from St. Augustine’s Confessions: “The one who is lost in his desires is not as lost as the one who has lost all desire.” (Jurgen TMB 12/05/2024)

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C.S. Lewis – The Screwtape Letters, Chapter 12

Obviously, you are making excellent progress. My only fear is lest, in attempting to hurry the patient, you awaken him to a sense of his real position. … He must not be allowed to suspect that he is now, however slowly, heading right away from the sun on a line which will carry him into the cold and dark of utmost space.

For this reason, I am almost glad to hear that he is still a churchgoer and a communicant. I know there are dangers in this; but anything is better than that he should realize the break he has made with the first months of his Christian life. As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian, he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago. And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognized sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn't been doing very well lately.

This dim uneasiness needs careful handling. If it gets too strong, it may wake him up and spoil the whole game. … If such a feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become irresistible and flower into real repentance, it has one invaluable tendency. It increases the patient's reluctance to think about the Enemy. …

As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. … You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited, and nothing given in return, …

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,

Your affectionate uncle SCREWTAPE (Jurgen TMB 12/05/2024)

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Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1967, VI, 157, in Marino, op. cit., 67:

“There is something very specific that I have to say, and it weighs so on my conscience that I dare nor die without saying it. For the minute I die and leave this world, I will then (as I see it) instantly (so frightfully fast does it happen!) I will then be infinitely far from here, at another place, when even that very second (what frightful speed!) the question will be put to me: have you carried out your errand, have you very specifically said that specific something you were to say? And if I have not done it what then?” (Jurgen TMB 9/05/2024)

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John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker (1994), pages 163, 164:

Chapter 9 Eschatology

…

The Christian hope is, therefore, for me not the hope of survival of death, the persistence post mortem of a spiritual component which possesses, or has been granted, an intrinsic immortality. Rather, the Christian hope is of death and resurrection. My understanding of the soul is that it is the almost infinitely complex, dynamic, information-bearing pattern, carried at any instant by the matter of my animated body and continuously developing throughout all the constituent changes of my bodily make-up during the course of my earthly life. That psychosomatic unity is dissolved at death by the decay of my body, but I believe it is a perfectly coherent hope that the pattern that is me will be remembered by God and its instantiation will be recreated by him when he reconstitutes me in a new environment of his own choosing. That will be his eschatological act of resurrection.

…

Our hope is of the resurrection of the body. By that I do not mean the resuscitation of our present structure, the quaint medieval notion of the reassembling of bones and dust. In a very crude and inadequate analogy, the software running on our present hardware will be transferred to the hardware of the world to come. And where will that eschatological hardware come from? Surely the ‘matter’ of the world to come must be the transformed matter of this world. God will no more abandon the universe than he will abandon us. Hence the importance to theology of the empty tomb, with its message that the Lord’s risen and glorified body is the transmutation of his dead body. The resurrection of Jesus is the beginning within history of a process whose fulfilment lies beyond history, in which the destiny of humanity and the destiny of the universe are together to find their fulfilment in a liberation from decay and futility (cf. Romans 8:18-25). (Jurgen TMB 9/05/2024)

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Barclay's Daily Study Bible:

The Greek phrase for "He learned from what he suffered" is a linguistic jingle--emathen aph' hon epathen . And this is a thought which keeps recurring in the Greek thinkers. They are always connecting mathein , to learn, and pathein , to suffer. Aeschylus, the earliest of the great Greek dramatists, had as a kind of continual text: "Learning comes from suffering" (pathei mathos). He calls suffering a kind of savage grace from the gods. Herodotus declared that his sufferings were acharista mathemata, ungracious ways of learning. (Jurgen TMB 5/02/2024)

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Hebrews: A Commentary, by Luke Timothy Smith (2006), page 151:

Even though Jesus as "Son" came into the world to do God's will, the voice of God was new every day for him also. Like us, Jesus had to respond moment by moment, and therefore "learn obedience" precisely in and through the stress and pain generated by constantly allowing his present understanding of God and of God's will to be challenged and relativized by the voice of God that he heard within the circumstances of his every-day life. Hebrews says that Jesus was "perfected" by this process of experiential learn-ing. In what respect was he perfected, made mature, complete? Hebrews must mean that Jesus grew into his full identity as God's Son. Although he came into the world as Son, he could only "finish" that project moment by moment, in every response of obedient hearing, and could be "perfected" completely only through the final yes to God in the suffering that is death.

Here is the distinctive way in which the author of Hebrews brings together his remarkably high Christology (Jesus is the "preexistent" Son of God) and remarkable emphasis on Jesus' humanity (Jesus is like us in every respect, apart from sin). He under-stands Jesus precisely as growing into his stature as Son through the process of obedient faith, through a process of creative suffering. (Jurgen TMB 2/15/2024)

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Prologue, “The Last Temptation of Christ” by Nikos Kazantzakis, 1955

My principal anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.

Within me are the dark immemorial forces of the Evil One, human and pre-human; within me too are the luminous forces, human and pre-human, of God - and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.

…

Struggle between the flesh and the spirit, rebellion and resistance, reconciliation and submission, and finally-the supreme purpose of the struggle-union with God: this was the ascent taken by Christ, the ascent which he invites us to take as well, following in his bloody tracks.

…

In order to mount to the Cross, the summit of sacrifice, and to God, the summit of immateriality, Christ passed through all the stages which the man who struggles passes through. That is why his suffering is so familiar to us; that is why we share it, and why his final victory seems to us so much our own future victory. That part of Christ's nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand him and love him and to pursue his Passion as though it were our own. If he had not within him this warm human element, he would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; he would not be able to become a model for our lives. We struggle, we see him struggle also, and we find strength. We see that we are not all alone in the world: he is fighting at our side. (Jurgen TMB 10/05/2023)

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Dallas Willard on the Reliability of the Bible:

THE DIVINE CONSPIRACY (SAN FRANCISCO: HARPER COLLINS, 1998), P. XVI. JAN 01 . 1998

On the human side, I assume that [the Bible] was produced and preserved by competent human beings who were at least as intelligent and devout as we are today. I assume that they were quite capable of accurately interpreting their own experience and of objectively presenting what they heard and experienced in the language of their historical community, which we today can understand with due diligence.

On the divine side, I assume that God has been willing and competent to arrange for the Bible, including its record of Jesus, to emerge and be preserved in ways that will secure his purposes for it among human beings worldwide. Those who actually believe in God will be untroubled by this. I assume that he did not and would not leave his message to humankind in a form that can only be understood by a handful of late-twentieth-century professional scholars, who cannot even agree among themselves on the theories that they assume to determine what the message is.

The Bible is, after all, God’s gift to the world through the Church, not to the scholars. It comes through the life of his people and nourishes that life. Its purpose is practical, not academic. An intelligent, careful, intensive but straightforward reading — that is, one not governed by obscure and faddish theories or by a mindless orthodoxy — is what it requires to direct us into life in God’s kingdom. (Jurgen TMB 7/06/2023)

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“A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho; Adam himself is meant; Jerusalem is the heavenly city of peace, from whose blessedness Adam fell; Jericho means the moon, and signifies our mortality, because it is born, waxes, wanes, and dies. Thieves are the devil and his angels. Who stripped him, namely; of his immortality; and beat him, by persuading him to sin; and left him half-dead, because in so far as man can understand and know God, he lives, but in so far as he is wasted and oppressed by sin, he is dead; he is therefore called half-dead. The priest and the Levite who saw him and passed by, signify the priesthood and ministry of the Old Testament which could profit nothing for salvation. Samaritan means Guardian, and therefore the Lord Himself is signified by this name. The binding of the wounds is the restraint of sin. Oil is the comfort of good hope; wine the exhortation to work with fervent spirit. The beast is the flesh in which He deigned to come to us. The being set upon the beast is belief in the incarnation of Christ. The inn is the Church, where travelers returning to their heavenly country are refreshed after pilgrimage. The morrow is after the resurrection of the Lord. The two pence are either the two precepts of love, or the promise of this life and of that which is to come. The innkeeper is the Apostle (Paul). The supererogatory payment is either his counsel of celibacy, or the fact that he worked with his own hands lest he should be a burden to any of the weaker brethren when the Gospel was new, though it was lawful for him ‘to live by the gospel’.” Augustine, Questions on the Gospels, 2.19 as cited in C.H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom (Glasgow: Collins, 1978), 13-14. (Jurgen TMB 7/06/2023)

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John Stott, Authentic Christianity (1995), page 104

‘Our Christian conviction is that the Bible has both authority and relevance – to a degree quite extraordinary in so ancient a book – and that the secret of both is in Jesus Christ. Indeed, we should never think of Christ and the Bible apart. ‘The Scriptures . . . bear witness to me,’ he said (John 5:39), and in so saying also bore his witness to them. This reciprocal testimony between the living Word and the written Word is the clue to our Christian understanding of the Bible. For his testimony to it assures us of its authority, and its testimony to him of its relevance. The authority and the relevance are his.’ (Jurgen TMB 6/01/2023)

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J.J. von Allmen - Preaching and congregation, 1962, supporting John Stott:

“The heart of the Scripture (what sums it up and makes it live) or the head of the Scripture( ... what explains it and justifies it) ... is Jesus Christ. To read the Bible without meeting him is to read it badly, and to preach the Bible without proclaiming Him is to preach it falsely". (Jurgen TMB 6/03/2023)

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The Gospel of John Volume 1 (Chapters 1 to 7)

Translated with an Introduction and Interpretation by William Barclay (1956) page 13

In Alexandria there was a Jew called Philo. Philo had made it the business of his life to study the wisdom of two worlds, the Jewish and the Greek world.

No man ever knew the Jewish scriptures as he knew them; and no Jew ever knew the greatness of Greek thought as Philo knew it. He too knew and used and loved this idea of the Logos, the Word, the Reason of God. He held that the Logos was the oldest thing in the world and that the Logos was the instrument through which God had made the world. He said that the Logos is the thought of God stamped upon the universe; he talks about the Logos by which God made the world and all things; he says that God, the pilot of the universe, holds the Logos as a tiller, and with it steers all things. He says that man's mind is stamped also with the Logos, that the Logos is that which gives a man reason, the power to think and the power to know. He said that the Logos is the intermediary between the world and God, between the begotten and the unbegotten, that the Logos is the priest which sets the soul before God. (Jurgen TMB 1/07/2023)

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A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken (1987)

Chapter VIII - The Way of Grief - pages 185-186

One of the greatest occurrences of my own grief was the strange thing that began to happen within a day or two of her death. It was the flooding back to me of all the other Davys I had known. She had been in this year of her dying the Davy she had become - the Christian Davy of Oxford and since. Even when we had read about Glenmerle days under the oaks, she had been the Davy she had become. But now the young girl of Glenmerle, the blithe spirit of the Islands, the helmsman of the schooner - all were equally present. They had been gone - except perhaps for those fragile days of heartbreaking young love during the coma. Now they were all with me - for ever. The wholeness of Davy. That wholeness can only be gained by death, I believe. In writing to Lewis of my understanding of this astonishing phenomenon, I used the analogy of reading a novel like David Copperfield that covers many years. In that book one follows the boy David running away to his Aunt Betsy Trotwood, the youth David loving Dora, the mature David with Agnes. While one reads, chapter by chapter, even as one lives one’s own life week by week, David is what he is at that particular point in the book’s time. But then, when one shuts the book at the end, all the Davids - small boy, youth, man - are equally close: and, indeed, are one. The whole David. One is then, with reference to the book’s created time, in an eternity, seeing it all in one’s own Now, even as God in His eternal Now sees the whole of history that was and is and will be. But if, as the result of death, I was now seeing the whole Davy at once, I was having a heavenly or eternal vision of her. Only, in heaven I would have not vision only but her - whole.

Chapter IX - The severe mercy - pages 203-204

So it appeared to me. It appeared to me that Davy and I had longed for timelessness - eternity - all our days; and the longing coupled with my post-mortem vision of the total Davy whetted my appetite for heaven. Golden streets and compulsory harp lessons may lack appeal - but timelessness? And total persons? Heaven is, indeed, home.

