Autumn is a second spring
where every leaf is a flower.
where every leaf is a flower.
~ Albert Camus
Every Leaf A Flower
3
Tag Archives: quotes
Why I Am Hopeful
Andy Crouch nails it in this essay,
“We often seem incapable of seeing ourselves first as gardeners:
people whose first cultural calling is to keep good
what is, by the common grace of God, already good.
A gardener does not pull out weeds because she hates weeds;
she pulls out weeds because she loves the garden,
and because (hopefully) there are more vegetables or flowers in it than weeds.
people whose first cultural calling is to keep good
what is, by the common grace of God, already good.
A gardener does not pull out weeds because she hates weeds;
she pulls out weeds because she loves the garden,
and because (hopefully) there are more vegetables or flowers in it than weeds.
This kind of love of the garden
—loving our broken, beautiful cultures
for what they are at their best—
is the precondition, I am coming to believe,
for any serious cultural creativity or influence.
When weeds infest the garden,
the gardener does not take the opportunity
to decry the corruption of the garden as a whole.
She gets patiently, discerningly, to work
keeping the garden good.”
Listening, Really
On the importance of listening:
“Think of a person you know who tends to interrupt others. This person is not a good listener. His or her mind processes what it takes in and anticipates what the person speaking might say. This behavior is about impatience, insecurity, arrogance and a lack of caring. It is about an absence of openness, in the sense of being truly receptive to what one is listening to.”
On his dislike of music on headphones:
“But the real reason I don’t use personal audio stereo equipment is because I do not need it. My life in music as someone who grew up with it, continues to listen to it with great care and joy, has given me a headful of melodies that surge forth unbidden. They resonate in my mind and in my ears; they float away only to be replaced by others. A life in music can do this and you can be a part of it.”
These passages captured my attention this past weekend.
The second quote made me wonder: how often do we (individually or as a culture) sing in our daily lives? We had coffee with an old, dear friend who told us about his life-changing trips to South Africa. He talked about how musical their culture was, how spontaneous outbreaks of singing occurred regularly. When you listen with headphones (and I do) the aspect of community is removed from the listening experience. Individualism wins and connectedness loses. At the wedding reception in California, the DJ played old songs; what fun to lean in to the person next to you and croon the song together. There is power in singing together.
I think that is why the singing at our church is so potent: everyone sings with gusto and singing together is better than singing alone.
When is the last time you sang aloud?
*photo is my mom’s brother Gordon and my husband Curt talking and listening at a rendezvous last year
Lovely Flowers
Lovely flowers are the smiles of God’s goodness.
~ William Wilberforce
Re-member
This was our membership. Burley called it that. He loved to call it that. […] The work was freely given in exchange for work freely given. There was no bookkeeping, no accounting, no settling up. What you owed was considered paid when you had done what needed doing. Every account was paid in full by the understanding that when we were needed we would go, and when we had need the others, or enough of them, would come. In the long, anxious work of the tobacco harvest none of us considered that we were finished until everybody was finished.
The membership includes the dead. […]
What will be remembered, Andy Catlett, when we are gone? What will finally become of this lineage of people who have been members one of another? I don’t know. And yet their names and their faces, what they did and said, are not gone, are not “the past,” but still are present to me, and I give thanks.
Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry
When we are members of one another, remembering involves re-membering.
When one of us is cut down, it’s as if we have been dis-membered.
Remember.
Literally, Be mindful again.
What Makes A Good Teacher?
I hope reading the title of this post immediately puts a picture in your mind of that special teacher who opened your eyes, who connected with you, who drew out of you something you didn’t know was there, who made you do/think more than you believed possible. I’ve been reading The Courage to Teach
This book builds on a simple premise: good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher. [my emphasis]
Good teachers join
» self and
» subject and
» students
in the fabric of life.
Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves. [Yes, yes! I want to grow life long learners.]
As good teachers weave the fabric that joins them with students and subjects, the heart is the loom on which the threads are tied, the tension is held, the shuttle flies, and the fabric is stretched tight. Small wonder, then, that teaching tugs at the heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart–and the more one loves teaching, the more heartbreaking it can be.
