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The Word in the Wilderness QUOTES

The Word in the Wilderness QUOTES

1 " Receive this cross of ash upon your brow
Brought from the burning of Palm Sunday's cross;
The forests of the world are burning now
And you make late repentance for the loss.
But all the trees of God would clap their hands,
The very stones themselves would shout and sing,
If you could covenant to love these lands
And recognize in Christ their lord and king.
He sees the slow destruction of those trees,
He weeps to see the ancient places burn,
And still you make what purchases you please
And still to dust and ashes you return.
But Hope could rise from ashes even now
Beginning with this sign upon your brow. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

2 " a mature and balanced faith is not one that has refused the agony and the wrestling but one that has been through them and grown from the experience. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

3 " Dante is here alluding to one of the great lost Christian stories, which we need to recover today: ‘The Harrowing of Hell’. We, who build so many hells on earth, need to know that there is no place so dark, no situation so seemingly hopeless, that cannot be opened to the light of Christ for rescue and redemption. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

4 " Some things are too great to come at directly. Just as we may weave back and forth as we climb a hill, and appear to be going round in circles, yet all the while are coming closer to the summit, so in our religious and spiritual life things may seem circuitous; we may think we have come back to the same spot, but always, if we press on, it is a little higher, a little closer to the truth. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

5 " Both pride and despair are forms of self-absorption and the Christian must try to steer between them, hard though it is. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

6 " Most of us are under pressure, external and internal, to do everything, be good at everything, be accountable to everyone for everything! It is not so. In the divine economy each of us has a particular grace, gift and devotion. Finding out what that is, and learning how to be guilt-free about not doing everything else, may be part of what our Lenten journey is for. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

7 " The great statesman and Dante enthusiast, W. E. Gladstone, said: ‘The reading of Dante is not merely a pleasure, a tour de force, or a lesson; it is a vigorous discipline for the heart, the intellect, the whole man. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

8 " Love’s as hard as nails,      Love is nails:   Blunt, thick, hammered through   The medial nerves of One   Who, having made us, knew   The thing He had done,   Seeing (with all that is)   Our cross, and His. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

9 " And every common bush afire with God;  But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,  (Aurora Leigh, lines 61−3) "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

10 " I have a God who knows what it is to weep and who weeps for me, weeps with me, understands to the depths and from the inside the rerum lachrymae, the tears of things. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

11 " Again and again I find Dante’s poem gives me glimpses both of places I have been and of places I may well yet find myself; in doing so it gives me a map, and with the map a way forward. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

12 " I have often noticed how interesting footpaths and bridleways start just beyond the brambles at the end of tarmacked roads marked ‘dead end’. And it seems to me that this is very often where prayer starts too. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

13 " it is good to fold poetry into our prayer life. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

14 " So here’s the deal and this is what you get: The penthouse suite with world-commanding views, The banker’s bonus and the private jet, Control and ownership of all the news, An ‘in’ to that exclusive one per cent, Who know the score, who really run the show, With interest on every penny lent  And sweeteners for cronies in the know. A straight arrangement between me and you, No hell below or heaven high above, You just admit it, and give me my due, And wake up from this foolish dream of love … But Jesus laughed, ‘You are not what you seem. Love is the waking life, you are the dream. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

15 " Can I invite Jesus in to all of that? And if I do, what will happen? "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

16 " a world in which no one is credited with a soul, everyone is analysed in terms of complexes and chemicals and valued only as a potential consumer. It is a world where no meaning or value is given us or lasts for ever, where we choose not between eternal destinies but between lifestyle options, where we compensate for our meaninglessness and poor self-esteem with sex and shopping; but we still despair when death comes. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

17 " Offered a horse by the king to help him on his travels, he gave it to the first beggar he met. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

18 " Batter My Heart John Donne  Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you  As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;  That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend  Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.  I, "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

19 " To pray this prayer is to acknowledge the limits of knowledge, to know just how little our ‘little systems’ are. It is to ask for the grace and humility to trust: to trust God and one another. And yet from out of that humility this prayer asks for the wisdom to cherish real advances in knowledge, to see the discoveries of science as a partner to the discoveries of faith, to see ‘mind and soul according well’, making ‘one music’. "

― , The Word in the Wilderness

20 " Donne was aware that he was a highly complex, deeply conflicted person whose desires and interests, opinions and beliefs, pulled him in many different directions. Moreover he was immensely independent and strong-willed, while knowing and believing that at its heart his Christian vocation involved a renunciation of ego and a humility of which he felt scarcely capable. All this comes out in this poem "

― , The Word in the Wilderness