I attempted that spring something impossible: a sort of picture of what heaven might be. I could only describe it, though, in temporal terms. We haven’t the words for eternity. It is perhaps worth noticing how many words - italicised - suggest time and are, therefore, quite inadequate. Still, this is what I wrote:

It is a heavenly afternoon. Davy and I have just had atimeless luncheon (I am assuming that God will not waste so joyous an invention as taste). I then say to her that I shall wander down to sit beneath the beech tree and contemplate the valley for awhile, but I shall be back soon. I do so. I contemplate the valley for some hours or some years - the words are meaningless here where foreverness is in the air. At all events, I contemplate it just as long as I feel like doing. Then I get up and start back, but I meet someone, C. S. Lewis, perhaps, and we sit on a bench and maybe have a pint of bitter and talk for an hour or several hours - until we have said all we have to say for now. And then I go gladly back to Davy. She, meanwhile, has played the cestial organ, an organ on which perhaps every note of every song can be heard at the same time: that is, the song not played in time with half of it gone and half yet to be heard. She has played the organ for a few minutes and is just turning to greet me when I come in. Whether I was away for an hour or a hundred years, whether she has played for ten minutes or thirty, neither of us has waited or could wait for the other. For there simply is no time, no hours, no minutes, no sense of time passing. The ticking has stopped. It is eternity. (Jurgen TMB 12/01/2022)

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Pope Leo XIII - Papal Encyclical (1891)

'Rerum Novarum' - On Capital and Labor

41. From this follows the obligation of the cessation from work and labor on Sundays and certain holy days. The rest from labor is not to be understood as mere giving way to idleness; much less must it be an occasion for spending money and for vicious indulgence, as many would have it to be; but it should be rest from labor, hallowed by religion. Rest (combined with religious observances) disposes man to forget for a while the business of his everyday life, to turn his thoughts to things heavenly, and to the worship which he so strictly owes to the eternal Godhead. It is this, above all, which is the reason and motive of Sunday rest; a rest sanctioned by God’s great law of the Ancient Covenant — “Remember thou keep holy the Sabbath day,” and taught to the world by His own mysterious “rest” after the creation of man: “He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.” (Jurgen TMB 8/04/2022)

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C.S. Lewis - “A Grief Observed”, 1961 - pages 49-50:

And then one or other dies. And we think of this as love cut short; like a dance stopped in mid-career or a flower with its head unluckily snapped off— something truncated and therefore, lacking its due shape. I wonder. If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer. It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure. (Jurgen TMB 6/02/2022)

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C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity: What Christians Believe:

4. The Perfect Penitent

…

We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, even if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.

…

In other words, fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor—that is the only way out of a "hole." This process of surrender—this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person—and he would not need it.

…

But supposing God became a man—suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person—then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all.

…

Such is my own way of looking at what Christians call the Atonement. But remember this is only one more picture. Do not mistake it for the thing itself: and if it does not help you, drop it. (Jurgen TMB 4/22/2021)

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H. Richard Niebuhr - The Kingdom of God in America

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” (Jurgen TMB 2/04/2021)

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Nikos Kazantzakis, “The Last Tempation of Christ”, Prologue:

“The dual substance of Christ-the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain to God, or more exactly, to return to God and identify himself with him-has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. This nostalgia for God, at once so mysterious and so real, has opened in me large wounds and also large flowing springs.

My principal anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.

The anguish has been intense. I loved my body and did not want it to perish; I loved my soul and did not want it to decay. 1 have fought to reconcile these two primordial forces which are so contrary to one another, to make them realize that they are not enemies but rather fellow-workers so that they might rejoice in their harmony - and so that I might rejoice with them.

Every man partakes of the divine nature in both his spirit and his flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: it is universal. The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes Flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.

The stronger the soul and the flesh, the more fruitful the struggle and the richer the final harmony. God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The Spirit wants to have to wrestle with flesh which is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and by assimilating it, makes it disappear.

This is the Supreme Duty of the man who struggles-to set out for the lofty peak which Christ, the first-born son of salvation, attained. How can we begin?

If we are to be able to follow him we must have a profound knowledge of his conflict, we must relive his anguish: his victory over the blossoming snares of the earth, his sacrifice of the great and small joys of men and his ascent from sacrifice to sacrifice, exploit to exploit, to martyrdom's summit, the Cross.

I never followed Christ's bloody journey to Golgotha with such terror, I never lived his Life and Passion with such intensity, such understanding and love, as during the days and nights when I wrote The Last Temptation. While setting down this confession of the anguish and the great hope of mankind I was so moved that my eyes filled with tears. I had never felt the blood of Christ fall drop by drop into my heart with so much sweetness, so much pain.

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William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2:

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! (Jurgen TMB 10/01/2020)

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Charles E. Hummel, Fire in the Fireplace: Charismatic Renewal in the Nineties (1993):

“The heart of the charismatic renewal is not the question of speaking in tongues or even the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, about which there is marked difference of opinion, even within the renewal. Rather it is commitment to the full range of charisms as manifestations of the Holy Spirit to meet the needs of the Christian community. The charismatic renewal affirms the New Testament teaching that all of these spiritual gifts are essential to the life and mission of the church. It expects these charisms and witnesses to their presence today. This is a statement that affirms several realities. Spiritual gifts today are not limited to the so-called natural, or non-miraculous." (Jurgen TMB 9/03/2020)

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Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, The Household of God (1954):

“Catholicism and Orthodox Protestantism, however deeply they have differed from one another, have been at one in laying an immense stress on that in the Christian religion which is given and unalterable … Catholicism has laid its primary stress upon the given structure, Protestantism upon the given message … It is necessary, however, to recognize that there is a third stream of Christian tradition which … has a distinct character of its own … its central element is the conviction that the Christian life is a matter of the experienced power and presence of the Holy Spirit today … that if we would answer the question, “Where is the Church?” we must ask, “Where is the Holy Spirit recognizably present with power?” … for want of a better word I Propose to refer to this type of Christian faith and life as the Pentecostal." (Jurgen TMB 8/06/2020)

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Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 (1973):

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" (Jurgen TMB 7/02/2020)

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Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1895):

“Christianity needs sickness, almost as Hellenism needs a surplus of healthfulness, — making sick is the true final purpose of the entire system of salvation-procedures of the Church. … Nobody is free to become a Christian: one is not “converted” to Christianity, — one must be morbid enough for it …" (Jurgen TMB 7/02/2020)

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Thomas Howard – “On Being Catholic”, pg. 180:

Divine worship is referred to in the word latria, from the Greek. Such veneration may be given to no creature, not the burning seraphim themselves, much less to one of us mortals. It is reserved for God alone. At the other end of things we find dulia, which refers to the honor we mortals justly pay to those among us who should be honored: monarchs; heads of state; our elders; our parents; our teachers; heroes; and so forth. Such honor, it may be remarked here, can take on lavish proportions and yet stay clear of idolatry. We need only recall the golden state coach, Windsor grays, arches, plumes, guards, trumpets, ermine, gems, and gold that are brought out to honor the monarch of England; or the ticker-tape parades through Wall Street for astronauts and other heroes; or the rites and observances brought into play in connection with the memory of, say, Martin Luther King or John F. Kennedy. Mere dulia, then, often rises to sumptuous heights: but we do not call it idolatry, even though foolish people may indeed “idolize” such venerable figures. But the display itself is just and fitting, we claim. (Jurgen TMB 1/17/2019)

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William Willimon quote http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1052

The gospel is a story about something that has happened to us -- something that has come to us extra nos, from the outside. This story is, in the words of the Reformers, an externum verbum, an external word. It claims that by rooting around in our own egos or by reflecting upon our life experiences as men or women, whites or blacks, we really won’t discover much that is worth knowing, unless we know this Jew from Nazareth who is the way, the truth and the life, and are part of a people who follow him. It is only by listening to this story and allowing it to have its way with us that we learn anything worth knowing. As Saint Augustine said, when we look at our lives without Christ, they look like a chicken yard full of tracks in the mud going this way and that. But in the light of Christ’s life, our lives take on meaning, pattern, and direction. (Jurgen TMB 12/06/2018, 12/07/2017, 12/01/2016, 12/10/1998)

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Salvation Is From The Jews by Roy H. Schoeman pages 350-351

As mentioned, St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans that the last days will see the widespread conversion of the Jews. This has led many to consider the current wave of Jewish conversion and ask whether it might be the beginning of the fulfillment of that prophecy.

It is probably impossible to determine whether the current wave of Jewish conversion is numerically greater than any previous one. For one thing, good statistics are lacking for both present and the past conversions. Further complicating matters is the fact that past conversions were often induced by external persecution, while the current ones are almost all genuine. But whether or not the largest in history, the current wave of conversions does have some distinctive characteristics that are suggestive.

One of these is the emergence of Jewish Christian communities in which Jews accept the principles of Christianity while still maintaining their identity as Jews. The aforementioned associations, Remenant of Israel and the Association of Hebrew Catholics, are examples of this in the Catholic Church. Within Protestant Christianity, such communities are represented by what is known as “Messianic Judaism”. (Jurgen TMB 8/02/2018)

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Salvation Is From The Jews by Roy H. Schoeman pages 352-353

… We have seen how, at the very outset of Christianity, many held the mistaken belief that one must be a member of the Old Covenant (i.e., be a Jew) to be eligible for participation in the New. This error was quickly corrected, but was soon followed by another known as “supersessionism” – that the Old Covenant had been entirely replaced (or superseded, hence “supersession”), made null and void, by the New. This view dominated Christian theology for much of the past two thousand years. It has only recently been definitively rejected by the Church. With its rejection, however, a new and perhaps even more pernicious error has emerged – that the Old and New Covenants are two “separate but equal” parallel paths to salvation, the one intended for Jews, the other for Gentiles. This has been presented as though it were the only logical alternative to supersessionism, despite the fact that it is utterly irreconcilable with both the core beliefs of Christianity and with the words of Jesus Himself in the New Testament.

This book proposes a third alternative – that as the Old Covenant was brought to fruition by the New at the first coming, so will the New Covenant be brought to fruition by the Old, by the return of the Jews at the Second Coming. Thus, the current wave of Jewish entry into the Church may be among the most important things going on today, or indeed, in the history of the world. (Jurgen TMB 8/02/2018)

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C.S. Lewis – The Screwtape Letters

The Enemy has guarded him from you through the first great wave of temptations. But, if only he can be kept alive, you have time itself for your ally. The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather. You see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it—all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition. (Jurgen TMB 7/12/2018)

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Prologue from “The Last Temptation of Christ” by Nikos Kazantzakis:

…

Every man partakes of the divine nature in both his spirit and his flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: it is universal. The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.

Struggle between the flesh and the spirit, rebellion and resistance, reconciliation and submission, and finally – the supreme purpose of the struggle – union with God: this was the ascent taken by Christ, the ascent which he invites us to take as well, following in his bloody tracks.

…

In order to mount to the bloody Cross, the summit of sacrifice, and to God, the summit of immateriality, Christ passed through all the stages which the man who struggles passes through. That is why his suffering is so familiar to us; that is why we share it, and why his final victory seems to us so much our own future victory. That part of Christ’s nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand him and love him and to pursue his Passion as though it were our own. If he had not within him this warm human element, he would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; he would not be able to become a model for our lives. We struggle, we see him struggle also, and we find strength. We see that we are not all alone in the world: he is fighting at our side.

… (Jurgen TMB 3/01/2018)

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“The Memorial” from Blaise Pascal:

The year of grace 1654

Monday, 23 November, feast of Saint Clement, Pope and Martyr, and of others in the Martyrology.

Eve of Saint Chrysogonus, Martyr and others.

From about half past ten in the evening until half past midnight.

Fire

'God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,' not of philosophers and scholars.

Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace.

God of Jesus Christ.

My God and your God.

'Thy God shall be my God.'

The world forgotten, and everything except God.

He can only be found by the ways taught in the Gospels.

Greatness of the human soul.

'O righteous Father, the world had not known thee, but I have known thee.'

Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

I have cut myself off from him.

They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters.

'My God wilt thou forsake me?'

Let me not be cut off from him for ever!

And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.'

Jesus Christ.

I have cut myself off from him, shunned him, denied him, crucified him.

Let me never be cut off from him!

He can only be kept by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Sweet and total renunciation.

Total submission to Jesus Christ and my director.

Everlasting joy in return for one day's effort on earth.

I will not forget thy word. Amen. (Jurgen TMB 3/01/2018)

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“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 (Jurgen TMB 11/02/2017, 10/05/2017)

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John Piper – A Godward Life: Savoring the Supremacy of God in All of Life (1995):

“When you know that all is God’s, then anything you render to Caesar you will render for God’s sake. Any authority you ascribe to Caesar you will ascribe to him for the sake of God’s greater authority. Any obedience you render to Caesar you will render for the sake of the obedience you owe first and foremost to God. Any claim Caesar makes on you, you test by the infinitely higher claim God has on you.” (Jurgen TMB 11/02/2017)

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from (at-the-time U.S. Senator from Illinois) Barack Obama's keynote at the Call to Renewal's Building a Covenant for a New America conference in Washington, D.C., in 2006.

… secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, Williams Jennings Bryant, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King - indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history - were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. (Jurgen TMB 11/02/2017)

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Catechism of the Catholic Church

“Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment….For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God….His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.” (Jurgen TMB 9/07/2017)

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from John Henry Cardinal Newman, “Letter to the Dukes of Norfolk,” V, in Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching II (London: Longmans Green, 1885), pg. 248:

Conscience is a law of the mind; yet [Christians] would not grant that it is nothing more; I mean that it was not a dictate, nor conveyed the notion of responsibility, of duty, of a threat and a promise….[Conscience] is a messenger of him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by his representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ. (Jurgen TMB 9/07/2017)

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The Faith of a Physicist by John Polkinghorne (1994), pg. 163-164:

“… The Christian hope is, therefore, for me not the hope of survival of death, the persistence post mortem of a spiritual component which possesses, or has been granted, an intrinsic immortality. Rather, the Christian hope is of death and resurrection. My understanding of the soul is that it is the almost infinitely complex, dynamic, information-bearing pattern, carried at any instant by the matter of my animated body and continuously developing throughout all the constituent changes of my bodily make-up during the course of my earthly life. That psychosomatic unity is dissolved at death by the decay of my body, but I believe it is a perfectly coherent hope that the pattern that is me will be remembered by God and its instantiation will be recreated by him when he reconstitutes me in a new environment of his choosing. That will be his eschatological act of resurrection. Thus, death is a real end but not the final end, for only God himself is ultimate. Although there have, of course, been strands of the Christian tradition which have used the language of the survival of an immortal soul, I believe that the tradition which is truer, both to New Testament insight and to modern understanding, is that which relies on the hope of a resurrection beyond death.

