GODSTUFF

LOOKING BACK:

WORDS OF WISDOM TO TAKE INTO THE NEW YEAR

Each year, as the calendar prepares to flip to a new beginning, I like to look back on the conversations I’ve had with people over the previous 12 months to find gems of spiritual wisdom.

This was a particularly rich year for intriguing conversations about faith and doubt, spirituality and meaning. So rich, in fact, that I find myself with too many gems to fit into a single year-end column.

So here are — in the first installment of two this week and in no particular order — some of the most interesting spiritual musings I heard this year:

“A lot of my best words come out of the silence. We talk at God so much, and I think it was important for me to develop a practice of listening, instead. Silence can be experienced as an absence of sound or as a fullness of spirit. It’s important for me to develop a practice where I encounter the fullness of spirit.”

— Singer/songwriter Carrie Newcomer, a practicing Quaker

“Hope is a theologically grounded notion, and I think that perhaps is especially true as Sen. Obama uses it. Hope would have to be distinguished from optimism, which is simply supposing things will turn out well. Hope is daring to envision something that is beyond either optimism or planning. It is an articulation of a vision, and, as the Bible says, without a vision, the people perish. . . . [Obama’s hope] is grounded in a notion that what God intends is justice and mercy and compassion, even if that seems, under current circumstances, to be unrealistic.”

— Ted Jennings, professor of biblical and constructive theology, Chicago Theological Seminary

“I don’t think the ‘why’ question is the ‘God’ question. See, to me if you figured out the ‘why,’ you’ve still got the problem. To me, the question and where God is located in these situations is: What are you going to do about it. . . . You’re not a victim of a hurricane. You are a daughter of God.”

— The Rev. John Cusick of Chicago’s Old St. Pat’s Catholic Church, answering the question: “Why would God allow another hurricane to hit the Gulf Coast?”

“I’m just telling you what happened to me. . . . There is so much more out there. We just need to entertain the thought that maybe we don’t have all the answers.”

— Jenniffer Weigel, Chicago broadcaster and author of Stay Tuned: Conversations with Dad from the Other Side

“If the Evangelical impulse is a radical, reforming, and innovative force, we acknowledge with sorrow a momentous irony today. We who time and again have stood for the renewal of tired forms, for the revival of dead churches, for the warming of cold hearts, for the reformation of corrupt practices and heretical beliefs, and for the reform of gross injustices in society, are ourselves in dire need of reformation and renewal today. . . . We confess that we Evangelicals have betrayed our beliefs by our behavior.”

— from “The Evangelical Manifesto,” a 19-page document signed by nearly 80 prominent evangelical leaders hoping to lift evangelicalism out of a political morass

“We don’t create something sacred. We find it right where we are by the way we deal with experiences.”

— Abbot Robert Joshin Althouse, a Buddhist priest and founder of the Oak Park Zen Community

“We have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world.”

— Jill Bolte Taylor in her recovery memoir, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey

“Listen, I put everybody come in my life in the category of a tree. Some people are like leaves on a tree. The wind blow, they over here. They unstable. It blow the other way, they over here. Seasons change, they wither and die. They gone. That’s all right. Some people — most people in the world are like that. They’re just there to take from the tree. They ain’t there to do nothing but take and give shade, every now and then. That’s all they can do . . .

“But if you find you two or three people in your life that’s like the roots at the bottom of that tree, you are blessed. Because them the kind of people that ain’t goin’ nowhere. They ain’t worried about being seen, don’t nobody have to know that they know you, they ain’t got to know what they doin’ for you, but if them roots weren’t there that tree couldn’t live. A tree could have 100 million branches but only a few roots down at the bottom to make sure it get everything it need. I’m telling you, son, when you get you some roots, hold on to them. But the rest of them, let it go. Just let it go. Let folks go.”

— Tyler Perry’s character “Madea” in “Madea Goes to Jail”

“Lord, protect my family and me. Forgive me my sins, and help me guard against pride and despair. Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just. And make me an instrument of your will.”

— Barack Obama’s prayer at the Western Wall in Jerusalem

“Love is the thing, you know.”

— Oscar-winning Jennifer Hudson, as Louise, in the film “Sex and the City”