I grew up without a father around. I have certain memories of him taking me to my first jazz concert and giving me my first basketball as a Christmas present. But he left when I was two years old. And even though my sister and I were lucky enough to be raised by a wonderful mother and caring grandparents, I always felt his absence and wondered what it would have been like if he had been a greater presence in my life. I still do.
We avoid the reality of Christ’s power in a number of ways. For instance, we’re tempted to spiritualize his power, to reduce the elemental potency and energy to a moment of personal religious inspiration. The stilling of the storm is about psychologist storms in our lives. The healing of the lame is about solving emotional problems cripple us. Jesus bringing sight to the blind is about God’s ability to help us see our lives clearly. And so on and so forth. If we do that enough, we begin to think the Gospel stories are nothing but metaphors, and metaphors primarily about us.
“It is a form of vanity to imagine you are living in the worst of times—there have always been worse. In bad times and heavy seas, the natural fear is that things will get worse, and never better. It’s a jolt to a Western, instinctively progressive mind, trained to think of history as ascendant—like the stock market, like housing prices—to find trends running in the other direction.”
“The rabbi was talking about political civility, and he said it’s in the Judeo-Christian tradition that before you criticize someone you have to sit down with them and restate their position to them such that they’ll say, ‘Yes, that’s what I mean,’ and then they have to state your position to you so that you say, ‘Yes,’ so you both agree that you understand what the positions are, then you each introduce your facts. So I wanted to… I took the advice to heart. I said: ‘Well, as a good liberal I better be able to state the conservative position.’ So I started researching and I started reading, and it dawned on me that I was not a liberal, that although I could state the position of who I thought were my enemies, the conservatives, I could not rationally state the position of the liberals.”
“You will fail at some point in your life. Accept it. You will lose, you will embarrass yourself, you will suck at something—there’s no doubt about it. And I know that’s probably not a traditional message for a graduation ceremony, but hey, I’m telling you, embrace it, because it’s inevitable.” (U Penn graduation, 2011)
“Man sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
“…since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.”
“It is not merely the trivial that clutters our lives, but the important as well.”
“They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I’m going to miss mine by just a few days.”
“…I think of my father Vernon and my mother Bonita, who were only together one time because she wore a poodle skirt that day. A sperm meets an egg and a life comes into being, but it is so much bigger than that. I am not here because Vernon and Bonita decided to stop on the way home from school one day. Nor are you. Your life is no accident; you were literally loved into being. You exist because God loves you.”
“Vocation is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.
He [Newt Gingrich] was the smartest guy in the room, who didn’t notice the rooms had gotten smaller.
Buildings can hold the spirit of what happens in them, I think, for good or ill.
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if…
