quotes from tIR pt2

"God comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable... In my suburban comfort, I increasingly felt disturbed by God... my discomfort arose not from a cynical judgmentalism but from a longing for something more."

"The more I read the Scriptures, the more uncertain I became about my plans for the future, or even of the wisdom of making plans in the first place."

"People always want to define you by what you do. I want to be a lover of God and people... I was convinced that what we do is not really as important as who we are."

"Concern yourself with your vocation, and that is to be lovers of Jesus." - Mother Teresa

"It made sense to be single, and many of the people I had grown to admire had lived beautiful lives of singleness. And their lives would have been different had they been married (not bad, just different)."

"It was as if every good Christian should marry, and yet the more I looked at good Christians thoughout history, the less sure I was about that... Somehow I had missed the fact that singleness was a beautiful means of discipleship and that church history is filled with folks who followed God as singles - Jesus for one; many of the disciples and martyrs... What would Mother Teresa's life looked like had she been married?"

"I was attracted to God as lover. And then I began to experience God as lover, and quickly I became attracted to the Lover... Life is a romance with the divine."

"We can live without sex, but we cannot live without love, and God is love." - some Catholic monk

"I had come to see God as lover and provider and to desire a life of singleness and poverty."

"We've taken the blood at the foot of the cross and turned it into Kool-Aid." - Cornell West

"Totemism: the human tendancy to form our conception of God in our own image... take the values and traditions that we most admire about ourselves and project them onto a totem. Eventually, we stand in awe of that totem and end up worshiping an incarnation of the things we love about ourselves."

"God created us in his image, and we decided to return the favor." - George Bernard Shaw

"Buddy Jesus has become a white American resembling Mr. Rogers... I had grown very weary of this Jesus. THERE IS ANOTHER JESUS!... deconstruct the American totem, to take him (Jesus) off the totem pole we nailed him to."

"We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor. When the worlds of poverty and wealth collide, the resulting powerful fusion can change the world."

"I long for the Calcutta slums (or whatever your Calcutta slums are) to meet the Chicago suburbs (or your rich community) and for each to see God's image in the other."

"I truly believe that when the poor meet the rich, riches will have no meaning. And when the rich meet the poor, we will see poverty come to an end."


tunes: God of Justice (We Must Go).Tim Hughes