If this psychosomatic understanding is correct, then it is intrinsic to true humanity that we should be embodied. …” “… Our Hope is of the resurrection of the body. By that I do not mean the resuscitation of our present structure, the quaint medieval notion of reassembling of bones and dust. In a very crude and inadequate analogy, the software running on our present hardware will be transferred to the hardware of the world to come. And where will that eschatological hardware come from? Surely the ‘matter’ of the world to come must be the transformed matter of this world. God will no more abandon the universe than he will abandon us. Hence the importance to theology of the empty tomb, with its message that the Lord’s risen and glorified body is the transmutation of his dead body. The resurrection of Jesus is the beginning within history of a process whose fulfilment lies beyond history, in which the destiny of humanity and the destiny of the universe are together to find their fulfilment in a liberation from decay and futility (cf. Rom. 8.18-25).” (Jurgen TMB 6/01/2017)

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John Donne quote:

“One humour of our dead body produces worms, and those worms suck and exhaust all other humour, and then all dies, and all dries, and moulders into dust, and that dust is blown into the river, and that puddled water tumbled into the sea, and that ebbs and flows in infinite revolutions, and still, still God knows in what cabinet every seed-pearl lies, in what part of the world every grain of every man's dust lies; and sibilat populum suum, he whispers, he hisses, he beckons for the bodies of his saints, and in the twinkling of an eye, that body that was scattered over all the elements, is sat down at[ the right hand of God, in a glorious resurrection.” (Jurgen TMB 5/04/2017)

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Abraham Heschel:

The beginning of faith is not a feeling for the mystery of living or a sense of awe, wonder and amazement. The root of religion is the question what to do with the feeling for the mystery of living, what to do with awe, wonder and amazement.

Religion begins with a consciousness that something is asked of us.

It is in that tense, eternal asking in which the soul is caught and in which man’s answer is elicited.

Religion consists of God's question and man's answer. (Jurgen TMB 1/05/2017)

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Witness To Jesus Christ:

“In Jesus Christ the reality of God entered into the reality of this world. The place where the answer is given, both to the question concerning the reality of God and to the question concerning the reality of the world, is designated solely and alone by the name Jesus Christ. God and the world are comprised in this name. In him all things consist (Col. 1.17). Henceforward one can speak neither of God nor of the world without speaking of Jesus Christ. All concepts of reality which do not take account of him are abstractions.” (Jurgen TMB 12/01/2016)

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John Henry Newman – Prayer: “The Mission of My Life”

God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments. Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about. (Jurgen TMB 12/01/2016)

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C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you...God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it--made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”

"The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand." (Jurgen TMB 12/01/2016)

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John Updike “Seven Stanzas at Easter” poem [from “Telephone Poles and Other Poems”]:

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body;

if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules

reknit, the amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,

each soft Spring recurrent;

it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled

eyes of the eleven apostles;

it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,

the same valved heart

that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then

regathered out of enduring Might

new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the

faded credulity of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,

not a stone in a story,

but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow

grinding of time will eclipse for each of us

the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,

make it a real angel,

weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,

opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen

spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,

for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are

embarrassed by the miracle,

and crushed by remonstrance. (Jurgen TMB 5/02/2013, 3/04/2010, 7/22/2004, 5/17/2001, 4/10/1997)

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poem from “The Miracle of the Scarlet Thread” by Richard Booker:

I find my Lord in the Book, wherever I chance to look. He's the theme of the Bible, the center and heart of the Book. He's the Rose of Sharon, the Lily fair. Wherever I open my Bible, the Lord of the Book is there.

He, at the Book's beginning, gave to the earth its form. He is the ark of shelter bearing the brunt of the storm. He is the burning bush of the desert, the budding of Aaron's rod. Wherever I look in the Bible, I see the Son of God. The ram upon Mount Moriah, the ladder from earth to sky, the scarlet cord in the window and the serpent lifted high. The smitten rock in the desert, the shepherd with staff and crook, the face of my Lord I discover wherever I open the Book.

He is the seed of the woman, the Savior virgin-born. He is the Son of David whom men rejected with scorn. His garments of grace and of beauty, the stately Aaron deck, yet He is a priest forever, for He is Melchizedek. Lord of eternal glory whom John the apostle saw, light of the golden city, lamb without spot or flaw. Bridegroom coming at midnight for whom the virgins look; wherever I open my Bible, I find my Lord in the Book. (Jurgen TMB 8/02/2012)

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Austin Farrer, in a Christmas sermon A Faith of Our Own, page 34

“God does not give us explanations; we do not comprehend the world, and we are not going to. It is, and it remains for us, a confused mystery of bright and dark. God does not give us explanations.; he gives us a Son. …

A Son is better than an explanation. The explanation of our deaths leaves us no less dead than we were, but a Son gives us a life in which to live.” (Jurgen TMB 6/07/2012)

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Pascal in the PensŽes:

Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God, or of ourselves. (no. 417) (Jurgen TMB 6/07/2012)

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 6th ed., 1965, p. 194

In Jesus Christ the reality of God entered into the reality of the world. The place where the answer is given, both to the question concerning the reality of God and to the question concerning the reality of the world, is designated solely and alone by the name Jesus Christ. God and the world are comprised in this name. In Him all things consist (Col. 1:17). Henceforward one can speak neither of God nor of the world without speaking of Jesus Christ. All concepts of reality which do not take account of Him are abstractions. (Jurgen TMB 6/07/2012)

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C.S. Lewis - Miracles quote [1978 paperback; page 111]

In the Christian story, God descends to reascend. He comes down,

down from the heights of Absolute Being into Time and Space,

down into humanity, down further still, if embryologists are right, to

recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life,

down to the very roots and down to the very sea-bed of the Nature He

has created. But He goes down to come up again, and to bring the

whole ruined world up with Him. One has the picture of a strong

man stooping lower and lower to get himself underneath some great

complicated burden. He must stoop in order to lift. He must almost

disappear under the load before he incredibly straightens his back

and marches off with the whole mass swaying on his shoulders. (Jurgen TMB 12/22/2011, 11/04/2004, 8/14/1997)

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In the Gospel of the Hebrews it is written as follows:

Now the Lord, when he had given the linen cloth to the servant of the priest, went to James and appeared to him, for James had sworn that he would not eat bread from that hour in which he had drunk the Lord's cup until he should see him risen from among them that sleep. And Lord says, "Bring a table and bread." And it is added, "He took bread and blessed and broke and gave it to James the Just and said to him, "My brother, eat your bread, for the Son of man is risen from among them that sleep." (Jurgen TMB 5/05/2011)

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C.S. Lewis Beyond Personality quote [Talk 1 Making and Begetting, pages 1-3]:

…

In a way I quite understand why some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I’d been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, ‘I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!’

Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he’d probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he was really turning from something quite real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something more real to something less real, turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach, only, while yours would be a single isolated glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you’re content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map’s going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.

Well, Theology’s like the map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines aren’t God: they’re only a kind of map. But that map’s based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God – experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There’s nothing to do about it. In fact, that’s just why a vague religion – all about feeling God in Nature, and so on – is so attractive. It’s all thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the beach. But you won’t get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic that way, and you won’t get eternal life by just feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps without going to sea. And you won’t be very safe if you go to sea without a map.

In other words, Theology is practical: especially now. … (Jurgen TMB 3/24/2011)

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C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and other addresses (2001), pages 45, 46:

The Weight of Glory

…

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you say it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. (Jurgen TMB 8/05/2010)

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John R.W. Stott, in his book Confess Your Sins, quotes the head of a large British mental home as saying: “I could dismiss half my patients tomorrow if they could be assured of forgiveness.” (Jurgen TMB 6/03/2010)

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John Wesley’s Journal May 24, 1738 “I Felt My Heart Strangely Warmed”:

“Love never fails … Faith works with Love … Godly Wisdom never swings at what Satan throws … Grace wins the Game.” “If your Love, Faith and Wisdom had won the Game, you would thin that you had done it yourself. Love, Faith and Wisdom will get you on base, but only Grace will bring you Home.” (Jurgen TMB 6/03/2010)

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John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker (1994), pages 163, 164:

Chapter 9 Eschatology

…

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John Polkinghorne, The Faith of a Physicist: Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker (1994), pages 163, 164:

Chapter 9 Eschatology

…

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‘Pass It On’ The Story of Bill Wilson and how the A.A. message reached the world (1984), pages 120-121. Chapter Five

…

Now, he and Lois were waiting for the end. Now, there was nothing ahead but death or madness. This was the finish, the jumping-off place. “The terrifying darkness had become complete,” Bill said. “In agony of spirit, I again thought of the cancer of alcoholism which had now consumed me in mind and spirit, and soon the body.” The abyss gaped before him.

In his helplessness and desperation, Bill cried out, “I’ll do anything, anything at all!” He had reached a point of total, utter deflation – a state of complete, absolute surrender. With neither faith nor hope, he cried, “If there be a God, let Him show Himself!”

What happened next was electric. “Suddenly, my room blazed with an indescribably white light. I was seized with an ecstasy beyond description. Every joy I had known was pale by comparison. The light, the ecstasy – I was conscious of nothing else for a time.

“Then, seen in the mind’s eye, there was a mountain. I stood upon its summit, where a great wind blew. A wind, not of air, but of spirit. In great, clean strength, it blew right through me. Then came the blazing thought ‘You are a free man.’ I know not at all how long I remained in this state, but finally the light and the ecstasy subsided. I again saw the wall of my room. As I became more quiet, a great peace stole over me, and this was accompanied by a sensation difficult to describe. I became acutely conscious of a Presence which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. ‘This,’ I thought, ‘must be the great reality. The God of the preachers.’

“Savoring my new world, I remained in this state for a long time. I seemed to be possessed by the absolute, and the curious conviction deepened that no matter how wrong things seemed to be, there could be no question of the ultimate rightness of God’s universe. For the first time, I felt that I really belonged. I knew that I was loved and could love in return. I thanked my God, who had given me a glimpse of His absolute self. Even though a pilgrim upon an uncertain highway, I need be concerned no more, for I had glimpsed the great beyond.”

Bill Wilson had just had his 39th birthday, and he still had half his life ahead of him. He always said that after that experience, he never again doubted the existence of God. He never took another drink. (Jurgen TMB 4/01/2010)

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Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem (313-386), extract from the Procatechesis (Prologue to the Catecheses)

5 Perhaps you have another reason for coming. perhaps some man among you has come because he wants to win the approval of his girl-friend; the same can apply to women too. Perhaps a slave has wanted to please his master or someone has wanted to please a friend. I accept this as bait for my hook and let you in. You may have had the wrong reason for coming, but I have good hope that you will be saved. Perhaps you didn’t know where you were going or recognize the net waiting to catch you. You have swum into the Church’s net. Allow yourself to be caught; don’t try to escape. Jesus is fishing for you, not to kill you but to give you life once you have been killed. For you have to die and rise again. You have heard the Apostle say: ‘dead to sin, alive to righteousness’. Die to your sins and live to righteousness. Make today the first day of your life. (Jurgen TMB 10/15/2009)

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Jaroslav Pelikan quote (U.S. News & World Report, July 26, 1989):

“Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” (Jurgen TMB 6/04/2009)

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The Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus (“The Works of Josephus, Complete and Unabridged” 1987 edition)

(The Antiquities of the Jews, Book 19, chapter 8 pages 523-524)