The courage to teach is the courage to keep one’s heart open in those very moments when the heart is asked to hold more than it is able so that teacher and students and subject can be woven into the fabric of community that learning and living require.
Bored? Lethargic?
Today’s best quote (and it is only 7:17 a.m.) comes from a book review of Kathleen Norris’ newest book Acedia & Me
In the end her remedies for acedia are simple:
Go for a walk.
Memorize Scripture.
Sing Psalms.
Seek community.
Worship.
Shovel manure.
Dust a bookshelf.
Wash dishes.
Study.
Read.
Write.
And be kind to one another.
Go for a walk.
Memorize Scripture.
Sing Psalms.
Seek community.
Worship.
Shovel manure.
Dust a bookshelf.
Wash dishes.
Study.
Read.
Write.
And be kind to one another.
Healed, Whole, Holy
“It is no coincidence that the root word of whole, health, heal, holy, is hale (as in hale and hearty). If we are healed, we become whole, we are hale and hearty, we are holy.
The marvelous thing is that this holiness is nothing we can earn. We don’t become holy by acquiring merit badges and Brownie points. It has nothing to do with virtue or job descriptions or morality. It is nothing we can do, in this do-it-yourself world. It is gift, sheer gift, waiting there to be recognized and received. We do not have to be qualified to be holy. We do not have to be qualified to be whole, or healed.”
~ Madeleine L’Engle
~ ~ ~
“Wounds. By his wounds we are healed. But they are our wounds, too, and until we have been healed we do not know what wholeness is. The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort toward wholeness.”
~ Madeleine L’Engle
~ Madeleine L’Engle
A Soldier of the Great War
Reading Mark Helprin keeps me off balanced. I never know what direction he will take. His stories are intriguing, engrossing and provocative. I’m beginning my final lap of the 860 page marathon called Soldier of the Great War
“I never took my religious instruction seriously,” Alessandro told them, “because it was delivered in the language of reason. I asked everyone you can imagine, from the nuns when I was a child, to bishops, philosophers, and theologians later on, why do you speak of God in the language of reason? And they said it was because God has burdened those who believe in Him with the inability to prove His existence except in the language of His enemies, which is a language in which you cannot prove His existence. Why bother? I asked. Their answers showed me that they believe in God no more strongly than you do. Can you see a group of people on a beach in a storm, deafened by the surf, their hair blown back from their foreheads, their eyes tearing, trying to prove the existence of the wind and the sea?
“I want nothing more than what I have, for what I have is enough. I’m grateful for it. I foresee no reward, no eternal life. I expect only to leave further pieces of my heart in one place or another, but I love God nonetheless, with every atom of my being, and will love Him until I fall into black oblivion.”
“You’re grateful for what you have?” they asked, their lips curling into bitter smiles. The leader said, “You’re a piece of sh** in a dungeon. You live on potatoes and salt, and you’re a servant to the dying scum of a dying world. For this you’re grateful?”
Alessandro thought for a moment, and then he said, “Yes.”
“Why?”
“I know what I was, what I had, what I lack.”
Mama, Don’t Let Your Baby Grow Up Without Grammar
“…he writes the worst English
I have ever encountered.
It reminds me of a string of wet sponges;
it
reminds me of tattered washing on the line;
it reminds me of stale
bean-soup,
of college yells,
of dogs barking idiotically through
endless nights.
It is so bad a sort of grandeur creeps into it.
It
drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish,
and crawls up to the
topmost pinnacle of posh.
It is rumble and bumble.
It is flap and doodle.
It is balder and dash.”
~ H.L. Mencken
“The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.”
~ E.E. Cummings
The subject of these scathing sentences is our twenty-ninth president, Warren G. Harding. It is said that he was elected because of his striking good looks (?? I’m just not into eyebrows) and his ambitious wife. He promised a return to normalcy – one of his favorite words, a word journalists thought should be normality — but his short term was marked by scandal.
Thus endeth the history lesson of the day.
A Living Pencil 