Tall Monastic Guy:

September 19, 2012

Holding the Tension: a divine invitation

“I’ve been holding tension my whole life.” This was a remark that a friend made in our conversation over breakfast this week. The phrase has lodged itself in my mind due to the individual’s credibility as a gay man who also happens to be a committed follower of Jesus. Since coming out twenty years ago, he’s found himself at home in the thick complexity of unresolved tension.

In general, tension comes to the surface when we are faced with various elements of absurdity, irony, opposition, or contradictions throughout our life experiences. Life throws these awkward spaces at us all the time and in response we demand inner resolution to it all.

Continue reading "Holding the Tension: a divine invitation" »

Posted at 01:46 PM in Access, prayer, Ryan's ruminations, Street Psalms | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

September 06, 2012

Misdirected desires... Messianic expectations... (Part 2)

In my previous post I wrote of Rene Girard’s theory of Mimetic Desire as a psychological bedrock which may clue us in to the behavioral patterns we observe throughout culture... especially in an election year! I realize my epic cheating story may not be the most powerful metaphor to illustrate Girard's philosophy but I'm just assuming you're at least a little like me and may appreciate some Cliff Notes.

I'll continue to work off that monumental event in my life to illustrate another piece of Girard's theory which is the Scapegoat phenomenon. If you're taking the time to read this post, I'd love for you to engage this conversation in regard to how you see the impact of both Mimetic Desire as well as Scapegoating in your life as well as the community around you. Is a deeper understanding of Girard's work helpful for you? Are you noticing this psychological theory at work in the fabric of culture in say, the passion of partisan politics or professional sports fanatics?

Back to my high school golf story...

Continue reading "Misdirected desires... Messianic expectations... (Part 2)" »

Posted at 10:50 AM in Access, Ryan's ruminations, Street Psalms | Permalink | Comments (2) | 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