Preaching Life (Barbara Brown Taylor)

A Lovely book; a series of meditations on preaching followed by a handful of stunning, perfect little sermons. I read one per Sunday when i was between churches, and they kept me going.

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Quotes:

Barbara Brown Taylor is primarily a worshiper. Whether in the study, in a classroom, in a hospital room, on a mountain trail, or in the pulpit, she is in the sanctuary.

As best I can figure, the Christian era ended during my lifetime.

Every time God declines to meet my expectations, another of my idols is exposed.

When all is said and done, faith may be nothing more than the assignment of holy meaning to events that others call random.

We are born seekers, calling strange names into the darkness from our earliest days because we know we are not meant to be alone, and because we know that we await someone whom we cannot always see.

"Do anything that pleases you," the voice in my head said again, "and belong to me.'

the sacrament of the word calls for a light touch.

Finally I got the message. "Bible" was a code word for "God." People were not hungry for information about the Bible; they were hungry for an experience of God, which the Bible seemed to otter them.

Faith may be an imaginative act, as I have suggested, but the Bible reminds us that we are not free to imagine anything we like.

In short, the Bible turned out not to be a fossil under glass but a thousand dillerent things-a mirror, a scythe, a hammock, a lantern, a pair of binoculars, a high diving hoard, a bridge, a goad-all of them offering themselves to me to be touched and handled and used.

For those rooted in Christian memory and fed by Christian hope, nothing in life is simply what it seems. Equipped with the paradoxical images and stories of our historic faith, we see things differently than we would without them.

Sometimes we kneel, assuming a posture that is all but gone from our world-like troubadours, like lovers, like servants, we kneel before the Lord our maker and our hearts follow suit. 'Ihen we stand to sing and sit to listen, dancing the peculiar ballet of the people of God.

the first thing [the sacraments] teach us is that we do not worship God alone.
'Ihe second thing sacraments teach us is that God uses material things to reach out to us.
'I he third thing sacraments teach its is that God is not delicate. 'The sacraments of the church are not weekend performances in sacred settings; they are portable.

the sermon proves to be a communal act, not the creation of one person but the creation of a body of people for whom and to whom one of them speaks. A congregation can make or break a sermon by the quality of their response to it.

When the door opens in a sermon, it is because God has consented to be present. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't.

This means that I never know ahead of time what I will preach. If I did, then my sermons would be little more than lessons, expositions of things I already know that I think my listeners ought to know too. While there are preachers who do this sort of thing well, I am not one of them.

Human beings do not lose control of their lives. What we lose is the illusion that we were ever in control of our lives in the first place,

MOST OF US KNOW THIS STORY AS THE STORY OF the rich young ruler, although Mark is the only one who suggests he is rich, Matthew is the only one who says he is young, and Luke is the only one who calls him a ruler. The fact that he shows up in all three of these gospels is a pretty good indication that his story is true, although most of us wish that he had never shown up at all. Because of hinl, we have one of the hardest sayings in the whole Bible, one that strikes fear in the hearts of would-he Christians everywhere: "Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then conic, follow nme."

Are we really supposed to admire a poor woman who gave her last cent to a morally bankrupt religious institution?

We are not called to be philanthropists or social workers, but brothers and sisters. We are called into relationship, even when that relationship is unlikely, momentary, or sad.

I imagine Jesus down at the plasma bank on Boulevard, standing in line with the hungover men waiting to sell their blood, or maybe down at the city jail shooting the breeze with the bail bondsmen who cruise the place like vultures. I imagine him at the Majestic Diner on Ponce de Leon with a crack dealer, a car thief, a prostitute with AIDS, buying them all cheese omelettes when I come in with the sixth-grade confirmation class and sit down a couple of booths away.

These two parables are full of problems, not least of which is that they do not seem to mean what Jesus says they mean. According to his explanations, they are about heaven's joy over one repentant sinner, but the lost sheep does not repent as far as I can tell and the lost coin certainly doesn't. They are both simply found-not because either of them does anything right, but because someone is determined to find them and does. They are restored thanks to God's action, not their own, so where does repentance come in at all?

If God is where we came from and God is where we are going, then we have no permanent address and all our shelters along the way are temporary ones.

It is not the best feeling in the world, but it is not the worst either. It is not a bad thing to know you belong somewhere, even if you are not there yet.