Section 2

(343) Now, when Agrippa had reigned three years over all Judea, he came to the city Cesarea, which was formerly called Strato’s Tower; and there he exhibited shows in honor of Caesar, upon his being informed that there was a certain festival celebrated to make vows for his safety. At which festival, a great multitude was gotten together ot the principal persons, and such as were of dignity through his province. (344) On the second day of which shows he put on a garment made wholly of silver, and of a contexture truly wonderful, and came into the theatre early in the morning; at which time the silver of his garment being illuminated by the fresh reflection of the sun’s rays upon it, shone out after a surprising manner, and was so resplendent at to spread a horror over those that looked intently upon him; (345) and presently his flatterers cried out, one from one place, and another from another (though not for his good), that he was a god; and they added, “Be thou merciful to us; for although we have hitherto reverenced thee only as a man, yet shall we henceforth own thee as superior to mortal nature.” (346) Upon this the king did neither rebuke them, nor reject their impious flattery. But, as he presently afterwards looked up, he saw an owl sitting on a certain rope over his head, and immediately understood that this bird was the messenger of ill tidings, as it had once been the messenger of good tidings to him; and fell into the deepest sorrow. A severe pain also arose in his belly, and began in a most violent manner (347) He therefore looked upon his friends, and said, “I whom you call a god, am commanded presently to depart this life; while Providence thus reproves the lying words you just now said to me; and I, who was by you called immortal, am immediately to be hurried away by death. But I am bound to accept of what Providence allots as it pleases God; for we have by no means lived ill, but in a splendid and happy manner.” (348)When he said this, his pain was become violent. Accordingly he was carried into the palace; and the rumor went abroad everywhere, that he would certainly die in a little time. (349) But the multitude presently sat in sackcloth, with their wives and children, after the law of their country, and besought God for the king’s recovery. All places were also full of mourning and lamentation. Now the king rested in a high chamber, and as he saw them below lying prostrate on the ground, he could not himself forbear weeping. (350) And when he had been quite worn out by the pain in his belly for five days, he departed this life, being in the fifty-fourth year of his age, and in the seventh year of his reign; (351) for he reigned four years under Caius Caesar, three of them were over Philip’s tetrarchy only, and on the fourth he had that of Herod added to it; and he reigned besides those, three years under the reign of Claudius Caesar: in which time he reigned over the forementioned countries, and also had Judea added to them, as also Samaria and Cesarea. (352) The revenues that he received out of them were very great, no less than twelve millions of drachmae. Yet did he borrow great sums from others; for he was so very liberal, that his expenses exceeded his incomes; and his generosity was boundless. (Jurgen TMB 1/22/2009)

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The Power of Prayer article in “Cooking Light” March 1997, page 20

The latest research suggests that prayer isn’t just salve for the soul – it may help keep your body healthy, too. “The vast majority of studies on the role of religion in health have found that the more people pray, the less prone they are to mental and physical illness,” says David Larson, M.D., president of the National Institute for Healthcare Research in Rockville, Maryland, and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at Duke and Northwestern universities. Studies have shown, for example, that among churchgoers, the death rate from coronary-artery disease is 50% lower and the suicide rate 53% lower than among people who don’t attend religious services.

Prayer may also reduce the adverse health effects of stress, and some studies suggest it might even help improve recovery from major surgery. For a group of 232 patients undergoing coronary-bypass surgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire, strength or comfort from religious faith was the single most consistent predictor of survival. And the more religious the subjects were, the greater the protective effect: Of the 195 patients who said they were fairly, slightly, or not religious, 21 died within six months after surgery; however, all 37 patients who described themselves as deeply religious survived.

Studies like these have perhaps bolstered the medical community’s interest in the faith-healing link. According to a recent survey by the American Academy of Family Physicians, 99% of doctors believe there is an important connection between the spirit and the flesh. So if you’re one of the more than 60% of Americans who believe prayer should play a larger part in their health care, you shouldn’t have trouble finding a physician who agrees. “To someone in good health, this may not seem very important – but should the day come that you are facing a serious illness, your doctor’s sensitivity to matters of faith could be very important,” Larson says. “It isn’t always a doctor’s place to raise the subject, but he or she should be open to listening to you if your spiritual life is important to you and you want to talk about it. If your doctor resists that idea, you may want to change physicians.”

You don’t necessarily have to select a doctor who shares the same faith as you do, he adds. “You just need to find someone who is at least respectful of your needs and comfortable with your talking about your faith.” (Jurgen TMB 1/22/2009)

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“Emerging data suggest that God may be as good as Prozac in fighting depression – especially for older women.

In a 1988 study of 850 people over 60, two-thirds of them women, Dr. Harold Koenig, a psychiatrist and head of Duke University’s Program on Religion, Aging and Health, found a strong link between ‘intrinsic religiosity’ and well-being.”

Boston Globe Sept 23, 1996 article/link: http://www.boston.com/globe/search/stories/health/health_sense/092396.htm (Jurgen TMB 1/22/2009)

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Another study has found that smokers who go to church live longer than smokers who don’t. One researcher has summed it up: “If you’re a smoker, get your butt in church.”

Christian Century Jan 27, 1999 article/link: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_3_116/ai_53739113 (Jurgen TMB 1/22/2009)

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“Planning on going to church this holiday season? That should be good for the spirit, of course – and perhaps also for the body. According to a study in Annuals of Epidemiology, people who attend religious services tend to be healthier than the rest of us.”

Parade Magazine Dec 21, 2008 article/link: http://www.parade.com/health/2008/12/stay-healthy-spirituality.html (Jurgen TMB 1/22/2009)

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Dag Hammarskjold Markings quote [letter titled Whitsunday, 1961 in the Chapter 1961]

I don’t know Who-or what-put the question, I don’t know when it was put.

I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to

Someone-or Something-and from that hour I was certain that existence is

meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal. (Jurgen TMB 4/03/2008)

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John Wimber Power Evangelism quote [Chapter 3 Power Evangelism]:

It was the end of a long day of ministry and I was exhausted. I had just completed a teaching conference in Chicago and was flying off to another speaking engagement in New York. I was looking forward to the plane ride as a chance to relax for a few hours before plunging back into teaching. But it was not to be the quiet, uneventful trip I had hoped for.

Shortly after takeoff, I pushed back the reclining seat and readjusted the seat belt, preparing to relax. My eyes wandered around the cabin, not looking at anything in particular. Seated across the aisle from me was a middle-aged man, a business man, to judge from his appearance, but there was nothing unusual or noteworthy about him. But in the split second that my eyes happened to be cast in his direction, I saw something that startled me.

Written across his face in very clear and distinct letters I thought I saw the word “adultery.” I blinked, rubbed my eyes, and looked again. It was still there. “Adultery.” I was seeing it not with my eyes, but in my mind’s eye. No one else on the plane, I am sure, saw it. It was the Spirit of God communicating to me. The fact that it was a spiritual phenomenon made it no less real.

By now the man had become aware that I was looking at him (“gaping at him” might be a more accurate description).

“What do you want?” he snapped.

As he spoke, a woman’s name came clearly to mind. This was more familiar to me; I had become accustomed to the Holy Spirit bringing things to my awareness through these kinds of promptings.

Somewhat nervously, I leaned across the aisle and asked, “Does the name Jane [not her real name] mean anything to you?”

His face turned ashen. “We’ve got to talk,” he stammered.

The plane we were on was a jumbo jet, the kind with a small upstairs cocktail lounge. As I followed him up the stairs to the lounge, I sensed the Spirit speaking to me yet again. “Tell him if he doesn’t turn from his adultery, I’m going to take him.”

Terrific. All I had wanted was a nice, peaceful plane ride to New York. Now here I was, sitting in an airplane cocktail lounge with a man I had never seen before, whose name I didn’t even know, about to tell him God was going to take his life if he didn’t stop his affair with some woman.

We sat down in strained silence. He looked at me suspiciously for a moment, then asked, “Who told you that name?”

God told me,” I blurted out. I was too rattled to think of a way to ease into the topic more gracefully.

“God told you?” He almost shouted the question, he was so shocked by what I had said.

“Yes,” I answered, taking a deep breath. “He also told me to tell you … that unless you turn from this adulterous relationship, he is going to take your life.”

I braced myself for what I was sure would be an angry, defensive reaction, but to my relief the instant I spoke to him, his defensiveness crumbled and his heart melted. In a choked, desperate voice he asked me, “What should I do?”

At last I was back on familiar ground. I explained to him what it meant to repent and trust Christ and invited him to pray with me. With hands folded and heads bowed, I began to lead him in a quiet prayer. “Oh God …”

That was as far as I got. The conviction of sin that had built up inside him seemed virtually to explode. Bursting into tears, he cried out, “O God, I’m so sorry” and launched into the most heartrending repentance I had ever heard.

It was impossible, in such cramped quarters, to keep hidden what was happening. Before long everyone in the cocktail lounge was intimately acquainted with this man’s past sinfulness and present contrition. The flight attendants were even weeping right along with him.

When he finished praying and regained his composure, we talked for a while about what had happened to him.

“The reason I was so upset when you first mentioned that name to me,” he explained, “was that my wife was sitting in the seat right next to me. I didn’t want her to hear.”

I knew he wasn’t going to like what I said to him next.

“You’re going to have to tell her.”

“I am?” he responded weakly. “When?”

“Better do it right now,” I said gently.

The prospect of confessing to his wife was, understandably, somewhat intimidating, but he could see there was no other way. So again I followed him, down the stairs and back to our seats.

I couldn’t hear the conversation over the noise of the plane, but I could see his wife’s stunned reaction, not only to his confession of infidelity, but also to his account of how the stranger sitting across the aisle had been sent by God to warn him of the consequences of his sin. Eyes wide with amazement (and probably terror!), she stared first at her husband, then at me, then back at her husband, then back at me, as the amazing story unfolded. In the end the man led his wife to accept Christ, right there on the airplane.

There was little time to talk when we got off the airplane in New York. They didn’t own a Bible, so I gave them mine. Then we went our separate ways. (Jurgen TMB 3/20/2008, 3/12/1998)

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Bill Wilson Conversion:

Historians have traced the genesis of the 12 step programs in Alcoholics Anonymous back to the Oxford Group, an evangelistic movement from the early 1900s. Dr. Frank Buchman, a Lutheran minister from Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, was the founder of the Oxford Group. Dr. Buchman experienced a spiritual transformation in 1908 as he visited a small church in Cumberland. Envisioning the suffering face of the crucified Christ, he realized how his resentments had separated himself from God’s unconditional love. He surrendered his will and willfulness to God and began to share his experience with others. His work and following grew, with groups eventually at Oxford, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Williams, Smith and Vassar. Outreach was conducted through house meetings and members were encouraged to find and work with people who suffered from problems similar to their own.

Bill Wilson, one of the co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, traced his journey to sobriety through the Oxford group. After being visited by an old friend, Ebby Thatcher, who was restored to sobriety through the Oxford Group, Bill W. was told the principles of the Oxford Group. He described his conversion experience from that night 20 years after the event in Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age: A Brief History of A.A., p. 63:

“My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the very bottom of the pit. I still gagged badly at the notion of a Power greater than myself, but finally, just for the moment, the last vestige of my proud obstinacy was crushed. All at once I found myself crying out, “If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything, anything!”

Suddenly, the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness. All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, “So this is the God of the preachers!” A great peace stole over me and I thought, “No matter how wrong things seem to be, they are still all right. Things are all right with God and His world.”

In the subsequent development of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson eventually distanced himself from the Oxford Group in order to reach out to Catholics and other groups who were uncomfortable with the evangelical emphasis. However, many of the traditions of the Oxford Group continue in the A.A. approach and the Scriptures remain the foundation for recovery for many of those in A.A. and other 12 Step groups. (Jurgen TMB 7/07/2007, 12/10/1998)

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Queen Elizabeth I:

Twas God the Word who Spake it

He took the Bread and break it

And what his words doth make it

That I believe and take it (Jurgen TMB 10/06/2005)

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“Sing to God in jubilation” by St. Augustine

http://sognodargento.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html

This is a very large website, so here is the text-of-interest:

Do not search for words, as if you could find a lyric which would give God pleasure. Sing to him “with songs of joy”. This is singing well to God, just singing with songs of joy.

But how is this done? You must first understand that words cannot express the things that are sung by the heart. Take the case of people singing while harvesting in the fields or in the vineyards or when any other strenuous work is in progress. Although they begin by giving expression to their happiness in sung words, yet shortly there is a change. As if so happy that words can no longer express what they feel, they discard the restricting syllables. They burst out into a simple sound of joy, of jubilation. Such a cry of joy is a sound signifying that the heart is bringing to birth what it cannot utter in words. (Jurgen TMB 5/05/2005)

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Dante in Paradiso

God is ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’ (Jurgen TMB 1/02/2003)

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Susan Howatch quote

My personal life was shown to be a devastating failure when my daughter chose to return to America to live with her father. I found I had been quite stripped of any illusion that I was doing very-nicely-thank-you. In the eyes of the world I was still the successful “Susan Howatch,” but this persona no longer seemed to be related to me. Behind this glittering image was someone else, someone who no longer knew who she was. I began to feel as if God had seized me by the scruff of the neck, slammed me against the nearest wall and was now shaking me until my teeth rattled. Why people think a religious conversion is all sweetness and light I have no idea. It must be one of the big spiritual misconceptions of our time. (Jurgen TMB 1/02/2003)

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Dag Hammarskjold Markings quote [letter titled Whitsunday, 1961 in the Chapter 1961]

I don’t know Who-or what-put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone-or Something-and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal. (Jurgen TMB 1/02/2003)

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C.S. Lewis book For Love

"There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung, and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket of coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell." (Jurgen TMB 10/31/2002)

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The Chalcedon Formula

AD 451

THEREFORE, following the holy fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge

one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ,

at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood,

truly God and truly man,

consisting also of a reasonable soul and body;

of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead,

and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood;

like us in all respects, apart from sin;

as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages,

but yet as regards his manhood begotten, for us men and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin, the Godbearer;

one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten,

recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation;

the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union,

but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence,

not as parted or separated into two persons,

but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ;

even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and our Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us,

and the creed of the fathers has handed down to us.

