“Mystery is not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.” (Dennis Covington; quoted in “Reaching For The Invisible God” by Philip Yancey)
“Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity… The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand… The one created thing (the sun at noonday) which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything.” (G.K. Chesterton; “Orthodoxy”)
"Our task is to help people concentrate on the real but often hidden event of God's active presence in their lives. Hence, the question that must guide all organizing activity in a parish is not how to keep people busy, but how to keep them from being so busy that they can no longer hear the voice of God who speaks in silence." -- Henri Nouwen, "The Way Of The Heart"
Sunflowers in Comfort (TX.!)
"...A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”: and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.” [G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy]
“The most important thing a pastor does is stand in a pulpit every Sunday and say, ‘Let us worship God.’ If that ceases to be the primary thing I do in terms of my energy, my imagination, the way I structure my life, then I no longer function as a pastor… I cannot fail to call the congregation to worship God, to listen to His word, to offer themselves to God. Worship becomes a place where we have our lives redefined for us.” (Eugene Peterson, author of "The Message" Bible paraphrase)
Don’t you just hate it when things really finally come together in some kind of cohesive reality in such a way that the underlying integrity of the universe, as we know it, is not fundamentally threatened, and can actually be seen to support just such a view of life as being in harmony with the before mentioned universe, and then—whammo! Everything that I said above comes unraveling, and you realize the cohesiveness you experienced previously was actually a black hole in space, or a time-warp at best, which sends you plummeting into some kind of weird parallel universe where everything is just the opposite of life as you thought you knew it!it knew you thought you as life of opposite the just is everything where universe parallel weird of kind some into plummeting you sends which, best at time-warp a or, space in hole black a actually was previously experienced you cohesiveness the realize you and, unraveling comes above said I that everything !whammo – then and, universe mentioned before the with harmony in being as life of view a such just support to seen be actually can and, threatened fundamentally not is, it know we as, universe the of integrity underlying the that way a such in reality cohesive of kind some in together come finally really things when it hate just you Don’t
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