We cling to the illusion that some of us are blessed and some of us are not, and that it is our job as those who are blessed to rescue those who are not.

Belief is something else altogether, although it is not what some would have us believe. It is not a well-fluffed nest, or a well-defended castle high on a hill. It is more like a rope bridge over a scenic gorge, sturdy but swinging hack and forth, with plenty of light and plenty of air but precious little to hang onto except the stories you have heard: that it is the best and only way across, that it is possible, that it will bear your weight.

The best way the writer of Genesis could think of to describe it was to say that paradise was the kind of place where you could walk around naked, where you could skinny-dip to your heart's content. It was that safe-so safe, in fact, that it might never even occur to you that you were naked, at least as long as you stayed away from the fruit of one particular tree.

Adam and Eve decided to live. The days of peace and plenty were gone for good, but they got by. Using all the scraps at hand, they managed to build first in altar and then a home, to bake bread from the wild wheat of the field and to bear five children. Using the pieces of their broken past, they made a future for themselves and for their descendants in the world outside of Eden, a world we continue to live in today. It is a world full of chips and dents and scars. Even where we have glued it back together you can still see the cracks, but in its own way it is lovely, a mosaic of many colors, a mended work of art, a testament to the God who is willing to work with broken pieces and who calls us to do the same.

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (Valente, Catherynne M.)

A worthy continuation to The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, in which the heroine finds space to grow up gracefully. The themes and characters get a little darker, and the book ends with a hint of a sequel to come.

Read with Laura

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Quotes:

For though, as we have said, all children are heartless, this is not precisely true of teenagers. Teenage hearts are raw and new, fast and fierce, and they do not know their own strength

You get the face you build your whole life, with work and loving and grieving and laughing and frowning.

“So much light, sweet girl, begins in the dark.”

Everything Must Be Paid For, Sooner Or Later.

Nothing could be quite that easy in Fairyland. It could be a Rule: Nothing is easy here. All traffic travels in the direction of most difficulty.

“First Law of Heroics.” The Monaciello grinned up at a confused September. “Someone has to tell you it’s impossible, or the Quest can’t go on.

“A book is a door, you know. Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.

“Well, I use the metric system. It’s the only way to get really exact numbers.”

Forgiveness always takes practice to get right,

RULES OF FAIRYLAND-BELOW
BEWARE OF DOG
ANYTHING IMPORTANT COMES IN THREES AND SIXES
DO NOT STEAL QUEENS
A GIRL IN THE WILD IS WORTH TWO IN CHAINS
NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF TEMPTATION
EVERYTHING MUST BE PAID FOR SOONER OR LATER
WHAT GOES DOWN MUST COME UP

her daughter’s shadow had gone a deep, profound shade of green—just the color of the smoking jacket of a man she’d known long ago, when she was just a small girl.

The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party (Alexander Mccall Smith)

In which Phuti Radiphuti finally gets his act together.

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Quotes:

A chair should be able to support a traditionally built person, and that should apply in particular, she felt, to a traditional chair.

A certain amount of acceptance—which was not the same thing as cowardice, or indifference—was necessary or you would spend your life burning up with annoyance and rage.

Mma Ramotswe had agreed that it would not be a good idea to allow men to do as they pleased, but she felt that there were tactful ways of achieving the desired result. “Rather than telling a man directly what to do,” she said, “a wife should make the man think that he is doing what he wants to do. There are ways of making this happen, Mma—tactful ways.”

One should not forget how to sit on the floor, she thought—never, no matter what happened in one’s life, no matter where one’s life journey took one. A president, she believed, should be able to sit on the floor with as much ease as the humblest herdsman.

Perhaps everybody is lying, she thought. And as she thought this, she remembered a passage from Clovis Andersen. There are some cases where everybody tells lies, he wrote. In these cases you will never know the truth. The more you try to find out what happened, the more lies you uncover. My advice is: do not lose sleep over such matters. Move on, ladies and gentlemen: move on.

The Double Comfort Safari Club (Alexander McCall Smith)

Another perfect Botswana story.

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Quotes:

NO CAR, thought Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, that great mechanic, and good man. No car … He paused. It was necessary, he felt, to order the mind when one was about to think something profound.
Now, his thoughts having been properly marshalled, the right words came to him in a neat, economical expression: No car is entirely perfect. That was what he wanted to say, and these words were all that was needed to say it. So he said it once more. No car is entirely perfect.

