GODSTUFF

LOOKING BACK:

WORDS OF WISDOM FOR THE NEW YEAR, PART DEUX

Happy New Year!

A fresh start. A new beginning. The chance for do-overs, spiritual lessons to be learned, wisdom to be acquired, blessings to be discovered.

As promised, here is the second installment of my look back at the most intriguing thoughts I heard about faith, spirituality, religion and God in 2008:

“America’s simultaneous embrace of holiness and hedonism, its pining love of tradition as it carries on a headlong romantic affair with progress, its extreme individualism coursing beside a gigantic, gaping yearning for community, and its insistence on innocence at the same time it revels in violence … all of those are characteristics of the American personality and it just so happens that Johnny Cash profoundly struggled with all of those things and embodied all of them.”

— Rodney Clapp in his book Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction: Christianity and the Battle for the Soul of a Nation

“I don’t know about you, but I am so glad I’m not God. I really am glad I’m not God, but I’m also so glad that God is God. He is an incredible God! … His embrace is so wide that it leaves no one outside.”

–Archbishop Desmond Tutu speaking in Chicago in October 2008

“The national soul is now asserting and coming forward and choosing to serve humanity.”

–Sraddhalu Ranade, an educator and scientist from India’s Sri Aurobindo Ashram speaking at an international peace conference in Aspen, Colo., a few days after the 2008 General Election

“There’s been this evaporation of doubt as a hallmark of wisdom. … Everyone is very entrenched. And true discourse is nowhere to be found. And we’re desperate for it.”

–John Patrick Shanley, director (and author of) the screen adaptation of his Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Doubt”

“[A blessing] touches the tender membrane where the human heart cries out to its divine ground. In the ecstasy and loneliness of one’s life, there are certain times when blessing is nearer to us than any other person or thing. A blessing is not a sentiment or a question; it is a gracious invocation where the human heart pleads with the divine heart. There is nothing more intimate in life than the secret under-territory where it anchors.”

–The late Irish poet and former priest John O’Donohue in his book To Bless the Space Between Us

In the cathedrals of New York and Rome
There is a feeling that you should just go home
And spend a lifetime finding out just where that is

–From the song “Cathedrals” on Joan Osborne’s album “Little Wild One”

“This is a dangerous time in America, the freest country in the world, where you have to whisper your thoughts.”

–The Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of Chicago’s St. Sabina Catholic Church, in the wake of his controversial comments about Hilary Clinton at Trinity United Church of Christ

“Young evangelicals really think that Jesus probably would care more about the 30,000 children who died today because of poverty and disease than he would have about gay marriage amendments in Ohio. This is a new generation of abolitionists, you might say. And they are applying their faith, using their faith, addressing their faith to the challenges we face: the moral scandal of poverty; the degradation of the environment, which they call ‘God’s creation’; the threat of climate change; human rights; Darfur; pandemic diseases like HIV/AIDS; war and peace issues – the exclusive use of war to fight evil and the foreign policy disasters that has led us to. Their agenda is much wider and deeper.”

–Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners and author of The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America

“Give him the graces he needs. The graces of kindness and gentleness. The graces of a spirit of sensitivity that will enable him to reach across the lines which have divided and split our nation and bring wholeness and healing to the broken places in our national life. Endow him with an unshakable spirit. Lift him when his spirits are low and anchor him in a grace and a goodness that no world affair could shake or tumble.”

–Bishop Phillip R. Cousin in his invocation before President-elect Obama’s acceptance speech on election night 2008

God walks around in muddy boots,
sometimes in rags and that’s the truth
You can’t always tell, but sometimes you just know

–from the song “Geode” on Carrie Newcomer’s album “The Geography of Light”

“God delights in humans and what we do and how we try so hard. Several times in the show, [an angel] holds Grace – that’s God, to me, holding us up when we’re ashamed of something we’ve done and just there with his arms around us.”

–Nancy Miller, creator of the television series “Saving Grace”

“Never tell God what to do.”

–Carole “Bud” Pickett, a Presbyterian minister and anti-death penalty activist, who from 1982 to 1995 was the death-house chaplain at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, where he accompanied 95 inmates to their executions

I’d love to know what the best spiritual thoughts you heard in 2008 were. Please send your responses to me at: [email protected].