Fankle
a better F word
…unfankling the fankles, and deciding to live with the odd unfankleable knot. ‘Fankle’ is a wonderful Scottish word for an unholy mess of thread, string, rope so tangled and entangled it takes inordinate patience to restore it to a useable skein.
Attachments
In Maps of Meaning Peterson describes how neurosis is often the product of unhealthy, excessive, and rigid attachments. Because of these attachments we often fail to move into newness and opportunity. We fail to meet the challenges of life with flexibility. Primarily because some things must be “let go” or “sacrificed” in order to move forward. Fearing to face this loss and grief, and clinging to the safety and predictability of the past, we neurotically cling to psychic lifeboats that can no longer save us and have outgrown their usefulness. Symbolically, we remain “children,” playing it safe, and fail to move heroically into the risks of “adulthood.” We have to be willing to “sacrifice” to keep moving into an ever-changing future.
Preaching
Scott Swain wrote something that defines preaching this way:
In preaching, we are heralds of the king, announcing that he has come and that he is coming again. In preaching, we are friends of the bridegroom, wooing the bride to embrace her beloved Lord. In preaching, we are ministers of the new covenant, presenting Jesus Christ, clothed in all the promises of the gospel, and summoning hearers to engage him in covenant union and communion.
What is a woman?
The prominence of the woman in the Scriptures parallels the Spirit’s. She is present and yet backgrounded. She is visible, yet obscure. However, in the unfolding she comes increasingly into view until she looms as large as day in Revelation, the bride as the final symbol of mankind. Redeemed humanity is a mankind who has become “womankind,” the exalted son’s sister and bride. The final corporate identity of mankind is feminine. So, the woman is obscure in the Scripture not because she is less, but because she is last. She is indicative of things to come, yet she is treasure worth finding as she represents what eye has not seen, what ear has not heard, neither has entered into the heart of man, the things that God has prepared for those that love him.
Aimee Byrd
Language
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
George Orwell
Lived Theology
If you take a look at what Christian living is actually like for those in your community and circles, you will discover — usually not creeds and confessions — but “lived” theology. The lived theology of a suburban and urban life will not be identical.
Scott McKnight
This is what I’ve come to understand about prayer.
Prayer is like breathing. Prayer is metaphysical respiration. Release and receiving. Escaping the trap of your subjectivity into an experience of gratitude and gift. Renunciation and grace.
If you refuse to pray, it’s like going through the day holding your breath. You become trapped within yourself, like a stagnant pond. To keep the waters clear you need inflow and outflow.
But when you look at the world, everyone is holding their breath.
All the world is suffocating.
Richard Beck
Paradoxical thinking
The truth in paradoxical language lies neither in the affirmation nor in the denial of either side, but precisely in the resolution of the tug-of-war between the two. The human mind usually works on the logical principle of contradiction, according to which something cannot be both true and false at the same time. Yet that is exactly what higher truths invariably undo (for example, God is both one and three; Jesus is both human and divine; bread and wine are both matter and Spirit). Unfortunately, since the Reformation and the Enlightenment, we Western, educated people have lost touch with paradoxical, mystical, or contemplative thinking. We’ve wasted five centuries taking sides—which is so evident in our culture today!
Richard Rohr
Doctrine
Doctrine gets a bad wrap. It gets portrayed as flat, fixed, and even fossilized truth. Nothing could be further from the truth. Doctrine is revelatory truthwhich has been crystallized, like a many faceted diamond, into the brilliance of a refracted clarity. Doctrine never replaces Scripture, but it collects and collates these sacred texts into dynamic exhibits of revealed truth. Think of doctrine as a theological art gallery. Doctrine presents Scripture as a series of theological works of art.
Part of the problem with doctrine is how over the years it has become like the Cliff Notes on the Bible. It’s like trying to reduce a movie to a series of still images. The Bible is like an epic movie series. Doctrines are like select scenes from the movie put into still images. The images only have meaning if you have seen the movie, but if you have seen the movie, they hold enormous significance.
Our doctrine, though, cannot be confused for for our experience. Doctrine helps us understand and interpret our experience, but too often, it has been a substitute. We ask people to accept a set of doctrines when we need to be helping them to encounter and experience Jesus Christ. Doctrine does not save people. Only Jesus does that.
Then there is the peril of substituting our experience for our doctrine, or worse, defining our doctrine according to our experience. The deception of sin has shipwrecked many souls on the shoals of changing our doctrine to accommodate our broken human condition.
There is a supreme irony in the interplay of these two scenarios. Because we have been willing to allow an approach to doctrine that settles for mere acceptance instead of pressing on toward personal experience, we have perpetrated an approach to personal experience (whatever it may be) that elevates it to its own doctrine. In other words, the Truth has been exchanged for “my truth” and “your truth.”
the greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection or order.
Richard Rohr
Van Gogh’s Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear indicts us. How willing are we to lead with the fact that we’ve got a lot of things in us that aren’t right?
This is how God sees his people. We are fully exposed in our short-comings, and at the same time we are of unimaginable value to him. Because this is so, this is how we should see others, and it is how we should be willing to be seen by others—broken and of incalculable worth.
Russ Ramsey
German theoretical physicist Max Planck was told by his professor not to go into Physics as “almost everything is discovered already”. So Planck said he did not want to discover anything & just wanted to learn the fundamentals. He went on to originate Quantum theory & won a Nobel Prize. – a recent fact that came to my attention.
STILL ON THE JOURNEY