(Translation from Bettenson, Henry. Documents of the Christian Church. Oxford Univ. Press, 1947, p. 73) (Jurgen TMB 8/01/2002)

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William Willimon quote webpage link

The gospel is a story about something that has happened to us -- something that has come to us extra nos, from the outside. This story is, in the words of the Reformers, an externum verbum, an external word. It claims that by rooting around in our own egos or by reflecting upon our life experiences as men or women, whites or blacks, we really won’t discover much that is worth knowing, unless we know this Jew from Nazareth who is the way, the truth and the life, and are part of a people who follow him. It is only by listening to this story and allowing ii to have its way with us that we learn anything worth knowing. As Augustine said, when we look at our lives without Christ, they look like a chicken yard full of tracks in the mud going this way and that. But in the light of his life, our lives take on meaning, pattern, direction. (Jurgen TMB 6/06/2002)

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Albert Schweitzer quote:

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same words: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is. (Concluding paragraph, Quest of the Historical Jesus.) (Jurgen TMB 5/02/2002)

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(possible) Modern Theological quote:

"You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of being and of the faith community. You are the kerygma manifested in conflict. You are the self-realization of human personhood. You are the archetype of the fully-individuated self. You are the motivational encounter for the process of humanizing and socializing mankind." To which Jesus replied, "I'm what?" And straightway He told them not to tell anyone who he was, but because he couldn't recall the formula or repeat it himself. (Jurgen TMB 5/02/2002)

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selections from the Prologue; The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis

Every man partakes of the divine nature in both his spirit and his flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: it is universal. The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.

Struggle between the flesh and the spirit, rebellion and resistance, reconciliation and submission, and finally - the supreme purpose of the struggle - union with God: this was the ascent taken by Christ, the ascent which he invites us to take as well, following in his bloody tracks.

…

In order to mount to the Cross, the summit of sacrifice, and to God, the summit of immateriality, Christ passed through all the stages which the man who struggles passes through. That is why his suffering is so familiar to us; that is why we share it, and why his final victory seems to us so much our own future victory. That part of Christ’s nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand him and love him and to pursue his Passion as though it were our own. If he had not within him this warm human element, he would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; he would not be able to become a model for our lives. We struggle, we see him struggle also, and we find strength. We see that we are not all alone in the world: he is fighting at our side. (Jurgen TMB 5/02/2002)

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The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis) quote:

The rising of the sun had made everything look so different -- all the colors and shadows were changed -- that for a moment they didn’t see the important thing. Then they did. The Stone Table was broken into two pieces by a great crack that ran down it from end to end; and there was no Aslan.

“Oh, oh, oh!” cried the two girls, rushing back to the Table.

“Oh, it’s too bad,” sobbed Lucy. “They might have left the body alone.”

“Who’s done it?” cried Susan. “What does it mean? Is it more magic?”

“Yes!” said a great voice behind their backs. “It is more magic.” They looked round. There, shining in the sunrise, larger than they had seen him before, shaking his mane (for it had apparently grown again), stood Aslan himself.

“Oh, Aslan!” cried both the children, staring up at him, almost as much frightened as they were glad.

“Aren’t you dead then, dear Aslan?” said Lucy.

“Not now,” said Aslan.

“You’re not--not a--?” asked Susan in a shaky voice. She couldn’t bring herself to say the word ghost.

Aslan stooped hs golden head and licked her forehead. The warmth of his breath and a rich sort of smell that seemed to hang about his hair came all over her.

“Do I look it?” he said.

“Oh, you’re real, you’re real! Oh, Aslan!” cried Lucy, and both girls flung themselves upon him and covered him with kisses.

“But what does it all mean?” asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer. (Jurgen TMB 4/04/2002)

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George William Rutler Saint John Vianney: the Cure d’Ars today quote (page 13):

Particularity is the ground of devotion, at least from the Christian point of view, because Christianity is the account of how God became particular. There was a period - one period of thirty-three years, to be precise, and a moment - three hours of a Friday, to be quite precise, when God was as specific with us as he ever was. That is called salvation history, and not simply salvation, because it happened. (Jurgen TMB 3/07/2002, 4/20/2000)

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A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken

The misunderstanding of most couples has to do with their understanding of vows. They think vows, perhaps, are an expression of their feelings; a confident prediction, as it were, of what they would feel, in high and holy ecstasy forever. So of course “till death do us part” - nothing else could possibly happen; of course “forsaking all others” - have we not found each in the other incomparable perfection. They were utterly sincere. They believed their prediction. As Lewis said, “love makes vows unasked - it can’t be deterred from making them.” But it is the promise of Eros, of eternal “in-love-ment”, that makes the vow no more than a prediction. They do not understand that the vows are a promise - their promise to God as well as each other, for the times when they’re not feeling the ecstasy of “in-love-ment”. No vows are necessary for those in love; nothing can separate them but force. The vows are a gift from one to the other, not a protestation of love. That’s what they don’t understand. Here and now, they are saying each to the other “This is my promise. This you can trust. This you can lean on in the bad times, as long as life shall last. Whatever I may feel at any given moment, I will be faithful. You have my word.” (Jurgen TMB 2/14/2002)

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C.S. Lewis Miracles, a preliminary study quote [Chapter14 The Grand Miracle]

The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this. Just as every natural event is the manifestation at a particular place and moment of Nature’s total character, so every particular Christian miracle manifests at a particular place and moment the character and significance of the Incarnation. There is no question in Christianity of arbitrary interferences just scattered about. It relates not a series of disconnected raids on Nature but the various steps of a strategically coherent invasion - an invasion which intends complete conquest and ‘occupation’. The fitness, and therefore credibility, of the particular miracles depends on their relation to the Grand Miracle; all discussion of them in isolation from it is futile.

The fitness or credibility of the Grand Miracle itself cannot, obviously, be judged by the same standard. And let us admit at once that it is very difficult to find a standard by which it can be judged. If the thing happened, it was the central event in the history of the Earth - the very thing that the whole story has been about. (Jurgen TMB 12/06/2001)

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C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity quote [Book II Chapter 3 The Shocking Alternative]

Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language. meant the Being outside the world Who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

…

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come [away] with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (Jurgen TMB 12/06/2001)

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A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken (1987)

Chapter VIII - The Way of Grief - pages 185-186

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The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology quote:

The body is the symbol, not of individuality, but of solidarity. It is that which binds, in each individual, divinely unique as he is, an inescapable relatedness to the whole of nature and history and the cosmic order. It is the bond of continuity and unity between man and his environment, between individual and community, between generation and generation. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body is the doctrine of the redemption and replacement of one solidarity by another, by the body of the old mortality by the Body of Christ. It is an assertion that no individual can be saved apart from the whole. Through His body He is organically linked with all other life and all other matter in the universe. There is no redemption for the individual out of this math, but only in it and with it. The Christian Gospel is not of the rescuing of individuals out of nature and history, but the redeeming of all the myriad relationships of creation into a new Heaven and a new Earth - the City of God, the Body of Christ. (Jurgen TMB 9/06/2001)

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Morton T. Kelsey Resurrection: release from oppression quote:

“It is my basic contention that the ideas of immortality and resurrection are

not contradictory, but rather complementary. In the same way that modern

physics uses two opposite descriptions to represent the nature of light completely.” (Jurgen TMB 5/17/2001)

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C. S. Lewis The Great Divorce, Chapter 3 (page 19) quote:

It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison. Moved by a sudden thought, I bent down and tried to pluck a daisy which was growing at my feet. The stalk wouldn’t break. I tried to twist it, but it wouldn’t twist. I tugged till the sweat stood out on my forehead and I had lost most of the skin off my hands. The little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron, but like diamond. There was a leaf – a young tender beech-leaf, lying in the grass beside it. I tried to pick the leaf up: my heart almost cracked with the effort, and I believe I did just raise it. But I had to let it go at once; it was heavier than a sack of coal. As I stood, recovering my breath with great gasps and looking down at the daisy, I noticed that I could see the grass not only between my feet but through them. I also was a phantom. (Jurgen TMB 5/17/2001)

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Studs Turkel Working interviewing Nora Watson in the Introduction (page xxiv):

“I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job.

Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that

are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.” (Jurgen TMB 4/05/2001)

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Os Guinness The Call, Chapter 6: Do What You Are (page 45, 1998 edition)

John Coltrane, the saxophonist who played for Dizzie Gillespie and Miles Davis, said something very similar. In the early 1950s “Trane” nearly died of a drug overdose in San Francisco, and when he recovered he quit drugs and drinking and came to put his faith in God. Some of his best jazz came after that, including “A Love Supreme,” an ardent thirty-two minute outpouring to thank God for his blessing and offer him Coltrane’s very soul.

After one utterly extraordinary rendition of “A Love Supreme,” Coltrane stepped off the stage, put down his saxophone, and said simply, “Nunc dimittis.” (These are the opening Latin words for the ancient prayer of Simeon, sung traditionally at evening prayers: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”) Coltrane felt he could never play the piece more perfectly. If his whole life had been lived for that passionate thirty-two minute jazz prayer, it would have been worth it. He was ready to go. (Jurgen TMB 4/05/2001)

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C.S. Lewis The Problem of Pain, Chapter 10: Heaven (page 151, 1996 edition)

… All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest – if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself – you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ (Jurgen TMB 4/05/2001)

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G. K. Chesterton quote from Orthodoxy (1907, Chapter “The Paradoxes of Christianity”):

“Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites,

by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.” (Jurgen TMB 1/11/2001)

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Charles Simeon of Cambridge quote:

“The truth is not in the middle, and not in one extreme, but in both extremes.”

(H. C. G. Moule, Life of Charles Simeon, p. 97) (Jurgen TMB 1/11/2001)

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Quaker philosopher Elton Trueblood quote from The Yoke of Christ (1958):

“Occasionally we talk of our Christianity as something that solves problems, and there is a sense in which it does. Long before it does so, however, it increases both the number and the intensity of the problems. Even our intellectual questions are increased by the acceptance of a strong religious faith. … If a man wishes to avoid the disturbing effect of paradoxes, the best advice is for him to leave the Christian faith alone.” (Jurgen TMB 1/11/2001)

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Kenneth L. Woodward quote from Ushering in the age of the laity (Sept 9, 1994, Commonweal cover story):

Back in the first Nixon presidency I did a cover story on Billy Graham. I asked him,

“Billy Graham, what’s it feel like knowing you are saved?”

“Ken,” he said, “it’s a wonderful feeling.” But suppose, I went on, you were to crawl into the hay with the organist. What then? “Well,” Graham replied, “I just wouldn’t get as high a place in heaven.”

I told this story to Senator Mark Hatfield (R-Oreg.), who is a devout Baptist. “Ken,” he said,

“if I didn’t know I was saved I couldn’t get up in the morning.”

“Mark,” I replied, “if I KNEW I was saved, I WOULDN’T get up in the morning.” (Jurgen TMB 1/11/2001, 8/03/2000)

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Friar Johann Tetzel, working for Archbishop Albert of Mainz

“As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,

The soul from Purgatory springs.” 1517 AD (Jurgen TMB 11/07/2000)

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C. S. Lewis A Grief Observed, Chapter 3 (page 67-68) quote:

And then one or the other dies. And we think of this as love cut short; like a dance stopped in mid-career or a flower with its head unluckily snapped off – something truncated and therefore, lacking its due shape. I wonder. If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer. It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure. We are ‘taken out of ourselves’ by the loved one while she is here. Then comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her, and not fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorrow, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love. (Jurgen TMB 11/07/2000)

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Alfred Lord Tennyson Morte d’Arthur [page 67, The Complete Poetical Works of Tennyson, Cambridge Edition, 1898].

…

More things are wrought by prayer

Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice

Rise like a fountain for me night and day.

For what are men better than sheep or goats

That nourish a blind life within the brain,

If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer

Both for themselves and those who call them friend?

For so the whole round earth is every way

Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

… (Jurgen TMB 10/19/2000)

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Mark Twain quote:

“It ain’t those parts of the Bible that

I can’t understand that bother me,

it is the parts that I do understand.”

The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain, edited by Alex Ayres, 1989, pg. 24 (Jurgen TMB 10/05/2000)

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William James/Charles Reade quote:

Sow a thought, reap an action;

Sow an action, reap a habit;

Sow a habit, reap a character;

Sow a character, reap a destiny. (Jurgen TMB 8/03/2000)

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Frank Charles Laubach Letters by a Modern Mystic quote:

Can we have contact with God “all the time”? You and I do experience fine fresh contact with God sometimes, and we do carry out his will sometimes, but can we have this contact with God “all the time”? All the time awake, fall asleep in his arms, and awaken in His presence; can we attain that? Can we do His will “all the time”? Can we think His thoughts “all the time”? Or are there periods when business, pleasures, and crowding companions must necessarily push God out of our thoughts? Of course, that is self-evident. If one thinks of God all the time, he would never get anything else done. So I thought too, until now, but I am changing my view. We can keep two things in mind at once. Indeed we cannot keep one thing in mind more than half a second. Mind is a flowing something. It oscillates. Concentration is merely the continuous return to the same problem from a million angles. We do not think of one thing. We always think of the relationship of at least two things, and more often of three or more things simultaneously. So my problem is this: Can I bring God back in my mind-flow every few seconds so that God shall always be in my mind as an after-image, shall always be one of the elements in every concept and percept?

