“If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man’s ethical formation, in man’s inner growth… then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world.”
“Certain realities take us beyond language because that is their very purpose. They do what words cannot do.”
“The God of the Incarnation is as much about kitchen tables as ecclesial altars.”
“In essence, what God is telling Adam and Eve is this: “I am going to give you life. You may receive that life, but you may never take it. To take it is to ruin and destroy the gift that it is”.”
“If our Eucharists do not succeed in breaking down the barriers that separate us from each other, then we have little reason to hope that these barriers will break down in our world.”
“Stegner argued that a wild place was worth much more than could ever be revealed by a cost-benefit analysis of its recreational economic value, or its minerals and resources. No, he explained, we need wild places because they remind us of a world beyond the human. Forests, plains, prairies, deserts, mountains: the experience of those landscapes can give people ‘a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost’.”
“Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain. When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost. When woods and trees are destroyed – incidentally, deliberately – imagination and memory go with them.”
“It is difficult, even now, to travel through the clearer glens of Scotland and miss the evidence of earlier calamity. Difficult, too, not to be disturbed by it, not to find one’s own relationship with the land changed by the knowledge of what once occurred here. The pasts of these places complicate and darken their present wildness; caution against romanticism and blitheness.”
Almost a decade ago, I started reading this musician’s blog after a photographer I admire linked to her. We quickly became fast friends: blog comments turned to emails; Skype calls turned to visits to each other.
I am undoubtedly biased, but Julie is an insanely talented musician and songwriter, and I am so freakin’ proud of her new E.P. which released last week.
You Were Younger is available now, in all your favorite music listening places: grab your copy on iTunes or Bandcamp, stream from Spotify or Apple Music, or do what I did and buy a physical copy off Bandcamp.
When my primary creative tools are keystrokes and shuttersnaps, it’s nice to make something every so often that requires sandpaper and hacksaws. There is a physicality to this kind of creation that is absent from my digital creations.
Recently I have been turning an old pallet into a shelf for my kitchen wall, and I’ve found myself surprised by what Jesus has been doing through the process.
The shelf started as an old, rough, wooden pallet. My first step was to pull boards off, resizing and realigning them as needed. It’s a brutal and demanding process! How often I’ve found myself there with my faith, too. I find the ever-patient Jesus prying off the boards of jealousy; control; every area in need of an overhaul. It’s not an easy process, but it is absolutely necessary to shape me into who God longs for me be.
Then there’s the hours of sanding. Hours of running a rough piece of paper up and down the boards. It’s a tedious and repetitive task: there’s no medals for smoothest board, no awards for longest sanding. Every run along the board adds to the callouses on my hands. Calloused to match the areas where I’ve been hard hearted and stubborn, and desperately need Jesus to sand my soul.
Finally the shelf is finished: the right boards are in the right places at the right level of smoothness. All that’s left is to hang it on the wall. But right now it’s sitting on one end in a corner of my bedroom. Perhaps not the best place for it if I want to set placemats and recipe books on it. I wonder how many other places in my life I have started well, only to get distracted or frustrated halfway through? It doesn’t matter how smooth or beautiful the shelf is, if I don’t finish it. Without actually hanging it on the kitchen wall, all I’ve got is very pretty wooden posts randomly sitting in my room.
Surprising how much you can learn about faith while building a shelf.
Earlier this month I dragged my long-suffering flatmate up a hill with me for the very first time.
It’s easy to think that climbing Munros requires lots of fitness.
It doesn’t; not really.
All it requires is the determination to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
“Kafka might have advocated tackling ‘only books that bite or sting us’ (or ‘wound and stab us’, depending on which translation you favour)… but he didn’t have to commute through the rush hour, holding on to a swinging strap with only the words in front of his eyes to take his mind off the armpit of the person standing two inches away.”
“There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater.
But sometimes it doesn’t.
Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life.
“Alec Motyer said, “Holiness is the most intimately divine word the Bible possesses.” And thus the call to be holy as he is holy is the call to the most intimate union with God. Imitation of God has intimacy with God as the goal.”
“Prayer is the language of intimacy. Prayer keeps communion. And prayer bears fruit, not simply in answered prayer, but in presenting us to a holy God to be transformed into his likeness.”
“In solitude we confront the forces that seek to shape us in their image and the alternative ways that we try to define ourselves, and we meet the God who offers us true identity and hear the voice that truly defines us and shapes us according to his image.”
“It’s important that we pay attention to the mundane as well as the sublime, as it’s the mundane that makes the sublime possible.”
“Because of these assumptions in many churches about what constitutes participation, we can become convinced that the faithful word in the Christian life is always yes. When we are asked to participate in an activity or group or sharing time, if we are really committed to community, if we truly trust God, we think we must answer “yes.” Conversely, no is the unfaithful word. No is the word that shuts us out of community, that doesn’t trust God and is closed to others and his work.”
Earlier this month, Facebook reminded me that it was “6 years ago today” that I got my tattoo.
I’d had an eventful couple of years before that.
I moved out of my parents house and moved countries.
I started (and dropped out of) university.
I travelled the globe.
I discovered things that made me come alive.
I found things that killed my joy.
I had no idea what the wild goose chase really meant. I still don’t.
But for now…
It is the greatest adventure, even in the darkness and the doubt.
June was a fairly good month of reading for me; there were a few gems mixed in with the cheesy, switch-off lit.
My friend Bex Lewis’ book Raising Children in a Digital Age is well worth a read – perhaps particularly for parents, but I found it helpful as an ‘adoptive aunty’. I love the focus on learning how to do life online together, and not focusing on the false notion of ‘digital natives’.
So, don’t just think that some time in the future when you’re older or wiser or can control your temper or you live somewhere else or you’re not single or you’re a better person, you’ll serve God or do what He wants. He wants all of you now, how you are.
Letting go is not giving up and admitting defeat; it’s choosing to move away from a thing that is actually defeating you already.
Real criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right.
We need to ask not whether it is realistic or practical or viable but whether it is imaginable. We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought.
– Wyatt North
– Ronald Rolheiser
– Robert Macfarlane
Almost a decade ago, I started reading this musician’s blog after a photographer I admire linked to her. We quickly became fast friends: blog comments turned to emails; Skype calls turned to visits to each other.
When my primary creative tools are keystrokes and shuttersnaps, it’s nice to make something every so often that requires sandpaper and hacksaws. There is a physicality to this kind of creation that is absent from my digital creations.
– Veronica Roth
– Craig Gross & J.R. Mahon
– Simon Ponsonby
– Adam S. McHugh
is well worth a read – perhaps particularly for parents, but I found it helpful as an ‘adoptive aunty’. I love the focus on learning how to do life online together, and not focusing on the false notion of ‘digital natives’.
– Leonard Sweet
– Jamie George 
– Pip McCracken 
– Walter Brueggemann
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