It is the absoluteness of meaninglessness that Christianity, as I understand it, inhabits and inflects, the shock and stark violence of the cross that discloses the living Christ. Revelation, like creation, arises not merely out of nothingness but by means of it.
Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, "Love your enemies." It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. Just keep being friendly to that person. Just keep loving...
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Unknown
In a time of destruction, create something.
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Maxine Hong Kingston
Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.
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Roy T. Bennett
I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.
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Oscar Wilde
What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.
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Mark Twain
More Quotes By Christian Wiman
You cannot devote your life to an abstraction. Indeed, life shatters all abstractions in one way or another, including words such as "faith" or "belief". If God is not in the very fabric of existence for you, if you do not find Him (or miss...
I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence that the world, including many prose writers, doesn't recognize as discipline. It is, though. It's the discipline to endure hours that you refuse...
It is as if joy were the default setting of human emotion, not the furtive, fugitive glimpses it becomes in lives compromised by necessity, familiarity, ‘maturity, ’ suffering. You must become as little children, Jesus said, a statement that is often used to justify anti-intellectualism...
We do not need definite beliefs because their objects are necessarily true. We need them because they enable us to stand on steady spots from which the truth may be glimpsed. And not simply glimpsed–because certainly revelation is available outside of dogma; indeed all dogma,...
When I think of the years when I had no faith, what I am struck by, first of all, is how little this lack disrupted my conscious life. I lived not without God, nor wish his absence, but in a mild abeyance of belief, drifting...