I choose to make the rest of my life an experiment in answering this question. (Jurgen TMB 8/03/2000)

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Anonymous author, carved in a cell wall (concentration camp) or a cellar wall (Cologne, Germany):

I believe in the sun even when it’s not shining.

I believe in love even when there is no one there.

I believe in God even when he is silent. (Jurgen TMB 6/01/2000)

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One of the least understood aspects of the drug problem is the degree to which it is in the end a moral and spiritual problem.

I continue to be amazed at how often people I speak to in treatment centers refer to drugs as the great lie, the great deception, indeed as a product of the Great Deceiver. An astonishing number of people in treatment have described crack cocaine to me simply as “the Devil.” This has come up too often and too spontaneously in conversation to be ignored.

You will know what I mean, then, when I say that in visiting treatment centers, prisons, inner-city communities, and public housing projects across the country over the past twenty-one months I’ve seen what I can only describe as the face of evil. Those people who doubt that there is evil in the world need to travel a few weeks with me on the drug circuit.

Recently a police officer told me about going into an apartment after receiving a complaint and finding there a four-year-old child and a one-year-old child. They had been in there by themselves for three days. The four-year-old had been left by his mother to care for the one-year-old. Now my wife and I have a six-year old and a one-year old at home. I know something about four-year-olds and their capabilities. Babysitting is not one of them. I don’t suppose that anyone would deny that for a four-year old to be left in charge of a one-year old for three days is not very wise child rearing. When the police entered and spoke to the children, the one-year-old was still holding on to the hand of her older brother. And the little boy said, “This is my sister and my mother told me to take care of her and I will.” The little boy was manfully trying to do his best. While the police were there, the mother came in with a roll of money in her hand. She had been out walking the streets to get the money to support her crack habit.

That’s not the kind of story that’s going to make the headlines or the evening news. But that’s the kind of story that is being told too often every day in communities all over America. Child-abuse experts tell me that they think that much of the dramatic increase in child abuse and neglect is due to drugs.

You may have heard the story from the West Coast of a six-month-old child who died of an overdose of crack. How does a six-month old die of an overdose of crack? Because her mother or father, we’re not sure which, inhaled crack and then, to quiet the baby, blew crack into the baby’s mouth until the baby was destroyed.

Or you may have heard the story from Detroit of the woman who owed a debt to her drug dealer and handed over her thirteen-year-old daughter to the drug dealer in order to pay the debt.

If these kinds of incidents are not the face of evil in our time, I don’t know what is. That is why a spiritual and a moral response is required. Those who believe that because of modernity the categories of right and wrong, of good and evil, no longer apply need to take a close, hard look at the drug problem. If one doesn’t believe in the struggle of the psychomachia—what I was taught to recognize as the struggle between good and evil for possession of the human soul—then one might never get to the heart of this drug problem.

I think that the drug question, although serious in itself, is really symptomatic of a much wider problem. And that has to do with the neglect of the most important things. The most important things have to do with the teaching and passing on of certain true and time-honored values to our children. When we neglect these things, it doesn’t matter what wealth or knowledge we have. For in neglecting the task of transmitting our fundamental values, we lose everything for which this country and our Judeo-Christian religious tradition stand. A recent news report in the New York Times on teenage health problems makes the point inadvertently, but very well:

America’s teenagers are plagued with an array of physical and emotional health problems that make them less healthy than their parents were at that age, the [National Association of State Boards of Education and the American Medical Association] Commission said today. The panel, including medical, health, and business leaders, said hundreds of thousands of adolescents and teenagers suffered from excessive drug use, unplanned pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, social and emotional problems that can lead to academic failure or suicide. As a result, many teenagers are unprepared to achieve successful lives as adults, the panel says. Unlike the problems of earlier generations, the Commission said, those of today’s teenagers are rooted in behavior rather than in physical illnesses like infections and diseases. Excessive drinking, drug use, sex, and violence are major threats to the current generation.

Note that one sentence: “Unlike the problems of earlier generations . . . those of today’s teenagers are rooted in behavior rather than in physical illnesses. . . .” So, having stated that teenagers’ problems are rooted in behavior, what does the Commission recommend? It recommends that teenagers be guaranteed access to health services and that schools take on a larger role in improving their students’ health. It says that schools should establish health centers as well as offer classes that go beyond customary hygiene lessons to include sex education. In other words, having pointed out that the problem is not, for the most part, a health problem, the Commission goes on basically to recommend better medical health as the solution.

Why is that? Because that’s the only solution that the conventional wisdom—at least in some circles—understands. It understands physical health, but it does not understand spiritual health. The approach of the Commission indicates the intellectual poverty of modernity, with its reliance on technological, psychological, and governmental solutions for moral and spiritual problems. The evidence in this case is clear. Never has our scientific, technological, or governmental know-how been greater, and never has the condition of our young people been worse.

What’s the answer? We need the decade of the nineties to be a time when once again we talk directly about right and wrong, about values and character, about education as the architecture of the soul. What our children need—and all one has to do is go to schools and talk to children to see it—is not for the most part medicine. Where medicine is needed, by all means let it be provided. But what these children need most is guidance. They need an example. They need moral principles. They need to know what is worthy of being loved and what is worthy of being defended.

If we wish to help our children, we need the courage to say in classrooms in this country—including the classrooms in our public schools—that there is a difference between right and wrong. And to say in those same classrooms that the greatest institution is the family, the family of husband and wife, male and female, joined. Schools are there, after all, to enlighten, not to obscure; to point people to a better way of life, not a worse way of life. That is true of the art and the music we present to our children as well. It is not an act of censorship to distinguish between a work of art or a piece of music that lifts the human spirit and one that degrades it.

Much now is settled in the wider world. During his visit here earlier this year. Lech Walesa reflected on the dramatic political revolutions occurring in countries all over the world. He reminded all of us that the job of social reconstruction is not finished once the right political system is established. To Americans in particular he said, “Please take care of this country. If you do not lead us, who will?” We have led the world in the aspiration for freedom, and much of the world has taken our cue and adopted our principles. Now comes the time for America to lead in an area beyond the political. We need now to show the world that we understand what it means to care for children. (Jurgen TMB 12/02/1999)

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The Gulag Archipelago quote (pages 175-176)

Let any reader who thinks that this book is going to be a political indictment shut it right now. If it were only that easy! If it were just that there were some evil persons, people who have committed evil acts, and had to be identified and eliminated. But the line dividing good and evil runs through the heart of every human being. And who is going to eliminate part of his own heart? In the lifetime of one heart, this line shifts even within it, sometimes pressed by exultant evil, at other times opening room for the flowering of good. One person at different ages and in different situations can be a completely different individual. At times, he may be close to being a devil, at others to being a saint. But the name doesn’t change and we attribute everything to him. (Jurgen TMB 12/02/1999)

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C.S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters quote (Preface, page 9, 1943 edition)

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can

fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other

is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. (Jurgen TMB 12/02/1999)

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George Weigel Death of a heresy quote/selection:

What died in the Soviet Union on August 21, 1991, was, in the strict sense of the term, a heresy. For Communism was never just economic foolishness married (in its Leninist form) to draconian methods of social control; Communism was a false doctrine, a congeries of false teachings about human nature, human community, human history, and human destiny. Therein lay its power; its power to attract, and its power to coerce. (Jurgen TMB 12/02/1999)

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selections from Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (1964)

Chapter 5. Letter from Birmingham Jail, page 70:

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Chapter 5. Letter from Birmingham Jail, page 72:

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law. (Jurgen TMB 11/04/1999)

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selections from Metropolitan (Archbishop) Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray (1982)

chapter 6 Two Meditations: Staretz Silouan, pages 112-114:

… He was a most remarkable man and for a long time he was in charge of the workshops of the monastery. The workshops of the monastery were manned by young Russian peasants who used to come for one year, for two years, in order to make some money, really farthing added to farthing, in order to go back to their villages with a few pounds, perhaps, at the utmost to be able to start a family by marrying, by building a hut and by buying enough to start their crops. One day other monks, who were in charge of other workshops, said ‘Father Silouan, how is it that the people who work in your workshops work so well while you never supervise them, while we spend our time looking after them and they try continuously to cheat us in their work?’ Father Silouan said ‘I don’t know. I can only tell you what I do about it. When I come in the morning, I never come without having prayed for these people and I come with my heart filled with compassion and with love for them, and when I walk into the workshop I have tears in my soul for love of them. And then I give them the task they have to perform in the day and as long as they will work I will pray for them, so I go into my cell and I begin to pray about each of them individually. … And so’, he said, ‘I spend my days, praying for each of them in turn, one after the other and when the day is over I go, I say a few words to them, we pray together and they go to their rest. And I go back to fulfil my monastic office.’ (Jurgen TMB 11/04/1999)

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9/17/99 For $128 million, a seat in bosses' hall of fame - After sale of firm, owner splits riches, by Sharon Cohen, AP via Boston Globe, A3.

BELLEVILLE, Mich. - When Bob Thomson sold his company for $422 million, he could have chartered a jet, flown off to an island, even bought the island, perhaps. But he had a secret plan. It was only when the sale of Thompson-McCully Co., his road-building firm, was completed in July that he let all of his workers know, in a letter.

First, the good news: They would not lose their jobs.

Then, the great news: They would share in the proceeds.

The boss divided up $128 million among his 550 workers, making more than 80 of them millionaires.

"I was flabbergasted," said Rusty Stafford, a manager who opened his envelope at home, with his wife, Tammy. She tearfully said, "'Russ, I think the commas are in the wrong place,'" he recalled. "I looked at it, and kept looking, and thought the next thing I knew Ed McMahon would be knocking at our door."

But the 67-year-old Thompson is casual about his generosity. "It's sharing the good times, that's really all it is," he said.

"I don't think you can read more into it. I'm a proud person. I wanted to go out a winner and I wanted to go out doing the right thing."

If that philosophy seems like a throwback to an earlier era, consider the source: a businessman whose life reads like a Frank Capra script.

Humble guy with a soft spot for Norman Rockwell art. Starts a business in his basement with $3,500, supported by his school-teacher wife. Owns same modest house for 37 years. Expands his asphalt company into road-building juggernaut. Sells it after 40 years, collects nine-figure check. Shares the money with the salespeople and the secretaries, the folks in the gravel pits, the people who hold the road signs.

"People work exceedingly hard for us," he said. "It's a tough business and this is a demanding company." Translation: 14-hour days, six-day weeks, 99-degree sun, 300-degree asphalt.

"We're dependent on people," Thompson said, "so it would just not be fair not to do it. They've allowed me to live the way I want to live."

Actually, [the way he wanted to live] was pretty modestly. Thompson and his wife, Ellen, have a three-bedroom frame house. She still mops floors and washes windows. His [office is wood-panelled but] has no Persian rugs or oil paintings. Instead, there are photos of their three children and five grandchildren, Rockwell prints, a copy of poet John Donne's meditation that "No man is an island", and a clock with its hands frozen shy of 3 o'clock.

Thompson does not play the stock market, belong to a country club, or collect rich men's toys; the only boat he owns [is] a rowboat. His indulgences are few: He drives a Lincoln, and he and Ellen travel and take in an occasional Broadway show.

Thompson plans to give away much of what's left of the $422 million and plays down what he already has doled out. "I'm not trying to be a big shooter," he said. "A lot of people don't get the opportunity, but would if they could ... This didn't change my life a whole lot when you get right down to it."

But it did change the lives of many hundreds of others, including that of Thompson's 54-year-old administrative manager, Marlene Van Patten, who has worked for the company for 15 years and will cash in a generous annuity certificate upon retirement. (Like other employees, she took Thompson's advice and kept the amount private.)

Thompson had long planned to reward his workers, naming scores of them in his will. But in July, he sold his firm to CRH PLC, a building and construction firm based in Dublin. He says he chose it because of its record of not breaking up companies or firing workers; he will stay on to run the business.

As the sale becomes final, Thompson worked with senior staffers to develop a share-the-proceeds plan. Hourly workers, most of whom have pensions or 401(k) plans, received $2,000 for each year of service; some checks exceeded annual salaries.

Salaried workers, who do not have pensions, were given checks or annuity certificates that they can cash in at age 55 or 62. Those range from $1 million to $2 million each.

In addition, Thompson included some retirees and widows in his plan.

And he paid the taxes, which amounted to $25 million.

