Remake/Remodel

You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self…and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds.

Ephesians 4

I tried but I could not find a way
Looking back, all I did was look away
Next time is the best time, we all know
But if there is no next time, where to go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go?

“Remake/Remodel” by Roxy Music

In the quest for herd immunity against COVID I recently took one for the team: that’s right, I came down with the virus.  You’re welcome.

Thankfully, I was vaccinated and boostered, so my symptoms were relatively mild.  It isn’t the worst illness I have ever had, though it may be the strangest. I did lose my senses of taste and smell for five or six days; I cannot imagine what that would be like long term. I am hoping that I will now have enough immunity to carry me through the fall.  (On a side note, I am planning to use COVID fog as an excuse for my forgetfulness for as long as I can.)

Sometimes it’s good to have your day to day routine, your normal patterns of thinking disrupted. Left to my own devices, I would just cruise through life without much thought or course deviation. COVID has broken up my routine and given me the opportunity to rethink a few things.

While rethinking things, including what to do with this blog site, I thought I would clean house.  So, I’m sharing selections from my reading over the last few weeks. Some quotes have spoken to me more deeply than others, but they all made me think.  Hopefully, you will find something in them as well.

Blessings, Mark

The moment the suffering symbol of the cross is placed in front of or as cover for empire-building strategies, Christianity has lost.

Lee Staman

Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection… Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the “Beloved.” Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.

Henri Nouwen

If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence. Since God cannot be imagined, anything our imagination tells us about Him is ultimately a lie and therefore we cannot know Him as He really is unless we pass beyond everything that can be imagined and enter into an obscurity without images and without the likeness of any created thing.

Thomas Merton

If we cannot calmly hold a certain degree of anxiety, we will always look for somewhere to expel it. Expelling what we can’t embrace gives us an identity, but it’s a negative identity. It’s not life energy, it’s death energy. Formulating what we are against gives us a very quick and clear sense of ourselves. Thus, most people fall for it. People more easily define themselves by what they are against, by whom they hate, by who else is wrong, instead of by what they believe in and whom they love.  

Fr. Richard Rohr

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image.  If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them

Thomas Merton

A gentle person makes the best guide, someone who is no longer at war with who he or she has become and who, there, does not need to battle with others as they have become.

Thomas Malone

A life without a…quiet center, easily becomes destructive. When we cling to the results of our actions as our only way of self-identification, then we become possessive and defensive and tend to look at our fellow human beings more as enemies to be kept at a distance than as friends with whom we share the gifts of life. In solitude we can slowly unmask the illusion of our possessiveness and discover in the center of our own self that we are not what we can conquer, but what is given to us.

Henri Nouwen

The right to bear arms does not eclipse the right to life, or the right of all Americans to go about their lives free of the fear that they might be shredded by bullets at any moment. Gun violence is a life issue.

Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, the Catholic Archbishop of Chicago

Mysticism and revolution are two aspects of the same attempt to bring about radical change. Mystics cannot prevent themselves from becoming social critics, since in self-reflection they will discover the roots of a sick society.

Henri Nouwen

And last but certainly not least –

The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.

A core principle of the Center for Action and Contemplation