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Deep Love

"What can we say about God's love? We can say that God's love is unconditional. God does not say, 'I love you, if ...' There are no ifs in God's heart. God's love for us does not depend on what we do or say, on our looks or intelligence, on our success or popularity. God's love for us existed before we were born and will exist after we have died. God's love is from eternity to eternity and is not bound to any time-related events or circumstances. Does that mean that God does not care what we do or say? No, because God's love wouldn't be real if God didn't care. To love without condition does not mean to love without concern. God desires to enter into relationship with us and wants us to love God in return.

Let's dare to enter into an intimate relationship with God without fear, trusting that we will receive love and always more love."

 

-Henri Nouwen

Choosing Joy - Henri Nouwen

Joy is what makes life worth living, but for many joy seems hard to find. They complain that their lives are sorrowful and depressing. What then brings the joy we so much desire? Are some people just lucky, while others have run out of luck? Strange as it may sound, we can choose joy. Two people can be part of the same event, but one may choose to live it quite differently than the other. One may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise. The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it.

What makes us human is precisely this freedom of choice.

 

-Henri Nouwen

What's Your Art? II.5

"When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work.  I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw.

She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, 'You mean they forget?'"

- Howard Ikemoto quoted in Art & Fear by David Bayles & Ted Orland

First Tweets - I'm nobody! Who are you?

I just entered the Twitter-verse (http://twitter.com/#!/BrianBajari) with a bit of reluctance . . . for a variety of reasons. However, I thought my initial foray into tweeting should begin with a poem from one who was rather hidden & better known as a gardener in her lifetime - though her poetry would later change the world. Needless to say, the practice of quiet & anonymity was good for Emily & the poems hidden in her desk drawer needed to remain hidden until the correct time emerged.  Doubtless she would have remained rather unknown in the web 2.0 world.  So I hold her thoughts with me as I plunge deeper into a world of savage verbiage.  Of course quiet & a movement toward hiddenness may be a tonic for all of us so immersed in instantaneous information.  So yes I now tweet but with a sense of nobody-ness in & around me.

 

I'm nobody! Who are you?

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They'd advertise -- you know!

How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell one's name the livelong day
To an admiring bog! 

 

-Emily Dickinson

 

 

Wisdom

"Wisdom is confusing to the proud and often evident to the lowly."

-St. Bonaventure

Christianity is something to do - John Caputo

“Christianity is something to do, not a philosophical puzzle. It comes about not when someone affirms a creedal proposition, but when someone does something. It is a way to be witnessed, not a proposition to be proven.” 

-John D. Caputo, How to Read Kierkegaard

Love Until it Hurts

“I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” 
– Mother Teresa

Love that Bewilders Us . . . Frederick Buechner

"The love for equals is a human thing - of friend for friend, brother for brother.  It is to love what is loving and lovely.  The world smiles.

The love for the less fortunate is a beautiful thing - the love for those who suffer, for those who are poor, the sick, the failures, the unlovely.  This is compassion, and it touches the heart of the world.

The love for the more fortunate is a rare thing - to love those who succeed where we fail, to rejoice without envy with those who rejoice, the love of the poor for the rich, of the black man for the white man.  The world is always bewildered by its saints.

And then there is the love for the enemy - love for the one who does not love you but mocks, threatens, and inflicts pain.  The tortured's love for the torturer.  This is God's love.  It conquers the world."

-Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat

Theology & the Dung Beetle - Frederick Buechner

"Theology is the study of God and his ways.  For all we know, dung beetles may study man and his ways and call it humanology.  If so, we would probably be more touched and amused than irritated.  One hopes that God feels likewise."

-Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

Want of Wonder

We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.

- G.K. Chesterton