When the checks were distributed one recent Sunday [Sunday? why Sunday?] morning in seven Thompson offices across Michigan, it was as if dozens of co-workers had all bought winning lottery tickets: There were tears and hugs. Some folks were speechless, others chattered away.

Thompson stayed home that day, worried it might be too embarrassing and maybe too emotional. He also told supervisors he did not want to be flooded with phone calls.

Slowly workers have revealed plans for their newfound [riches]:

Furniture. A car. In-vitro fertilization. Braces for a granddaughter. College tuition for a son. Retirement homes.

But Jim McInnis, whose father also worked at the firm, echoes the thoughts of many others who say the checks did not change their work ethic. Many were back on the job at 5:30 a.m. the day after the checks were distributed. "I've always held my head up high working for this company," he said. "Now it's a little bit higher. I'm standing 10 feet tall." (Jurgen TMB 11/04/1999)

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Prayer Panels in the Ruins of Coventry Cathedral (Coventry, England):

In Industry God be in my hands and in my making.

In the Arts God be in my senses and in my creating.

In Commerce God be at my desk and in my trading.

In Suffering God be in my pain and in my enduring.

In Healing God be in my skill and in my touching.

In Government God be in my plans and in my deciding.

In Education God be in my mind and in my growing.

In Recreation God be in my limbs and in my leisure.

In my Home God be in my heart and in my loving. (Jurgen TMB 10/07/1999)

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C.S. Lewis The Problem of Pain,

Chapter 10: Heaven (pages 151-152, 1996 edition)

… Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. The mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.

Chapter 10: Heaven (pages 154, 1996 edition)

… But it is also said ‘To him that overcometh I will give a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.’ [Revelation 2: 17] What can be more a man’s own than this new name which even in eternity remains a secret between God and him? And what shall we take this secrecy to mean? Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the Divine beauty better than any other creature can. (Jurgen TMB 10/07/1999)

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Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer

God, give us grace to accept with serenity

the things that cannot be changed,

Courage to change the things

which should be changed,

and the Wisdom to distinguish

the one from the other.

Living one day at a time,

Enjoying one moment at a time,

Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,

Taking, as Jesus did,

This sinful world as it is,

Not as I would have it,

Trusting that You will make all things right,

If I surrender to Your will,

So that I may be reasonable happy in this life,

And supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen. (Jurgen TMB 9/02/1999)

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Charles Williams The Descent of the Dove: A Short History of the Holy Spirit in the Church quote (page 1)

The beginning of Christendom is, strictly, at a point out of time. A metaphysical trigonometry finds it among the spiritual Secrets, at the meeting of two heavenward lines, one drawn from Bethany along the Ascent of Messias, the other from Jerusalem against the Descent of the Paraclete. That measurement, the measurement of eternity in operation, of the bright cloud and the rushing wind, is, in effect, theology. (Jurgen TMB 5/20/1999)

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C.S. Lewis - The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe quote:

“Oh, oh, oh!” cried the two girls, rushing back to the Table.

“Oh, it’s too bad,” sobbed Lucy. “They might have left the body alone.”

“Who’s done it?” cried Susan. “What does it mean? Is it more magic?”

“Oh, Aslan!” cried both the children, staring up at him, almost as much frightened as they were glad.

“Aren’t you dead then, dear Aslan?” said Lucy.

“Not now,” said Aslan.

“You’re not--not a--?” asked Susan in a shaky voice. She couldn’t bring herself to say the word ghost.

Aslan stooped hs golden head and licked her forehead. The warmth of his breath and a rich sort of smell that seemed to hang about his hair came all over her.

“Do I look it?” he said.

“Oh, you’re real, you’re real! Oh, Aslan!” cried Lucy, and both girls flung themselves upon him and covered him with kisses.

“But what does it all mean?” asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer. (Jurgen TMB 4/01/1999)

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Night by Elie Wiesel (pages 64-65, 2006 edition):

One day, as we returned from work, we saw three gallows, three black ravens, erected on the Appelplatz. Roll call. The SS surrounding us, machine guns aimed at us: the usual ritual. Three prisoners in chains – and, among them, the little pipel, the sad-eyed angel.

The SS seemed more preoccupied, more worried, than usual. To hang a child in front of thousands of onlookers was not a small matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was pale, almost calm, but he was biting his lips as he stood in the shadow of the gallows.

This time, the Lagerkapo refused to act as executioner. Three SS took his place.

The three condemned prisoners together stepped onto the chairs. In unison, the nooses were placed around their necks.

“Long live liberty!” shouted the two men.

But the boy was silent.

“Where is merciful God, where is He?” someone behind me was asking.

At the signal, the three chairs were tipped over.

Total silence in the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting.

“Caps off!” screamed the Lagerälteste. His voice quivered. As for the rest of us, we were weeping.

“Cover your heads!”

Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing …

And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking:

“For God’s sake, where is God?”

And from within me, I heard a voice answer:

“Where He is? This is where – hanging here from this gallows …”

That night, the soup tasted of corpses. (Jurgen TMB 4/01/1999)

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The godly Archbishop William Temple once observed that people say there cannot be a God of love “because if there was, and he looked upon the world, his heart would break. The church points to the cross and says, ‘It did break’”.

from Nothing Else to Fear by David W. Ellis, page 76 (Jurgen TMB 4/01/1999)

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“Jesus of the Scars” by Edward Shillito, 1872-1948 (printed as poem 737, page 235 Masterpieces of Religious Verse edited by James Dalton Morrison, 1948):

If we have never sought, we seek Thee now;

Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars;

We must have sight of thorn-pricks on Thy brow,

We must have Thee, O Jesus of the Scars.

The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;

In all the universe we have no place.

Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm?

Lord Jesus, by Thy Scars we claim Thy grace.

If when the doors are shut, Thou drawest near,

Only reveal those hands, that side of Thine;

We know to-day what wounds are, have no fear,

Show us Thy Scars, we know the countersign.

The other gods were strong; but Thou wast weak;

They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;

But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,

And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone. (Jurgen TMB 4/01/1999)

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Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray you to set your passion, cross and death between your judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death. Give mercy and grace to the living, pardon and rest to the dead; to your holy Church peace and concord; and to us sinners everlasting life and glory; for with the Father and the Holy Spirit you live and reign, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

the end of the Good Friday Liturgy, The Book of Common Prayer, The Episcopal Church (Jurgen TMB 4/01/1999)

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The Mystery of Marriage [As Iron Sharpens Iron] by Mike (Michael Ross) Mason (1985 edition)

(chapter 6 Submission pages 142-143)

That is why matrimony may correctly be termed a holy order, a special category, in fact, of the religious life. It is a monasticism in which the vow and discipline of chastity becomes the vow and discipline of fidelity, in which the vow of poverty is translated into an unqualified sharing of the totality of one’s life and possessions, in which the vow of stability applies not to a place or a fraternity but to a particular person, and in which the vow of obedience is practiced not in community but in partnership, and not toward a superior but to an equal. Matrimony is a holy order because in it the meaning of holy is interpreted in the light of its homonym wholly: for only through wholeness of dedication can human life begin to approach wholeness, or holiness.

(chapter 6 Submission page 138)

The fact of the matter is that holy matrimony, like other holy orders, was never intended as a comfort station for lazy people. On the contrary, it is a systematic program of deliberate and thoroughgoing self-sacrifice. A man’s home is not his castle so much as his monastery, and if he happens to be treated like a king there, then it is only so that he might be better enabled to become a servant. For marriage is intended to be an environment in which he will be lovingly yet persistently confronted with the plainest and ugliest evidence of his sinfulness and thus encouraged on a daily basis to repent and to change.

(chapter 6 Submission page 139)

In marriage it so happens that the Lord has devised a particularly gentle (but no less disciplined and effective) means for helping men and women to humble themselves, to surrender their errant wills.

(chapter 6 Submission page 142)

… Just as the man who loves God will almost certainly incur greater suffering in this world than the man who does not, so it is that a man who loves a woman may, by virtue of that very fact, open himself up to deeper levels of suffering than a man who will not commit himself to any love at all. For it is not in the nature of love to deflect pain, but rather to absorb it, and to absorb greater and greater amounts of it. Marriage gives a face to suffering, just as it gives a face to joy, and thereby enables the suffering not to be lessened, but rather to be transformed from something inhuman and faceless into something fully human, something which registers in the depths of relational personhood. It is true of all intimacy, but especially of marriage, that it creates the unique and miraculous circumstances in which suffering cannot be extracted from love. (Jurgen TMB 3/18/1999)

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer Letters and Papers from Prison (Chapter 3 “A Wedding Sermon from a prison cell” (May 1943)”, page 28)

… It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love. (Jurgen TMB 3/18/1999)

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Pierre Teilhard de Chardin Hymn of the Universe quote [Section Penses, Chapter “The Presence of God in the World”, part 2 pages 76-77]:

The prodigious expanses of time which preceded the first Christmas were not empty of Christ: they were imbued with the influx of his power. It was the ferment of his conception that stirred up the cosmic masses and directed the initial developments of the biosphere. It was the travail preceding his birth that accelerated the development of instinct and the birth of thought upon the earth. Let us have done with the stupidity which makes a stumbling-block of the endless eras of expectancy imposed on us by the Messiah; the fearful, anonymous labours of primitive man, the beauty fashioned through its age-long history by ancient Egypt, the anxious expectancies of Israel, the patient distilling of the attar of oriental mysticism, the endless refining of wisdom by the Greeks: all these were needed before the Flower could blossom on the rod of Jesse and of all humanity. All these preparatory processes were cosmically and biologically necessary that Christ might set foot upon our human stage. And all this labour was set in motion by the active, creative awakening of his soul inasmuch as that human soul had been chosen to breathe life into the universe. When Christ first appeared before men in the arms of Mary he had already stirred up the world. (Jurgen TMB 12/10/1998)

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Bertrand Russell Mysticism and Logic, and other essays quote [Chapter III, A Free Man’s Worship page 41]:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins – all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built. (Jurgen TMB 12/10/1998)

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Millard Fuller (1994) essay quoted by Jürgen:

We had a big time down in Charlotte, North Carolina last year. We decided to build an entire city block of houses – 14 houses in only 5 days. 14 houses in 5 days. We sent out a call. Folks came from 28 states, and 2 Canadian provinces. Former President Jimmy Carter and Roslyn joined us. People came from 86 Charlotte churches – it was really something. But you know what made me just about as proud as anything else? After we gathered the first morning and had our devotionals, like we always do, we grabbed our hammers and went to work. And there went an Episcopal priest, and the most conservative Baptist preacher in Charlotte, to begin hammering together. When you’re on the roof of a house, working for God, it don’t matter if you’re a conservative or a liberal. All that matters is that you can hit the nail on the head. Those two preachers didn’t know each other before they started work on that house; now they’re good friends. That’s “the theology of the hammer”. (Jurgen TMB 6/11/1998)

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The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas (1974 edition) (chapter 3 On Societies as Organisms pages 11-12):

…

It is hard for a bystander not to do so. Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves. The families of weaver ants engage in child labor, holding their larvae together like shuttles to spin out the thread that sews the leaves together for their fungus gardens. They exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.

What makes us most uncomfortable is that they, and the bees and termites and social wasps, seem to live two kinds of lives: they are individuals, going about the day’s business without much evidence of thought for tomorrow, and they are at the same time component parts, cellular elements, in the huge, writhing, ruminating organism of the Hill, the nest, the hive. It is because of this aspect, I think, that we most wish for them to be something foreign. We do not like the notion that there can be collective societies with the capacity to behave like organisms. If such things exist, they can have nothing to do with us.

Still, there it is. A solitary ant, afield, cannot be considered to have much of anything on his mind; indeed, with only a few neurons strung together by fibers, he can’t be imagined to have a mind at all, much less a thought. He is more like a ganglion on legs. Four ants together, or ten, encircling a dead moth on a path, begin to look more like an idea. They fumble and shove, gradually moving the food toward the Hill, but as though by blind chance. It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits. (Jurgen TMB 6/11/1998)

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Habits of the Heart by Robert N. Bellah (1985 edition) (chapter 9 Religion pages 220-221):

…

Today religion in America is as private and diverse as New England colonial religion was public and unified. One person we interviewed has actually named her religion (she calls it her “faith”) after herself. This suggests the logical possibility of over 220 million American religions, one for each of us. Sheila Larson is a young nurse who has received a good deal of therapy and who describes her faith as “Sheilaism.” “I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.” Shelia’s faith has some tenets beyond belief in God, though not many. In defining “my own Sheilaism,” she said: “It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think He would want us to take care of each other.” Like many others, Sheila would be willing to endorse few more specific injunctions. We will return to Shelia later in this chapter, for her experience and belief are in some ways significantly representative. But first we must consider how it came about that “Sheilaism” somehow seems a perfectly natural expression of current American religious life, and what that tells us about the role of religion in the United States today. How did we get from the point where Anne Hutchinson, a seventeenth-century precursor of Sheila Larson’s, could be run out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony to a situation where Anne Hutchinson is close to the norm? (Jurgen TMB 6/11/1998)

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Thomas Merton “Seasons of celebration” Chapter 6 The Nativity Kerygma (page 101, 1986 edition) quote:

Christianity is not so much a body of doctrine as the revelation of a mystery. A mystery is a divine action, something which God does in time in order to introduce men into the sanctuary of eternity. Being a religion of mysteries, Christianity is a religion of facts – divine facts, divine actions.

