miniZibaldone

A Cross-Shattered Church: Reclaiming the Theological Heart of Preaching by  Stanley Hauerwas We live in a death-denying world that seems determined to develop technologies that will enable us to get out of life alive. Yet the more we strive to be free of death the more our lives are shaped by the death-determined means we create to try to free ourselves of death. Even more paradoxical, the means we use to free ourselves from death only serve to increase our isolation from one another. We fear the loneliness we think death entails, but it turns out that the loneliness we fear death entails is the expression of the loneliness made unavoidable by our attempts to avoid death. Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead. But Lazarus is still to die. We are still to die. Jesus, by contrast, has been raised never again to die. His death makes possible a communion that overwhelms the loneliness our sin creates. ... That feast we call Eucharist, for in eating it we are made “living member...

Being Disciples by Rowan Williams [T]here is no contrast, no tension really, between holiness and involvement in the world. On the contrary, the most holy, who is Jesus, is the most involved, most at the heart of human experience. And we really misunderstand the whole thing very seriously if we think that holiness means being defended from our own humanity or other people’s humanity: quite the opposite. To understand this, we need to bear in mind an all-important distinction between being holy and simply being good. There’s a fine phrase in one of Evelyn Waugh’s novels, when a character is described by another: ‘She was saintly, but she wasn’t a saint.’ The character in question is indeed saintly, very strict, devout and intense, but the effect she has on those around her is to make them feel guilty, frustrated and unhappy. They feel inadequate, and I suspect that many of us experience this when we encounter people we think are saintly or Very Good—they make us feel rather worse ... In...

Open to Judgement by Rowan Williams The dark night is God’s attack on religion. If you genuinely desire union with the unspeakable love of God, then you must be prepared to have your ‘religious’ world shattered. If you think devotional practices, theological insights, even charitable actions give you some sort of a purchase on God, you are still playing games. On the other hand, if you can face and accept and even rejoice in the experience of darkness, if you can accept that God is more than an idea which keeps your religion or philosophy or politics tidy – then you may find a way back to religion, philosophy or politics, to an engagement with them that is more creative because you are more aware of the oddity, the uncontrollable quality of the truth at the heart of all things. This is what ‘detachment’ means – not being ‘above the battle’, but being involved in such a way that you can honestly confront whatever comes to you without fear of the unknown; it is a kind of readiness for th...

A Prayer Journal by Flannery O'Connor Oh God please make my mind clear. Please make it clean. I ask You for a greater love for my holy Mother and I ask her for a greater love for You. Please help me to get down under things and find where You are. I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always very fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to You. Please do not let the explanations of the psychologists about this make it turn suddenly cold. My intellect is so limited, Lord, that I can only trust in You to preserve me as I should be. Please help all the ones I love to be free from their suffering. Please forgive me.

"A person who is poor in spirit has nothing except one thing for which and by which he is made: endless aspiration. This is openness and willingness: boundless expectation. It is not boundless because the heap of things one expects is endless. No, he does not expect anything, but lives a boundless openness, and he does not expect anything! […] It’s as if in that meadow, we imagined a person who is poor in spirit, and we would have to imagine him sitting there with his legs spread, his face up, looking at the sky, the earth, the mountains, and everything, with this total dilation of his heart without any set image in mind: ‘Well, I would like a roof, a home, a wife, children, money.’ Nothing, there is nothing! This is the original nature of the human person, and in fact the original nature of the human person is expectation of the infinite." Those who live the encounter with Christ have discovered the future good, which in any case remains a mystery, because in no way can we d...

From 2023 Christmas Midnight Mass Homily of Pope Francis Let the seed of the Incarnation bloom within us Brothers and sisters, tonight we might ask ourselves: Which God do we believe in? In the God of incarnation or the god of achievement? Because there is always a risk that we can celebrate Christmas while thinking of God in pagan terms, as a powerful potentate in the sky; a god linked to power, worldly success, and the idolatry of consumerism. With the false image of a distant and petulant deity who treats the good well and the bad poorly; a deity made in our own image and likeness, handy for resolving our problems and removing our ills. God, on the other hand, waves no magic wand; he is no god of commerce who promises “everything all at once”. He does not save us by pushing a button, but draws near us, in order to change our world from within.... Dear brother, dear sister, to God, who changed history in the course of a census, you are not a number, but a face. Your name is written o...