True North: Grace - Notes from Earthen Vessels

Sunday, February 19, 2017

Grace - Notes from Earthen Vessels - Grace

Notes on what I marked in my copy of Earthen Vessels - Matthew Anderson -

Grace is not a technique.
It is not a magical quality that God dispenses like a candy machine, or the power for self-actualization or personal peace and affluence. It is not a lubricant to get the parts inside working properly. And it is not a three-step program for self-improvement. When we treat grace that way, we surrender to the spirit of our age by fashioning ourselves and our bodies through our own efforts. We don't use grace to shape ourselves - it shapes us into the image of the one who gives it. ~pg.27

I recently pooled a chat group of my oldest friends asking what do y'all think would be an important attribute/characteristic/quality/etc. to begin your 60s with ... what makes the 60s great? One friend answered I would propose grace. She went on to say grace encompasses several things including physical grace,the grace of forgiveness,the grace of knowing when to keep your mouth shut and the grace of knowing the best thing to say or do. The "in and out" on going conversation took a different turn after that one (and only) response. Grace probably is the ultimate answer to that question.

Through grace - the presence of God himself is in our hearts and lives - it is not a technique, it does have a shape. And it looks like Jesus. ~pg.27

Christ is not only the pattern for our lives - he is also the power. ...
The reduction of our lives and morality to a "technique" is at the root of the malaise within the evangelical world. Sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Denton introduced the term moralist therapeutic deism to describe the dominant religion among young people in America. It is deistic because its God is not present or active in the world. It is therapeutic because its benefits involve feeling "good, happy, secure, and at peace." And it is moralistic because it teaches that doing the right thing is central to having a "good and happy life." It is technique - the assertion of our wills on the world - applied to morality. pg.28

Unfortunately, evangelicals sometimes suffer from an anemic understanding of how grace shapes our lives. We alternate between playing the legalistic card when people attempt to draw lines about how Christians should or should not act, and playing the libertine card when others sanction their immoral actions with the gospel. We either have cheap grace or it doesn't exist at all. ~pg.28 A gospel ethic, though, is a normative account of how our lives conform to the pattern of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that is discerned and freely enacted by the power of the Spirit's indwelling presence.(*15 - Donovan's Resurrection and Moral Order is the key text here.)~pg. 29

So what does that mean Matthew Anderson asks ... and suggest that we reconsider and clarify three popular ways in which we talk about ethics:

First we need to guard against conflatulating our understanding of Christian freedom with our culture's premise that freedom is our absolute right to do whatever we want without harming others.
...
Second - and I put this forward tentatively - I suspect we need to rethink whether conscience is an adequate guide for how we live in the body. ... Specifically, if my conscience did not trouble me and the action in consideration was not explicitly commanded or prohibited in the Scripture, then I was "free" to move ahead. But if the conscience is a faculty like the mind or the heart, then it too is fallen - which means it needs to be brought into conformity with Scripture, the authoritative witness to the reality of Christ's death and resurrection, and is insufficient as a guide to how we should love our neighbors as ourselves.~pg.29

(In the margin I wrote - numbed conscience shaped by repetitive sin and societal norms. I believe that "repentance" is not just saying "I'm sorry", it includes stopping doing whatever it is one is "sorry" for doing.)

Third, ... our experiences are an inadequate guide for determining how we should live ... . ...We must always evaluate our own circumstances and experiences in light of the authoritative Word of God. ~pg.30

No comments:

Quotes I like

"Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today." ~ Mark Twain
"Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul. " ~ Augustine
"That we come as a seed of who we might be and make choices which tend ourselves as we grow towards who we are becoming. so ... the idea of where we spend our time and collect our thoughts is pretty consequential ". ~unknown
"How to hit home runs: I swing as hard as I can, and I try to swing right through the ball... The harder you grip the bat, the more you can swing it through the ball, and the farther the ball will go. I swing big, with everything I've got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can." ~ Babe Ruth
"Often we don't even discover them as memories until years later when they emerge, not as they were, but as they have become as our souls expand enough to value what we thought at the time was dross as the real gold of our lives". ~ Gerard Van der Leun
“It is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness. I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return. ” ~ George MacDonald, Phantastes
“from what we cannot hold the stars are made” ~ W.S.Merwin
“we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been” ~ W.S.Merwin
"Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.
"Always do what you are afraid to do." ~ Emerson
“Sometimes you will never know the value of something,until it becomes a memory.” ~ Dr. Seuss
"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good." ~ Vaclav Havel
"Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world: all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it....Because Galileo saw this, and particularly because he drummed it into the scientific world he is the father of modern physics-indeed, of modern science altogether." ~Einstein
"The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds." ~John Maynard Keyes
"Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away." ~ George Eliot
"If nothing saves us from death, may love at least save us from life." - Pablo Neruda
"Yes I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world." ~ Oscar Wilde
"God bears His soul in the words of His book - thereby He draws me to Himself." ~ Gary Spooner
"Negative capability...is being capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." ~ John Keats
"I choose love . . . No occasion justifies hatred; no injustice warrants bitterness. I choose love. Today I will love God and what God loves." ~ Max Lucado
"If you had the chance to change your fate, would you?" ~ Merida from BRAVE
"There are those who say fate is something beyond our command. That destiny is not our own, but I know better. Our fate lives within us, you only have to be brave enough to see it." ~ Merida from BRAVE
What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
"To my left, Scorpius' tail, embedded in the Milky Way, is dragging billions of stars west." ~ "Captain Dave" via FL390
“There would be no chance at all of getting to know death if it happened only once. But fortunately, life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change. Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These changes, these small deaths, are our living links with death. They are death’s pulses, death’s heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things we cling to.” ~ Sogyal Rinpoche
"Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart." ~ Kahlil Gibran
“It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.” ~ Lois McMaster Bujold
"Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness, nourishment of mind by His truth, purifying of imagination by His beauty, opening of the heart to His love, and submission of will to His purpose. All this gathered up in adoration is the greatest of all expressions of which we are capable." ~ William Temple
“The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.” ~ Norman Schwarzkopf
"True leadership only exists if people follow when they have the freedom not to." ~Jim Collins
"The practice of leadership is not the same as the exercise of power."~James MacGregor Burns
“They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
"To contemplate Supreme Truth is like looking upon the face of God; it is consumation and therefore extermination, while learning, which is an endless extenstion of conscious activity, is the striving after, but not the acquisition of truth." ~Martin Nozick (Miquel De Unamuno*The Agony of Belief)
"Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?" ~ Tennyson
“Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.” ~Tennyson
“There is meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveler.” ~Bonhoeffer
"For my part I know nothing with certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream." ~ Vincent Van Gogh
“These are the days that must happen to you.” ~ Whitman
"We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well." ~George MacDonald
"Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god." ~ Dennis De Rougemont
“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” ~ Dr.Seuss
"All that we may see or seem, is but a dream within a dream." ~ Edgar Allan Poe
“The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.” ~ Whitman
“Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?” ~ Walt Whitman
"Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis - once that crisis can be recognized and understood. " ~ Norman Cousins
“Some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.” ~ Louise Erdrich, Tales of Burning Love
“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.” ~ Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves
“I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science. It has no beginning and no end.” ~ Stephen Hawking
“They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness” ~ Louise Erdrich
"I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own--a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty." ~ Einstein
“There are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion that if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret, spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together” ~ H.W. Longfellow
“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.” Marcel Proust
"To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life." ~ T. S. Eliot
"Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it." ~ Buddha
"The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart." ~ Buddha
"Nothing happens unless first a dream." ~ Carl Sandburg
"We can do no great things - only small things with great love." ~ Mother Teresa
"Thinking is the talking of the soul with itself." ~ Plato
"The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread." ~Mother Teresa
"We see things as we are, not as they are. " ~ Leo Rosten
"I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong. " ~ Leo Rosten
“I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.” ~ T.S. Eliot
" Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground. " ~ Dante
Personality implies that as this person: I am completely determined on every side and so finite, yet nonetheless I am simply and solely self-relation, and therefore in finitude I know myself as something infinite, – universal, and free. Philosophy of Right (1821) ~ GWF Hegel ... and ... ‘Person’ is essentially different from ‘subject’, since ‘subject’ is only the possibility of personality; every living thing of any sort is a subject. A person, then, is a subject aware of this subjectivity, since in personality it is of myself alone that I am aware. Philosophy of Right (1821) ~ Hegel ... and ... ‘Be a person and respect others as persons.’ Philosophy of Right (1821) ~ Hegel
"I've loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night." ~ Galileo
"Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn't know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day." ~ Elie Wiesel (Dawn)
"Think higher, feel deeper." ~ Elie Wiesel
"One person of integrity can make a difference." ~ Elie Wiesel
"Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds." ~ Elie Wiesel
"... Their words aren't heard, their voices aren't recorded, but their silence fills the earth: unspoken truth is spoken everywhere..." Ps 19:3-4 ~ King David
"I distinctly remember forgetting that." ~ Clara Barton
"This constellation in the dark - grace, thanksgiving, joy - it might be like that - reaching for the stars. So hard. So hard." ~ Ann Voskamp
"People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life." ~ Liz Gilbert
"If you want to be happy, be." ~ Henry David Thoreau
"In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." ~ Albert Camus
“Forbid us something, and that thing we desire” ~ Geoffrey Chaucer
'There is no easy way from the earth to the stars. -Non est ad astra mollis e terris via." ~ Seneca
"Never take counsel of your fears." ~ General Stonewall Jackson
"the truth is, everyone is going to hurt you...you just got to find the ones worth suffering for..." ~Bob Marley
"A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil."-~Victor Hugo
"He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determine the end." Harry Emerson Fosdick
"The difficulty in life is the choice." - George A Moore
"... who would not, finding a way, break loose from hell ... and boldly venture to whatever place farthest from pain?" - John Milton (Paradise Lost)
"If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is compromise." - Robert Fritz
"Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable." - Sir Francis Bacon
"There are always two choices. Two paths to take. One is easy. And its only reward is that it's easy." - Richard Bach
"The future is not a result of choices among alternate paths offered by the present, but a place that is created ... created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not found, but made, and the activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination." - Richard Bach
"Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences." - Richard Bach
"Some choices we live not once but a thousand times over, remembering them for the rest of our lives." - Eleanor Roosevelt
"Instead of looking at life as a narrowing funnel, we can see it ever widening to choose the things we want to do, to take the wisdom we've learned and create something." - Liz Carpenter
"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." Neil Peart
"In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility." - Victor Frankl
" The last of human freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances." - Victor Frankl
"The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice." - George Eliot (aka Mary Anne Evans)
"Every choice you make has an end result." - Zig Ziglar
"We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them." - Kahlil Gibran
"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday." - John Wayne
"For what is the best choice for each individual is the highest it is possible for him to acheive ... we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit. What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing." - Aristotle