Push, shove, twist: these were no mantras for a good mechanic. Listen, coax, soothe: that should be the motto inscribed above the entrance to every garage; that, or the words which he had once seen printed on the advertisement for a garage in Francistown: Your car is ours.

That was the way the world was; it was composed of a few almost perfect people (ourselves); then there were a good many people who generally did their best but were not all that perfect (our friends and colleagues); and finally, there were a few rather nasty ones (our enemies and opponents). Most people fell into that middle group—those who did their best—and the last group was, thankfully, very small and not much in evidence in places like Botswana, where he was fortunate enough to live.

“Never be put off by rudeness, Mma,” she whispered. “It is the rude person who is rude, not you.”

The realization of our mortality came slowly, in dribs and drabs, until we bleakly acknowledged that everything was on loan to us for a short time—the world, our possessions, the people we knew and loved. But we could not spend our time dwelling on our mortality; we still had to behave as if the worst would not happen, for otherwise we would not do very much, we would be defeated and give up.

She used the expression that the Batswana preferred: to become late. There was human sympathy here; to be dead is to be nothing, to be finished. The expression is far too final, too disruptive of the bonds that bind us to one another, bonds that survive the demise of one person. A late father is still your father, even though he is not there; a dead father sounds as if he has nothing further to do—he is finished.

Light made all the difference. Under this midday sky fear and terror seemed very far away, but at night it was easy to imagine the presence of evil and its attendants, even here.

if you listened to what was said at funerals, you would think that this is a land of saints.”

The boatman looked puzzled. Women, he thought. It was always the same: men were interested in crocodiles and hippos and how they behaved; women were not. It was very difficult to understand. What did women think about? He had never worked out an answer to this, in spite of having had five wives. Perhaps I shall never understand them, he thought.

She and Mma Makutsi were not here to sit about—as if they were members of some double comfort safari club—they were here to find somebody, to talk to him, and then to return to Gaborone.

Unlikely things do happen, said Mma Ramotswe, and she knew, for she had seen many such things happen in her job, and had long since come to the conclusion that the extraordinary was often not quite as extraordinary as people imagined it to be.

Mma Ramotswe glanced at Mma Makutsi, and knew that she had to go. And she wanted to, anyway, as she could hardly miss the spectacle of Mma Potokwane, one of the most formidable women in Botswana, coming face-to-face with one of the country’s nastiest senior aunts. It would be an encounter to remember, and talk about, for a long time. And she was sure who would win.

Mma Potokwane moved forward slowly. It was not really like a person moving, thought Mma Ramotswe; it was more a geological movement, the movement of boulders falling slowly down a slope—unstoppable, remorseless, obeying only the rules of gravity and no other.

Love without freedom is like a fire without air. A fire without air goes out

Life of Pi (Yann Martel)

I re-read this, a few years after the first reading, in order to read it at the same time as my mother. I remember the feeling that something was being held back in the story and the final jarring revelation (or is it?). On this second reading, of course, i knew what was coming, so it wasn't as jarring. A good book in many ways, worthy of reading even if only for the musings on the nature of God, religion and the world we choose to live in.

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Quotes:

From Matheran I mailed the notes of my failed novel. I mailed them to a fictitious address in Siberia, with a return address, equally fictitious, in Bolivia.

"I have a story that will make you believe in God."

I have nothing to say of my working life, only that a tie is a noose, and inverted though it is, it will hang a man nonetheless if he's not careful.

Piscine Molitor Patel.

An animal inhabits its space, whether in a zoo or in the wild, in the same way chess pieces move about a chessboard—significantly.

Short of breath I said, "Father, I would like to be a Christian, please." He smiled. "You already are, Piscine—in your heart. Whoever meets Christ in good faith is a Christian. Here in Munnar you met Christ."

I entered the church, without fear this time, for it was now my house too. I offered prayers to Christ, who is alive. Then I raced down the hill on the left and raced up the hill on the right—to offer thanks to Lord Krishna for having put Jesus of Nazareth, whose humanity I found so compelling, in my way.

I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.

"Bapu Gandhi said, All religions are true.' I just want to love God," I blurted out, and looked down, red in the face.

There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless.

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart.

"I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare. I will beat the odds, as great as they are. I have survived so far, miraculously. Now I will turn miracle into routine. The amazing will be seen every day. I will put in all the hard work necessary. Yes, so long as God is with me, I will not die. Amen."

