What are we going to do when we get home? When the two sons of the parable of the prodigal son both have returned to their father, what then? The answer is simple: they have to become fathers themselves. Sons have to become fathers; daughters have to become mothers. Being children of God involves growing up and becoming like God. -Nouwen

The rich brother needs to let the gospel humble him while the poor brother needs to let the gospel affirm him. -Keller

Worship

Sacramental Orthodoxy in our transcendent view of life, Celtic Community in our relational movements with one another and Franciscan Formation in our contemplative faith life in Christ.

It is amidst these characteristics of historical Christianity that I am seeking a Communion of Wonder.

To wish to learn from the Celtic Christian is to wish to sense the passionate presence of God in all of life. It is to find God in the ordinary events of life, love, eating, working, playing. . . . It is also to perceive that time and place do not separate us from what we ordinarily do not see and sense. The ancient Celts believed that the other world was always close to us and became apparent in the ‘thin times’ and ‘thin places’ in which the veil that usually obscured them was lifted -Timothy Joyce

Wonder how today’s worship team would do if they were placed in the balcony like the choir and the organ? How would the people do if they couldn’t see the band, but actually looked for God?

Worship is the strategy by which we interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves and attend to the presence of God. -Pastor Eugene Peterson

Worship and living are not two separate realms. Unless living is a form of worship, our worship has no life. – Rabbi AJH

It looks like I’m going to have to let go of what I expected and enter a mystery. -EP

“The impeded stream is the one that sings.” Wendell Berry

______

A Divergent not only seeks identity, but also belonging. The latter is much harder than the former.

The Old Testament is a portrait of God without the clarity offered by the Messiah. Yet, whenever the Christ appears in type or shadow in the ancient script an exquisite beauty appears in transformative, prophetic imagination that gives us a portal into a preferred future reality.

If you love your own, others will be drawn to that heart and home. If you love others more than your own you lose both.

The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there. Ruth Haley Barton

We don’t become more spiritual by becoming less human. -E Peterson

We are far too reserved when we encounter him…our gathering around him needs to read more like a story from the pages of the gospels.

My schedule is far less about what I want to get to done and far more about who I want to become. -Bill Hybels

While suffering passes, having suffered never passes. -Rabbi AJH

Suffering is a sharper chisel than success.

The value of . . . Myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ -C S Lewis

Marriage

The ordinary way to holiness and to the fullness of Christian life is marriage. -Merton

“Marriage turns out to be through and through an act of acquiescence, a willing compliance, both with God and with one other person, in the difficult process of one’s own sub-dual and mortification. It cannot succeed without, first of all, a profound acceptance of the conditions of struggle, the state of personal siege, in which it must be lived out, and secondly, without an ever-growing realization that one’s own self cannot and must not emerge as the winner of this struggle. ‘He who is least among you,’ says Jesus, ‘he is the greatest’ (Luke 9:48) and marriage at its best is a sort of contest in what might be called ‘one-downmanship,’ a backwards tug of war between two wills equally determined not to win. That is really the only attitude that works in marriage because that is the way the Lord designed it. He planned it especially as a way for men and women to enter wholeheartedly, with full consent and consequent peace and joy, into the inevitable process of their own diminishment, which is His worship and glorification.” —Mike Mason