“So, maps. Perhaps they are metaphors of progress towards a resting place, an ultimate goal. I used to teach courses in journal keeping as a means to self-awareness and God awareness. One of the exercises I suggested was this: “See your life as a landscape. Describe its contours and challenges, and think of yourself […]
Still Saturday: Why We Don’t Need Time
Thomas Merton wrote, in a light passage in one of his Gethsemane journals: “Suggested emendation in the Lord’s Prayer: Take out ‘Thy Kingdom come’ and substitute ‘Give us time!’ ” But time is the one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We […]
Still Saturday: Why There is No Need to Rush
“The theology of progress forces us to act before we are ready. We speak before we know what to say. We respond before we feel the truth of what we know. In the process, we inadvertently create suffering, heaping imprecision upon inaccuracy, until we are all buried under a mountain of misperception. But Sabbath […]
Still Saturday: The Problem with Busyness
“To remember is, literally, to put broken pieces back together, to re-member. It is to create an original wholeness out of what has become scattered fragments . . . “There is a terrible cost to our busyness. It erodes memory. Or worse than that: it turns good memory into mere nostalgia–memory falsified and petrified–and […]
Still Saturday: How Being Saved Sounds
An empty room is silent. A room where people are not speaking or moving is quiet. Silence is a given, quiet a gift. Silence is the absence of sound and quiet the stilling of sound. Silence can’t be anything but silent. Quiet chooses to be silent. It holds its breath to listen. It […]
Still Saturday: Abandoned
“His wounds didn’t disappear with his resurrected body. Jesus chose to walk out into the world with scars from the past–visible. “It’s with those hands he reaches out to gently hold you and draw you to his side, where his other scar is tender, where water and blood flowed. So you can touch it […]
Still Saturday: Quiet
But when our questions are invisible, we become invisible. Each time I am still, they emerge: my questions. Quietness resurfaces the thoughts and questions that are important. Quietness connects my soulful self to Jesus. ~Bonnie Gray :: :: invisibility fog of fear quiet connections intimacy. Inspired by chapter 13, “The Walk.” Leaving some […]
Still Saturday: Whitespace
“Arthur Rubenstein, one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century, when asked how he creates the tone he plays, said he once heard a woman sing. She sang with the most beautiful tone and he observed how she would pause. She stopped to take a breath. Rubenstein learned to do the same at […]
Still Saturday: Breathe
“Do you want to live in peace and hope? It can be simple. “All you have to do to live is insist on staying awake. Don’t flinch or fade; don’t forget or fake it. Just be. Accept who you’ve been made to be and let everything you do come from the impulses of seeking […]
Still Saturday: Still or Stationary?
“We choose to be stationary or we choose to be still. “The stationary pilgrim always turns his head around to see what was or what could have been. He loses focus on the potential and possibility of now. So he stays in the position of inaction because he can’t imagine another way. Stationary is […]
