Tell It Slant – The End of Pretending
Reflections
Ignore the pecking order — or worse — upend it? Don’t network, don’t schmooze, don’t brown nose? Open my heart and home to people who can do nothing for me? People I have no affinity for? People I can’t impress, earn favors from, or show off to my competition? Why on earth should I do that? Because Jesus insists on it. Because this is who God is, the Great Reverser of our priorities, our hierarchies, and our values. Because there is no end to the game of who is “in” and who is “out,” and God in his wisdom knows that our anxious scramble for greatness will lead to nothing but more anxiety, more suspicion, more loneliness, more hatred, and more devastation. Because God’s kingdom is not a kingdom of scarcity; it is one of abundance, where all are already welcome, already loved, already cherished. Because the currency of that kingdom is humility, not arrogance; generosity, not stinginess; hospitality, not fear.
— Debie Thomas, director of children’s and family ministries St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Palo Alto blogger at Journey with Jesus
- Pretending is exhausting
- God emphatically does not promise to meet only the odd winner of the self-improvement lottery; God meets us all in our endless and inescapable losing. — Robert Farrar Capon The Astonished Heart: Reclaiming the Good News from the Lost-and-found of Church History
- While the outside world rushes to move on, the experience of the pandemic has yet to fully leave my body. Parts of my body, my mind, my spirit are still trapped in the limbo of pandemic despair, pandemic depression, pandemic numbness, pandemic survival. I will not be pressured to move at the breakneck speed of capitalism that wants to forget everything. I will remind myself as often as I can to move at the pace of my own healing, and be attuned to my own slow and tender needs. –@yumisakugawa
- Our culture is almost entirely prepared to not just help you create your false self, but to get very identified with it and attached to it. So, without some form of God experience, which teaches you who you are apart from that – we would say in the religious world, who you are “in” God, in the mind and heart of God – there’s almost no way to get out of it. — Richard Rohr
