interconnection

“God and Jesus don’t do hat they do by blasting a way through all opposition. They do what they do by working with the grain of the cosmos, by planting seeds that grow secretly, by calling humans to be cocreators. God’s kingdom comes like a farmer sowing a fresh crop or like a vineyard owner looking for workers to pick the grapes, bringing people on board to help… .In God’s kingdom, humans get to reflect God at last into the world, in the way they were meant to. They become more fully what humans were meant to be.” 

— N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus

“As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole sect of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The mystic allows one thing to my mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.” 

— Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“It is the happy man who does the useless things;

the sick man who is not strong enough to idle.” 

— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy 

“I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. 

Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.

But sometimes a prayer comes that you have not thought to pray, yet suddenly there it is and you pray it. Sometimes you just trustfully and easily pass into the other world of sleep. Sometimes the bird finds that what looks like an opening is an opening, and it flies away. Sometimes the shut door opens and you go though it into the same world you were in before, in which you belong as you did not before.” 

- Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

some thoughts on irony, cynicism, and hope: 

Irony without hope leads to despair. 

Irony without love leads to cynicism. 

The solution for irony is participation. 

“To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you have to draw large and startling figures.”

- Flannery O’Conner

“But man is so partial to systems and abstract conclusions that he is ready to distort the truth, ready to hear nor see anything, as long as he can justify his logic.” 
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground