to stop the killing. Maybe we really want to see the killer redeemed. The detective is the killer's savior. Imagine if Jesus chased you around trying to catch you and save your soul. Not just a patient, passive god, but a hardworking, aggressive bloodhound. We want him to be exposed in the drawing room scene, surrounded by his peers. The detective is the shepherd, and we want the criminal back in the fold, returned to us. We love him. We miss him. We want to hug him.


-Chuck Palahniuk

Lent (Day 35)

Man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God's face, and then descends from contemplating Him to scrutinize himself. -John Calvin

Lent (Day 34)

It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as God's will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe you -- try to share some of their poverty and see if you can accept it as God's will for yourself.


-Thomas Merton, Seeds of Contemplation

Lent (Day 33)

    "When an evil spirit comes out of a man, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, 'I will return to the house I left.' When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that man is worse than the first." -Jesus


We must remember, especially during Lent, that life isn't simply about what we "just say 'no'" to, but, more importantly, who we say "yes" to.

Lent (Day 32)

   Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.

    Advertising treats all products with the reverence and the seriousness due to sacraments.


   -Thomas Merton

Lent (Day 31)

    Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God - the responsible man, who tries to make his whole like an answer to the question and call of God.


    Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison

Lent (Day 30)

Riches I heed not, nor man's empty praise,
Thou mine inheritance, now and always:
Thou and Thou only, first in my heart,
High King of heaven, my Treasure Thou art.



Dallán Forgaill, Be Thou My Vision

Lent (Day 29)

    I cannot keep silent, nor would it be proper, so many favours and graces has the Lord deigned to bestow on me in the land of my captivity. For after chastisement from God, and recognizing him, our way to repay him is to exalt him and confess his wonders before every nation under heaven...I am imperfect in many things, nevertheless I want my brethren and kinsfolk to know my nature so that they may be able to perceive my soul's desire.

    St. Patrick

Lent (Day 28)

    We modern Westerners are so busy with ourselves, so preoccupied with the question of whether we do justice to our own selves, that the experience of the transcendent becomes practically impossible...In this way of thinking there is scarcely room for Him who speaks whenever we are silent and who comes in whenever we have emptied ourselves. Instead of making ourselves susceptible to the experience of the transcendent God, we, busy with many things, begin to seek after the small flighty sensations brought about by the artificial stimulation of the senses.

    -Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton: Contemplative Critic

Lent (Day 27)

...when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the LORD...


Deuteronomy 6:11b-12a

Lent (Day 26)

Remember how the LORD your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.


Deuteronomy 8:2-3

Lent (Day 25)

If Christ's temptation in the wilderness tells us anything, it's that you can't get the right thing the wrong way.

The Easy Way v. The Right Way 

Lent (Day 24)

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,

Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ on my right, Christ on my left,

Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise,

Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,

Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,

Christ in every eye that sees me,

Christ in every ear that hears me.

from St. Patrick's Breastplate 

Lent (Day 23)

    God teaches us through pain, emotional or physical. It reminds us that we are human, dust, frail and totally dependant on Him. It can be redemptive if we offer it up to God, for ourselves and others. If I give up anything, I would hope it could be the desire to wrap everything in nice, positive wrapping paper, at least for this season.


    Mrs. Pogle, Giving Up or Taking On? 

Lent (Day 22)

Apart from God, every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance.

-Alfred North Whitehead

Come Meet The New Blog...

Welcome to my new blog. My old blog has been imported here and the change was made only because the old blog was hijacked. The old blog being hijacked is why the Lenten blog posts went on hiatus. My hope is that all will return to normal tomorrow. Until then...

Lent (Day 17)

I Cannot Do This Alone


O God, early in the morning I cry to you.
Help me to pray
And to concentrate my thoughts on you;
I cannot do this alone.
In me there is darkness,
But with you there is light;
I am lonely, but you do not leave me;
I am feeble in heart, but with you there is help;
I am restless, but with you there is peace.
In me there is bitterness, but with you there is patience;
I do not understand your ways,
But you know the way for me...
Restore me to liberty,
And enable me to live now
That I may answer before you and before men.
Lord, whatever this day may bring,
Your name be praised.
Amen

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Lent (Day 16)

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power

Lent (Day 16)

Jesus warned people about worrying over their possessions. For Jesus, greed is not only love of money, but excessive anxiety about it.

Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods

Lent (Day 15)

No servant can serve two masters; either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

Jesus, Luke 16:13

Lent (Day 14)

In many cultures there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of each year's income to some holy use. For Christians, to observe the forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth of each year's days. After being baptized by John in the river Jordan, Jesus went off alone into the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves...To hear yourself answer is to begin to hear something not only of who you are but of both what you are becoming and what you are failing to become. It can be a pretty depressing business all in all, but if sackcloth and ashes are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end of it.

Frederick Buechner, Whistling In The Dark

Lent (Day 13)

I think of [Lent] as an Outward Bound for the soul. No one has to sign up for it, but if you do then you give up the illusion that you are in control of your life.

Barbara Brown Taylor, Settling For Less