The Wisdom of Guigo

Affluence conceals and increases wretchedness. It does not take it away.
Prefer to be taught rather than to teach.
Your burden is not nearly as heavy as the Lord's.
Flee from your own faults. The flaws of others will not hurt you.
Be angry with the sinner only if you think it will do him good.
It is your lack of interior pleasures that makes you go looking for exterior ones.
Your purpose is not to be seen or known or loved or admired or praised. Your purpose is to see, know, love, admire and praise God.
We quickly accept an obtuse thought when an important person speaks it.
Never rejoice if you are better than others. Be sorry they are not better, and accept responsibility for it.
If you need to hate someone, hate yourself. No one else has hurt you more.
It is a mistake to love things that will inevitably decay, and to be annoyed when they do.
If it is for your own advantage that you do something for someone else, you are doing it for yourself.

Guigo I: Meditations
Near to the Heart of God: December 28

Faith in faith?

Wow, two days in a row....

A Unitarian Universalist student student said once that what he believed in was faith, and when I asked him faith in what, his answer was faith in faith. I don't mean to disparage him -- he was doing the best he could -- but it struck me that having faith in faith was as barren as being in love with love or having money that you spend only on the accumulation of more money.

Listening to Your Life: Frederick Buechner; December 18; p. 327

In Memory of Christopher Hitchens

I've always kind of liked Hitchens... Is it just me or is it ironic that people are wishing him to Rest In Peace? I thought today's C.S. Lewis reading is particularly appropriate...

If what you want is an argument against Christianity (and I well remember how eagerly I looked for such arguments when I began to be afraid it was true) you can easily find some stupid and unsatisfactory Christian and say, 'So there's your boasted new man! Give me the old kind.' But if once you have begun to see that Christianity is on other grounds probable, you will know in your heart that this is only evading the issue. What can you ever really know of other people's souls -- of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you  do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbors or memories of what you have read in books. What will all that chatter and hearsay count (will you even be able to remember it?) when the anesthetic fog which we call 'nature' or 'the real world' fades away and the Presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate, and unavoidable?
The Business of Heaven -- December 17; p. 311

Prayer and the Kingdom of God....

These two from this morning were too good not to get on the blog. -- drs

'God', said Pascal, 'instituted prayer in order to lend to his creatures the dignity of causality.'
He seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye.

The Business of Heaven -- November 17

If we only had eyes to see and ears to hear and wits to understand, we would know that the Kingdom of God in the sense of holiness, goodness, beauty is as close to breathing and crying out to born both within ourselves and within the world; we would know that the Kingdom of God is what we all of us hunger for above all other things even when we don't know its name or realize that it's what we're starving to death for. The Kingdom of God is where our best dreams come from and our truest prayers. We glimpse at those moments when we find ourselves being better than we are and wiser than we know. We catch sight of it when at some moment of crisis a strength seems to come to us that is greater than our own strength. The Kingdom of God is where we belong. It is home, and whether we realize it or not, I think we are all of us homesick for it. 
Listening to Your Life -- November 17 pp.303-4

Serving Others

Time to get  back at it...

Faith takes us away from love for the present with its honors, fortunes, and pleasures. These things hinder true love and service. They are a burden...
Only the word of God makes us wholesome and blessed. The divine Word brings faith. Faith brings love. Love results in good deeds.   
---- Martin Bucer : Instruction in Christian Love
Near to the Heart of God: November 10

God

It is as impossible to prove or disprove that God exists beyond the various conflicting ideas people have dreamed up about him as it is to prove or disprove that Goodness exists beyond the various conflicting ideas people have dreamed up about what is good.

It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.

All-wise. All-powerful. All-loving. All-knowing. We bore to death both God and ourselves with our chatter. God cannot be expressed but only experienced.

Listening to Your Life: October 6; p. 268

God is Busy Everywhere

 I've been thinking about faith lately and this devotion came up... it seems to me that without faith, that atheists are essentially right. -- drs


Faith is God's interpreter. Without faith, all we hear is a noisy babbling. Faith identifies God at work. In the same way that Moses heard the voice of God in the burning bush, we, with faith to guide us, are able to perceive him in what appears to be clutter and confusion. Faith will transform our perception. In this life, faith is our light. With it we can know what we can't see, we can touch what we can't feel, we can strip the world of everything superficial. Faith is the combination to God's vault.

-- Near to the Heart of God; Oct.4 --- Jean-Pierre de Caussade: Abandonment to Divine Providence