Tall Monastic Guy:

« March 2009 | Main | May 2009 »

April 05, 2009

Questions for Palm Sunday

From NT Wright's, Mark for Everyone (p148),

"Are we ready to put our property at his disposal, to obey his orders even when they puzzle us? Are we ready to go out of our way to honour him, finding in our lives the equivalents of cloaks to spread on the road before him, and the branches to wave to make his coming into a real festival? Or have we so domesticated and trivialized our Christian commitment, our devotion to Jesus himself, that we look on him simply as someone to help us through the various things we want to do anyway, someone to provide us with comforting religious experiences?"

Posted at 09:27 AM in missional/incarnational | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

April 03, 2009

Imagining other metaphors: some thoughts for Holy Week

During this particular Lenten season I’ve been thinking a little harder than usual about the metaphors we use to understand and explain the atonement. The heightened emphasis comes from several conversations, one in Dublin, a few from around Denver, and a weekend in Albuquerque just last month. All of those formidable conversations have accelerated my desire to come up with different and accessible stories that provoke me toward further action and contemplation in the way of Jesus. Throughout my life I’ve heard the “ransom” or “paying the debt”, “generous judge” type of ideas, but I believe we regularly need ways of making the story strange again, so that we can hear it once more as though it were new to us.

Continue reading "Imagining other metaphors: some thoughts for Holy Week" »

Posted at 05:49 PM in Ryan's ruminations | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

April 01, 2009

With the Poor: Three Conversions

My friend, Scott Dewey, with Mile High Ministries recently posted an article that I very much resonated with. Especially in this season in which I spend my Wednesday evenings with friends at the Network Coffee House who continue to form and inform me of both my ego and Jesus' preference for the poor. I encourage you to read it and am curious of where you find yourself on the spectrum.

Posted at 09:45 AM in Curiosities... | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Words make Worlds...

"It becomes so clear to me as I grow older that people who change, and keep changing, are the only people who grow up." -Richard Rohr
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
"Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be." -John Wooden
"Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody. Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody." - Henri Nouwen
"Spirituality is not a formula; it is not a test. It is a relationship. Spirituality is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection; it is about connection. The way of spirituality begins where we are now in the mess of our lives." -Mike Yaconelli
"But that doesn’t mean community is easy. For everything in this world tries to pull us away from community, pushes us to choose ourselves over others, to choose independence over interdependence, to choose great things over small things, to choose going fast alone over going far together." -Shane Claiborne
"Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don’t do, and more in light of what they suffer." Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create." Albert Einstein
"Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." Howard Thurman
"A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." -Dr. Martin Luther King
"Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful--- Christian community is the final apologetic." -Francis Schaefer
"It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one’s neighbor in order to borrow his tools." Wendell Berry
"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than the particular country in which he was born." -Francois Fenelon
"Ministry cannot be about maintenance, but it is about gathering, about embrace, about welcoming home all sorts of and conditions of people; home is a place for mother tongue, of basic soul food, of old stories told and treasured, of being at ease, known by name, belonging without qualifying for membership." -Walter Brueggemann
"Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get round to being the particular poet or particular monk that they are intended to be by God." "In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be." -Thomas Merton
"God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and God's been speaking through them ever since. So, if God chooses to speak through you don't think to highly of yourself." -Rich Mullins
"We must become holy not because we want to feel holy but because Christ must be able to live his life fully in us." Mother Teresa
"I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self." Henri Nouwen