Liturgies

REFLECTION

If you listen
not to the pages or preachers
but to the smallest flower
growing from a crack in your heart,
you will hear a great song
moving across a wide ocean…
connecting the islands
of the universe together…
you will feel it
touching you…
embracing you
with light.

John Squadra, This Ecstasy
quoted in inward/outward July 28, 2008

REFLECTION

If the world is sane, then Jesus is mad as a hatter…The world says, Law and order, and Jesus says, Love. The world says, Get, and Jesus says, Give. In terms of the world’s sanity, Jesus is crazy as a coot, and anybody who thinks we can follow him without being a little crazy too is laboring less under a cross than under a delusion.

Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life
Quoted in inward/outward April 9, 2009 

REFLECTION

And when we learn to read

the landscape of our fears,

and when we come to know

the terrain of every sorrow,

then will we turn

our fences into bridges

and our borders

into paths of peace.

Jan Richardson, Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas, Pilgrim Press, page 47.

REFLECTION

The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it. … What I want is so simple: … Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. … Right now I’m living in that hope, running down its hallways and touching the walls on both sides. I can’t tell you how good it feels.

Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams. Quoted in Inward/Outward January 9, 2008.

REFLECTION

I wish I could show you
when you are lonely
or in darkness
the astonishing light
of your being.

My Brilliant Image,” I Heard God Laughing: Renderings of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky, pp 13-15.