Madeleine L’Engle on Heaven

Heaven is nothing we can seek through our own virtue: it cannot be earned; it is a gift of the God of love. When we are self-emptied enough to make room for this love, it is not as a result of our own moral rectitude or willpower. But it is sometimes given to us, this lovely emptiness, and then the Holy Spirit can fill it, with prayer, or music, or a poem, or a story. Or, sometimes, it goes beyond all these to the greatest gift of all, being filled with that which is beyond all symbols, with God’s Presence. And then we are far more than when we are filled with self-probing, self-centeredness, or self-righteousness.
Source: A Stone for a Pillow

The suffering of Christ

My Madeleine L'Engle devotional book this morning:  George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble -- times when I have seen people tempted to deny God -- when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their suffering might be like his."

Mockingbird article: Axl Rose and Michael Jackson attend a Christian music festival -

In one of the most beautiful sections of the book, Sullivan recalls his own “Jesus phase.” But, as he writes, “a phase is supposed to end—or at least give way to other phases—not simply expand into a long preoccupation.” That is, he doesn’t harbor the usual emotional baggage or resentment. “It isn’t that I feel psychologically harmed. It isn’t even that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all. It’s that I love Jesus Christ…. [Christ's] breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness. Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what’s fragile and what suffers—there lies sanity. And salvation.” Amen!