Saturday, October 24, 2009

Morality

I've been reading a book by Donald Miller that he wrote in 2004, "Searching For God Know What." It's a really good book and has stirred my thinking on a number of things. I'm getting close to the end (and I'll be moving on to his newest book that just came out, "A Million Miles In a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life"). I just finishing up the chapter on Morality and there were a couple of things he wrote that I thought I'd share with you for your reflection:

"Morality..., if you think about it, is the way we imitate God. It is the way we imitate the ways of heaven here on earth. Jesus says, after all, to know Him we must follow Him, we must cling to Him and imitate Him, and many places in Scripture the idea is presented that if we know Him, we will obey Him."

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"The hijaking of the concept of morality began, of course, when we reduced Scripture to formula and a love story to theology, and finally morality to rules. It is a very different thing to break a rule than it is to cheat on a lover. A person's mind can do all sorts of things his heart would never let him do. If we think of God's grace as a technicality, a theological precept, we can disobey without the slightest feeling of guilt, but if we think of God's grace as a relational invitation, an outreach of love, we are pretty much jerks for belittling the gesture.

"In this way, it isn't only the moralist looking for a feeling of superiority who commits crimes against God, it is also those of us who react by doing what we want, claiming God's grace. Neither view of morality connects behavior to a relational exchange with Jesus. When I run a stop sign, for example, I am breaking a law against a system of rules, but if I cheat on my wife, I have broken a law against a person. The first is impersonal; the latter is intensely personal."

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"There are a great many other motives for morality, but in my mind they are less than noble. Morality for love's sake, for the sake of God and the sake of others, seems more beautiful to me than morality for morality's sake, morality to build a better nation here on earth, morality to protect our schools, morality as an identity for one of the parties in the culture war, one of the identities in the lifeboat (lifeboat: thinking that some/we are better than others for various reasons, thinking that some/we are worth saving because of met standards verses those who do not)."

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Friday, October 16, 2009

Quotes from David Adam

I'm reading a book by one of my favorite authors - David Adam, Walking the Edges: Living in the Presence of God. In this book, building on stories about several Celtic saints, he looks at what it means to live in the presence of God. Here are a couple of quotes from the first several pages:

"Faith does not come without effort on our part, faith asks us to move out of our limiting security."

"If you want to understand the doctrine we have to be willing to live the life: if we want to understand the way of heroes we have to be willing to live heroically, there is no half answer. If you do not enter fully into the life of faith, you will not be aware of what the written word is about. Secure theories can be learned by anyone; true faith involves us fully and leads us to frontiers. God is never on the edges of mystery and the unknown."

"So often when we look back on what seemed to be against what we had planned we discover that it was a point of growth and learning. God does not work only within the confines of the Church or of our own ideas: it is often when we are forced to do other than we planned that the great Other works through us."

Within each piece of creation,
within each person,
the hidden God waits
to surprise us with His glory.

Within each moment of time,
within each day and hour,
the hidden God approaches us
calling our name to make us His own.

Within each human heart,
within our innermost being,
the hidden God touches us,
to awaken us and to reveal His love.

Everything, everyone is within God,
all space, all time and every person.
The hidden God asks us to open
our eyes and our hearts to His presence.

I can't recommend his books enough! They're great devotional reads and I find them especially inspiring during the "hard" seasons for me - Winter, that's when I often reread them. He has written several books on the Celtic saints, as well as on prayer and meditation.