‘I wonder sometimes if the teacher is not the real student and beneficiary’ (George Steiner)
To quote Malcom Guite one more time, here’s an excerpt from his poem ‘Maundy Thursday’, also published in The Word in the Wilderness:
In vain we search the heavens high above,
The God of love is kneeling at our feet.
Though we betray him, though it is the night.
He meets us here and loves us into light.
The familiar face of the person we live with, the quality of their steadfast covenant love, can suddenly become a window through which the face of the God who loves us in and through them shines.
Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness
Interesting thoughts by Margaret Atwood on ‘dirty words’:
The bad ones in French are the religious ones, the worst ones in any language were what they were most afraid of and in English it was the body, that was even scarier than God.
From Surfacing.
It’s the really hungry who can smell fresh bread a mile away. For those who know their need, God is immediate – not an idea, not a theory, but life, food, air for the stifled spirit and the beaten, despised, exploited body.
Rowan Williams, as quoted by Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
Like two lovers who have become lost
In a winter blizzard
And find a cozy, empty hut
In the forest,
I now huddle everywhere
With the friend.
God and I have built an immense fire
Together.
We keep each other happy
And warm.
From: Hafiz, The Subject Tonight Is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems
You get to decide what you worship …. Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of … life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship … is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Karl Möller 