Traveling Light Relay

People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says “If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.” I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature; either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be in the one kind of creature is heaven: that is it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be in the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.
– C.S. Lewis

There is nothing drab about worship: but something rather exciting as we wait for God to move. There is nothing clerical about it: every member is involved. There is nothing verbose about it: silence can be golden. “There was silence in heaven for about half an hour” when the ascended Jesus disclosed himself (Rev. 8:1) Time after time I have known a divine stillness fall upon a congregation when the Spirit of God has been active in it. Nobody moves. Nobody wants to go. Sometimes it is a total silence. Sometimes it leads into informal praise. But everyone knows that the Lord has made his presence felt.
– Michael Green, from
Living the Story: Biblical Spirituality for Everyday Christians

The essential and primary invitation is to join God. We do this through becoming a disciple of Jesus who includes us in his own relationship with the Father. This is much more than joining the church. Becoming an adherent of the church without becoming an adherent of Jesus leads almost inevitably to following followers of Jesus instead of following Jesus Himself.
– R. Paul Stevens, from
Living the Story: Biblical Spirituality for Everyday Christians

The miserable idea that God should in any sense need, or crave for our worship like a vain [person] wanting compliments, or a vain author presenting his books to people he never met or heard of him, is implicitly answered by the words, ‘If I be hungry I will not tell thee’ (Psalm 50:12). Even if such an absurd Deity could be conceived, He would hardly come to us, the lowest of rational creatures, to gratify His appetite. I don’t want my dog to bark approval of my books… The most obvious fact about praise — whether of God or anything — strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all the enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness of fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise — lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game — praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars… I had not notices that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to joint them in praising it: ‘Isn’t she lovely? Wasn’t it glorious? Don’t you think that magnificent?’ The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak about what they care about. My whole, more general, difficulty about the praising of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can’t help doing, about everything else we value. I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its own appointed consummation.
– C.S. Lewis
Reflections on the Psalms

We never seem to be satisfied with what we possess or achieve; we are restless and crave what is novel.
As Plato puts it, we are like leaky vessels. It is as though we were containers into which we keep pouring things, but we never get filled up because there is a hole in each container and something is always leaking out. So we spend our lives trying to attain fullness, satisfaction, and completeness, and yet we never do. We go on thinking that if we only we had just a bit more, then we would be satisfied; if we had something else, then our potential would be realized, our happiness assured, and our fulfillment achieved.
– Diogenes Allen

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.
– Reinhold Niebuhr, from
The Irony of American History

Faith is to believe what we do not see, and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.
– St. Augustine

All Desire risks disappointment or even agony. All desire can open the door to loneliness and shame. There is no person who can fill all of our emptiness. Even the best marriage or the healthiest friendship fails us at times. When we have been disappointed or shamed, we come to believe that the way to escape loneliness and shame is to rid ourselves of desire for relationships. Addiction is an attempt to escape sorrow and remake my world so that my desires are satisfied. When all I want is a bag of potato chips and a Blockbuster movie at the end of the day, I don’t have to live in the tension of desire for anything more.
– Sharon Hersh

Far too easily we settle for holiness rather than wholeness, conformity rather than authenticity, becoming spiritual rather than deeply human, fulfillment rather than transformation, and a journey toward perfection rather than union with God. Far too often we confuse our own spiritual self-improvement tinkerings with the much more radical agenda of the Spirit of God. The call of the Spirit — which is always gentle and therefore easily missed — is an invitation to abandon our self-improvement projects that are, in reality, little more than polishing our false self and become the unique hidden self in Christ that we have been from all eternity. The call of the Spirit is always a call to return home, to settle for no other habitation or identity than that of being in Christ and knowing the reality of Christ in us.
– David Benner

How can the waters cover the sea? They are the sea. It looks as though God intends to flood the universe with himself, as though the universe, the entire cosmos, was designed as a receptacle for his love. We might even suggest, as part of a Christian aesthetic, that the world is beautiful not just because it hauntingly reminds us of its creator but also because it is pointing forward: it is designed to be filled, flooded, drenched in God, as a chalice is beautiful not least because of what we know it is designed to contain or as a violin is beautiful not least because we know the music of which it is capable.
– N.T. Wright, from
Surprised by Hope