Work and Weep for the Broken

To be a saint is to live not with hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it; but it is to live with the hands stretched out both to give and to receive with gladness. To be a saint is to work and weep for the broken and suffering of the world, but it is also to be strangely light of heart in the knowledge that there is something greater than the world that mends and renews.

Frederick Buechner

Come Dance

Every child has known God,
Not the God of names,
Not the God of don'ts,
Not the God who ever does
Anything weird,
But the God who knows only 4 words
And keeps repeating them, saying:
"Come Dance with Me."
Come Dance.

Hafiz (1320-1389)

It All Matters

Each human being is at the same time both riddled with divine sparks and in desperate need of repair. Each person is the whole world. And every human action therefore plays a role in the final restitution. Whatever we do is related to this ultimate task: to return all things to their original place in God. Everything a person does affects the process.

Lawrence Kushner

Truly Human

I don't think that it is always necessary to talk about the deepest and most private dimension of who we are, but I think we are called to talk to each other out of it, and just as importantly to listen to each other out of it, to live out of our depths as well as our shallows. We are all of us adolescents, painfully growing and groping our way toward something like true adulthood, and maybe the greatest value we have both to teach and to learn as we go is the capacity to be amazed...which is a power to heal us and bless us and in the end maybe even to transform us into truly human beings at last.

Fred Buechner

Seeds of Fuller Humanity

If the church is not a place where we not only learn something about what it means to be human but also a place where seeds of a fuller humanity are planted in us and watered, to grow, then all our hymns and prayers and preachments are vanity.

Frederick Buechner

All the Same People

You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Anne Lamott

Live Inside God's Imagination

To participate in the Eucharist is to live inside God's imagination. It is to be caught up into what is really real, the body of Christ. As human persons, body and soul, are incorporated into the performance of Christ's corpus verum, they resist the state's ability to define what is real through the mechanism of torture. Hardly anything remains to be said about imagination as a theological force. Except to note that clearly the need for Eucharistic imagination in the United States (Canada) is very different from the need for it in abusive contexts ... It may be, however, that torture and consumer satiation perform the same negative function: to deny lively communal imagination that resists mindless humanity of despairing conformity ... Numbness does not hurt like torture, but in quite a parallel way, numbness robs us of our capability for humanity.


Walter Brueggemann

Prophetic Imagination