Hungry

March 21, 2010

I haven't been doing much reading lately. I go through phases; sometimes it's like I can't read quickly enough to satisfy my hunger for words and books, and other times I have no appetite.

This morning, however, I started re-reading a book called Bread and Wine, which is a book of short readings for Lent and Easter. Devoured is probably a better word to describe my reading behavior. I didn't even know I was hungry, but once I started reading I realized I was utterly famished for deep, meaningful words of Truth.

Here are some delicious morsels to savor:

"Jesus came as the revealer of love. Jesus reveals God by being utterly transparent to him. What had been cloaked in mystery is clear in Jesus- that God is love. No man or woman has ever loved like Jesus Christ. Therein lies his divinity for me."
—Brennan Manning

"Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point- and does not break."
—G. K. Chesterton

"It is important for us to realize that when Jesus says, 'It is accomplished,' he does not simply mean, 'I have done all the things I wanted to do.' He also means, 'I have allowed things to be done to me that needed to be done to me in order for me to fulfill my vocation.' Jesus does not fulfill his vocation in action only but also in passion... All action ends in passion because the response to our action is out of our hands. That is the mystery of work, the mystery of love, the mystery of friendship, the mystery of community- they always involve waiting. And that is the mystery of Jesus' love. God reveals himself in Jesus as the one who waits for our response."
—Henri Nouwen