In celebrating the mysteries of Christ as they recur in time, the Church first of all announces these events: “Christ is born!” “Christ is risen!” She proclaims them, as a herald proclaims the triumphal entrance of a victorious King into a city. Her announcement, her proclamation of the divine event, is a work which she entrusts to her “heralds,” her apostles, her preachers. Christianity is thus essentially kerygmatic: the priest is a herald, kerux, an angel of the Lord of Hosts, a voice crying out in the desert: “Make straight the ways of the Lord.” (Jurgen TMB 4/09/1998, 12/05/2024)

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Episcopal Church definition of Evangelism:

To Evangelize is to present Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit in such a way that people come to believe in Him as Savior and follow Him as Lord in the fellowship of the church. (Jurgen TMB 4/09/1998)

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David du Plessis (as told to Bob Slosser) A man called Mr. Pentecost quote [Chapter 1 The Warning]:

I was in my Johannesburg office well before seven o’clock that bright, sun-bathed morning in 1936. The mail, as usual, was piled high on my desk. ...

...

I was bent over my desk, fully absorbed in a letter to the mission, when suddenly the door burst open. There was no knock. The door swung wide and there stood Smith Wigglesworth, the British evangelist. I started to smile and speak, but instantly sensed this was no time for cordiality. He was grim-faced, taut, erect to his full five-foot-eight stature. The fiery, rough-hewn Pentecostal evangelist looked like an elder statesman in his immaculate gray suit, well-groomed gray hair and finely-trimmed white mustache. He was nearing seventy at that time. A comparative youngster at thirty-one, I remained silent.

He wore a fierce expression and offered no greeting. Instead, he raised his right hand and pointed the forefinger at me. “Come out here!” his voice boomed. I remember thinking, how can a man of such small size have such a ringing voice?

Without hesitation, I moved out around the desk and walked toward him. “Yes, Brother Wigglesworth.”

He put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me against the wall—not roughly, but certainly firmly—and he held me there. I didn’t know what to expect. I had been around this powerful preacher a lot. In fact, I was at that time his host—he and his party were staying in my home. I did a lot of the interpretation at his meetings, and we were quite close. I had seen the Lord use him so dramatically in preaching and healing that I could hold him in nothing but the highest regard. But I was more than a bit uneasy at that moment.

He looked straight into my eyes. I had no choice but to stare back at him. He began to speak, and I knew he was prophesying.

“I have been sent by the Lord to tell you what He has shown me this morning,” he began. “Through the old-line denominations will come a revival that will eclipse anything we have known throughout history. No such things have happened in times past as will happen when this begins.”

Without breaking stride, he plunged ahead in his rapid-fire manner. “It will eclipse the present-day, twentieth-century Pentecostal revival that already is a marvel to the world, with its strong opposition from the established church. But this same blessing will become acceptable to the churches and they will go on with this message and this experience beyond what the Pentecostals have achieved. You will live to see this work grow to such dimensions that the Pentecostal movement itself will be a light thing in comparison with what God will do through the old churches. There will be tremendous gatherings of people, unlike anything we’ve seen, and great leaders will change their attitude and accept not only the message but also the blessing.”

He paused ever so slightly, and his eyes burned into mine. “Then the Lord said to me that I am to give you warning that He is going to use you in this movement. You will have a very prominent part.”

Again, a slight hesitation. “One final word, the last word the Lord gave me for you: All He requires of you is that you be humble and faithful under all circumstances. If you remain humble and faithful, you will live to see the whole fulfilled.”

For the first time in five minutes, his eyes left mine, and he bowed his head. “Lord, I have delivered the message of what you are planning to do with this young man, and now, Lord, bless him and get him ready; keep him in good health so that all this will come to pass. Amen.”

Without another word, he lifted his hands from my shoulders, turned and walked directly out the door, shutting it quietly behind him.

I stood against the wall for several moments, stunned by the whole scene and especially the words. I thought of running after the evangelist, but decided against it. I’d had enough for a while. “He sure has his own ways of doing things,” I mused.

I went back to my desk and sat down. “Lord, I don’t understand this at all.” I knew something had happened to me. “Lord, it’s all very puzzling, very confusing. I didn’t expect this, but give me grace to be faithful. Help me to remember; help me not to fail.”

It was deeply troubling. Wigglesworth’s message was a jolt, completely contrary to what we Pentecostals were teaching and believing. We were praying for God to do something, but this wasn’t it. We were preaching and teaching the full gospel—the baptism in the Holy Spirit, Pentecost—but our message was “come ye out from among them and join us.” We were totally convinced that the Pentecostal teaching was the last wave before the return of Christ and that God had no further use for the main line denominational churches. They had missed the boat completely and were virtually apostate. They had ostracized the Pentecostals, criticizing and ridiculing at every turn. How could God possibly have anything more to do with them—the Dutch Reformed, the Anglicans, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Catholics, all of them?

Without warning there was a gentle knock at the door. About ten minutes had passed. “Come in.”

It was Wigglesworth. He walked in as though for the first time, smiling and friendly. “Good morning, Brother David, and how are you this morning?”

“Oh,” I said, “about now, very puzzled.”

“And why is that?” he asked, with pure innocence.

“Well now,” I said, “you come into this office, and you stand me against the wall, and you prophesy, and now you come back in and you act as if you’d never seen me before, and you want to know why I’m puzzled?”

“Well,” he said, “the Lord said to his prophets, ‘speak to no man on the way,’ and I didn’t speak to anybody. I didn’t say anything to your wife when I arose this morning. I didn’t say anything to anybody I met. I didn’t say anything to you. I delivered the message. Now we can talk about it.”

Dumbfounded, I just looked at him.

(Jurgen TMB 2/12/1998)

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John Henry Newman, The Dream of Gerontius

O man, strange composite of heaven and earth!

Majesty dwarfed to baseness! fragrant flower

Running to poisonous seed! and seeming worth

Cloaking corruption! weakness mastering power! (Jurgen TMB 7/10/1997)

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Blaise Pascal

What a chimera is man! what a confused chaos! what a subject of contradiction! a professed judge of all things, and yet a feeble worm of the earth! the great depository and guardian of truth, and yet a mere huddle of uncertainty! the glory and the scandal of the universe! (Jurgen TMB 7/10/1997)

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John Seldon Whale, Christian Doctrine

page 43 (Chapter II, Man and His Sin: the Christian Doctrine of the Fall)

... In short, theirs was neither the easy optimism of the humanist, nor the dark pessimism of the cynic, but the radical realism of the Bible. (Jurgen TMB 7/10/1997)

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Evelyn Underhill, The house of the soul

Next, what type of house does the soul live in? It is a two-story house. The psychologist too often assumes that it is a one-roomed cottage with a mud floor; and never even attempts to go upstairs. The extreme transcendentalist sometimes talks as though it were perched in the air, like the lake dwellings of our primitive ancestors, and had no ground floor at all. A more humble attention to facts suggests that neither of these simplifications is true. We know that we have a ground floor, a natural life biologically conditioned, with animal instincts and affinities; and that this life is very important, for it is the product of the divine creativity its builder and maker is God. But we know too that we have an upper floor, a supernatural life, with supernatural possibilities, a capacity for God; and that this, man’s peculiar prerogative, is more important still. If we try to live on one floor alone we destroy the mysterious beauty of our human vocation; so utterly a part of the fugitive and creaturely life of this planet and yet so deeply coloured by Eternity; so entirely one with the world of nature and yet, “in the Spirit,” a habitation of God. “Thou madest him lower than the angels, to crown him with glory and worship.” We are created both in Time and in Eternity, not truly one but truly two; and every thought, word and act must be subdued to the dignity of that double situation in which Almighty God has placed and companions the childish spirit of man. (Jurgen TMB 7/10/1997)

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William Barclay, New Testament Words

Agapē has to do with the mind: it is not simply an emotion which rises unbidden in our hearts; it is a principle by which we deliberately live. Agapē has supremely to do with the will. It is a conquest, a victory, and achievement. No one has ever naturally loved his enemies. To love one’s enemies is a conquest of all our natural inclinations and emotions.

This agapē, this Christian love, is not merely an emotional experience which comes to us unbidden and unsought; it is a deliberate principle of the mind, and a deliberate conquest and achievement of the will. It is in fact the power to love the unlovable, to love people whom we do not like. Christianity does not ask us to love our enemies and to love men at large in the same way as we love our nearest and our dearest and those who are closest to us; that would be at one and the same time impossible and wrong. But it does demand that we should have at all times a certain attitude of the mind and a certain direction of the will towards all men, no matter who they are. (Jurgen TMB 7/10/1997)

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Dr Roger Pilkington, physicist:

If matter is no more than an arrangement of energy, then it is perfectly conceivable, even if surprising, that where the sheer essence of the whole creation was poured into human form, the body could dissociate into sheer energy and redistill, as it were, outside the tomb, in a state which was, on the average, more energy than matter, but definitely material enough to have some shape and substance. (Jurgen TMB 4/10/1997)

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John Donne, The Works of John Donne [Sermons, Vol IV] page 5:

... One humour of our dead body produces worms, and those worms suck and exhaust all other humour, and then all dies, and all dries, and moulders into dust, and that dust is blown into the river, and that puddled water tumbled into the sea, and that ebbs and flows in infinite revolutions, and still, still God knows in what cabinet every man’s dust lies; and sibilat populum suum, (as his prophet speaks in another case) he whispers, he hisses, he beckons for the bodies of his saints, and in the twinkling of an eye, that body that was scattered over all the elements, is sat down at the right hand of God, in a glorious resurrection. ... (Jurgen TMB 4/10/1997)

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St. Augustine The City of God, Chapter 19:

And consequently overgrown and emaciated persons need not fear that they shall be in heaven of such a figure as they would not be even in this world if they could help it. For all bodily beauty consists in the proportion of the parts, together with a certain agreeableness of color. Where there is no proportion, the eye is offended, either because there is something awanting, or too small, or too large. And thus there shall be no deformity resulting from want of proportion in that state in which all that is wrong is corrected, and all that is defective supplied from resources the Creator knows of, and all that is excessive removed without destroying the integrity of the substance. And as for the pleasant color, how conspicuous shall it be where the just shall shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father! (Matthew 13:43) (Jurgen TMB 4/10/1997)

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Eberhard Jürgel, God as the Mystery of the World, trans. Darrell L. Guder (Grand Rapids, 1983), p. 158:

“revelation means only that God is the unconditional subject of himself and as such is accessible only because and to the extent that he makes himself accessible. Apart from the access to himself which he himself affords, no thinking will ever find its way to him.” (Jurgen TMB 2/13/1997)

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From Beginning to Pray by Archbishop Anthony Bloom:

“In the years of the Civil War when the opposing armies were contending for power, conquering and losing ground in the course of three years, a small town fell into the hands of the red army which had been held by the remnants of the Imperial troops. A woman found herself there with her two small children, four and five years of age, in danger of death because her husband belonged to the opposite camp. She hid in an abandoned house hoping that the time would come when she would be able to escape. One evening a young woman, Natalie, of her own age, in the early twenties, knocked at the door and asked whether she was so-and-so. When the mother said she was, the young woman warned her that she had been discovered and would be fetched that very night in order to be shot. The young woman added, ‘You must escape at once.’ The mother looked at the children and said, ‘How could I?’ The young woman, who thus far had been nothing but a physical neighbor, became at that moment the neighbor of the Gospel. She said, ‘You can, because I will stay behind and call myself by your name when they come to fetch you.’ ‘But you will be shot,’ said the mother. ‘Yes, but I have no children.’ And she stayed behind.

We can imagine what happened then. We can see the night coming, wrapping in darkness, in gloom, in cold and damp, this cottage. We can see there a woman who was waiting for her death to come and we can remember the Garden of Gethsemane. We can imagine Natalie asking that this cup should pass her by and being met like Christ by divine silence. We can imagine her turning in intention towards those who might have supported her, but who were out of reach. The disciples of Christ slept; and she could turn to no one without betraying. We can imagine that more than once she prayed that at least her sacrifice should not be in vain. Natalie probably asked herself more than once what would happen to the mother and the children when she was dead, and there was no reply except the word of Christ, ‘No one has greater love than he who lays down his life for his friend.’

Probably she thought more than once that in one minute she could be secure! It was enough to open the door and the moment she was in the street she no longer was that woman, she became herself again. It was enough to deny her false, her shared identity. But she died, shot. The mother and the children escaped.” (Jurgen TMB 4/08/1993)

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C.S. Lewis: Aim at heaven, and you get the earth thrown in. Aim at the earth, and you get neither. (Jurgen TMB 6/13/1991)

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"Sour godliness is the devil's religion." John Wesley the Methodist, The Methodist Bookd Concern, 1903 (Jurgen TMB 6/13/1991)

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