If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Albert Camus, ‘Summer in Algiers’
People in need of saving
We believed that God’s home was the church …, and that the world was a barren place full of lost souls in need of all the help they could get. […] The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do. … What if a lost soul strikes God as more reachable than a lifelong believer?
Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: Finding the Sacred Beneath Our Feet
Divine spaciousness in all the tight places
Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God’s name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall.
Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
To help
To help lift a burden, to help light a path, to help heal a hurt, to help seek a truth – these struck me as the sorts of things that human beings were created to do for one another ….
Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
Not a manipulated extension of myself
We cannot love God or our neighbour. We love both or neither. And what love means is rejoicing in the otherness of the other because the depth of this awareness is the depth of our communion with the other. … in the people we live with we find not objects to be cast in our own superficial likeness but, much more, we find in them our true selves, for our true selves only appear, only become realized, when we are wholly turned towards another.
[…]
In this recognition of the other person, a recognition that remakes my mind and expands my consciousness, the other person comes into being as they really are, in their real self, not as a manipulated extension of myself. People move and act out of their own integral reality and no longer as some image created by my imagination.
[…]
The essence of community … is a recognition of and deep reverence for the other.
John Main, Word into Silence
Reluctant
Very often we are reluctant to admit that we are the sick and sinful Jesus came to heal, and very often we prefer our self-protecting isolation to the risk of our face-to-face encounter with the Other [God] in the silence of our own vulnerability.
John Main, Word into Silence
Karl Möller 