The Bible is about dysfunctional families. There’s no other kind in there.
Category: Getting pithy
Sad People
What do sad people have in common? It seems that they have all built a shrine to the past and often go there and do a strange wail and worship. What is the beginning of happiness? It is to stop being so religious like that. — Hafez
As Lily Tomlin says, “Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past.
Presents
“It’s so very hard, receiving. When you give something, you’re in much greater control. But when you receive something, you’re so vulnerable.”
“I think the greatest gift you can give a person is an honest receiving of what a person has to offer.”
Fred Rogers
Pay attention, fundagelicals
May our learning curb the error
that blind belief can breed,
lest we justify some terror
with an antiquated creed.
I’m adapting a sentence in a lyric by Thomas Troeger.
Certainty
“Kate Bowler writes in Everything Happens for a Reason/And Other Lies I’ve Loved, ‘There is a trite cruelty in the logic of the perfectly certain.’ That is true about virtually everything we think we know with certainty, particularly about what is greater than us.”
Vance Morgan in “Freelance Christianity” 190502, Patheos.com
Foregiveness
“Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.”
Lily Tomlin
Tikkun Olam
To take up your cross isn’t to accept difficulties but to risk reputation and life, because tikkun olam is the right thing to do.
Tikkun olam: Repair of the world, in Hebrew. Often interpreted as resolving to behave constructively, and — my addition — to heal and improve society with words and acts of compassion.
from Annie Dillard
God’s works are as good as we make them.
Day Eight
Having made the world, having given it everything it needs to continue, having brought it to the point of overabundance and possibility of dynamism, God left it for us to finish.
God left it to us to be the mercy and the justice, the charity and the care, the righteousness and the commitment, all that it will take for people to bring the goodness of God to outweigh the rest.
— Sr. Joan Chittister
Gautama Buddha:
“Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it…or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings — that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.”
From this alone, we can see why Buddhism doesn’t conflict with any legitimate religion.