Quotes I like:

"The march of improvement in any given field is always marked by periods of inactivity and then by sudden bursts of energy which revolutionize existing methods sometimes in a day." ~ George Eastman
"As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a single pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives." ~Henry David Thoreau
"The Art of Thinking is the art of being one's self and this art can only be learned if one is by one's self." ~Ernest Dimnet
'It is a dangerous thing to ask why someone else has been given more. It is humbling -- and indeed healthy -- to ask why you have been given so much." ~ Condoleeza Rice (commencement speech at University of Alabama
"... life does not consist mainly -- or even largely -- of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thougths that is forever blowing through one's head. " ~ Mark Twain
"It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory--and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making." ~ Mark Twain
"God's gift to you is life itself. What you do with it is your gift to God." ~ Leo Buscaglia
"Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things. ~ T.S. Eliot
"For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously." Also; "A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
''I would finish hoeing my garden.'' ~ St. Francis of Assisi
"Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams." ~ Thoreau
"It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see." ~ Thoreau
"A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone." ~ Thoreau
"I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now." ~ Thoreau
"It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil." ~ Thoreau
"If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment." ~Thoreau
"I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark." ~ Thoreau
"I have found that hollow, which even I had relied on for solid." ~ Thoreau
"Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still." ~ Thoreau
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor." ~ Thoreau
"In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood." ~ Thoreau
"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready." ~ Thoreau
"Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance; they make the latitudes and longitudes." ~ Thoreau
"No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well." ~ Thoreau
"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them." ~ Thoreau
There's enough poison in that drink to kill an army platoon. Good thing I'm a marine." - chuck/tv
"Hell, there are no rules here- we're trying to accomplish something." - Thomas A Edison
"Do more than belong, participate. Do more than care, help. Do more than believe, practice. Do more than be fair, be kind. Do more than forgive, forget. Do more than dream, work." - W. A. Ward"
"Death isn't sad. The sad thing is: most people don't live at all." - Socrates in The Peaceful Warrior
"Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try." which is Yoda from "The Empire Strikes Back"
"Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude." - Denis Waitley
"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy." - R.L. Stevenson
"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T.S. Eliot
"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run" ~Thoreau
"Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing." - Abraham Lincoln
"Who so loves believes the impossible.” - Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"Earth's crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees, takes off his shoes - The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.” - Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, then to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt
"Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it." - Colin Powell
"The freedom to pursue an aesthetic quality in life is an added dimension, like being able to fly where others walk." - Truman Capote
"Do you have the patience to wait til your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?" - Lao Tzu
"When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth." Billy - age 4
"Leadership is getting someone to do what they don't want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve." - Tom Landry

...and more favorite quotes...

"But the dream is never forgotten, only put aside and never out of reach: Where once the dream connected boys with the world of men, now it reconnects men with the spirit of boys." ~ John Thorn
“My real self wanders elsewhere, far away, wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.” ― Hermann Hesse
“Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.” ~ Oscar Wilde
"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length." ~ Robert Frost
"A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog." ~ Jack London
"It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us." ~ John Ruskin
No more is it a question of speaking of space and light: the question is to make space and light, which are there, speak to us." ~ Merleau-Ponty
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." ~ Dr. ML King
"Originality is... a by-product of sincerity." ~Marianne Moore
"Things can fall apart, or threaten to, for many reasons, and then there's got to be a leap of faith. Ultimately, when you're at the edge, you have to go forward or backward; if you go forward, you have to jump together." - Yo-Yo Ma
"Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you." - Marsha Norman
"After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb." - Nelson Mandela
"If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits? " - Carl Sagan
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." - Carl Sagan
"The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous." - Carl Sagan
Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements." - Napoleon Hill
"If I only had an hour to chop down a tree, I would spend the first 45 minutes sharpening my axe" - Abraham Lincoln