I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease.

I had to tame him. It was at that moment that I realized this necessity. It was not a question of him or me, but of him and me. We were, literally and figuratively, in the same boat. We would live—or we would die—together.

Where we can, we must give things a meaningful shape. For example—I wonder—could you tell my jumbled story in exactly one hundred chapters, not one more, not one less?

Carnivorous trees? A fish-eating algae that produces fresh water? Tree-dwelling aquatic rodents? These things don't exist." "Only because you've never seen them."

And so it goes with God.

Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger.

Guys Read: Funny Business (Jon Scieszka)

A collection of humorous short stories for boys. Some of them are very good, others so-so. I would probably have enjoyed it more if i were parenting boys, instead of girls.

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Quincas Borba (Machado de Assis)

Talvez o melhor livro de Machado. Pós-moderno como sempre, cronista da loucura humana que passa por vida normal.

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Quotes:

Ao vencido, ódio ou compaixão; ao vencedor, as batatas.

Quincas Borba chorava pelo outro Quincas Borba. Não quis vê-lo à saída. Chorava deveras; lágrimas de loucura ou de afeição, quaisquer que fossem, ele as ia deixando pela boa terra mineira, como o derradeiro suor de uma alma obscura, prestes a cair no abismo.

Humanitas é o princípio. Há nas coisas todas certa substância recôndita e idêntica, um princípio único, universal, eterno, comum, indivisível e indestrutível, — ou, para usar a linguagem do grande Camões:   Uma verdade que nas coisas anda, Que mora no visíbil e invisíbil.   Pois essa substância ou verdade, esse princípio indestrutível é que é Humanitas. Assim lhe chamo, porque resume o universo, e o universo é o homem.

esquece a dor, crê na esperança.

Quem conhece o solo e o subsolo da vida, sabe muito bem que um trecho de muro, um banco, um tapete, um guarda-chuva, são ricos de idéias ou de sentimentos, quando nós também o somos, e que as reflexões de parceria entre os homens e as coisas compõem um dos mais interessantes fenômenos da terra.

A expressão: "Conversar com os seus botões", parecendo simples metáfora, é frase de sentido real e direto. Os botões operam sincronicamente conosco; formam uma espécie de senado, cômodo e barato, que vota sempre as nossas moções.

"Há entre o céu e a terra, Horácio, muitas coisas mais do que sonha a vossa vã filantropia".

Rubião precisava de um pedaço de corda que o atasse à realidade, porque o espírito sentia-se outra vez presa da vertigem.

Eia! chora os dois recentes mortos, se tens lágrimas. Se só tens riso ri-te! É a mesma coisa. O Cruzeiro, que a linda Sofia não quis fitar, como lhe pedia Rubião, está assaz alto para não discernir os risos e as lágrimas dos homens.

Laurem Ipsum (Carlos Bueno)

Cute!

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Cloud Atlas: A Novel (Mitchell, David)

A clever book, built like a Russian doll. A little too messy to be life-changing, but a work of genius. I read somewhere someone said that "half of the time it wants to be the Bible, and the other half, the Simpsons."

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Quotes:

“Pain is strong, aye—but friends’ eyes, more strong.”

Several dead bottles of Trappist beer later, I asked Elgar about the Pomp and Circumstance marches. “Oh, I needed the money, dear boy. But don’t tell anyone.

You must imagine our awe as we looked at the grimy server serving three ugly sisters; seven stunted fabricants carrying bizarre cutlery behind a shining girl; a house built of candy. Castles, mirrors, dragons.

Dear Sonmi, Who art amongst us, return this beloved soul to a valley womb, we beseech thee.

Valleysmen only had one god an’ her name it was Sonmi.

Yay, Old Uns’ Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an’ made miracles ord’nary, but it din’t master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o’ humans, yay, a hunger for more.

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ’morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.

Catechism Seven: “A Soul’s value is the dollars therein.”

If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she xtemporized, corpocracy would be finished.

What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each “shell” (the present) encased inside a nest of “shells” (previous presents)

Courage grows anywhere, thinks Megan Sixsmith, like weeds.

science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity’s powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilization drives itself to extinction.

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room, reworking my year’s fragments into a “sextet for overlapping soloists”: piano, clarinet, ‘cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky?

“These are the tears of things”

Sunt lacrimæ rerum.

“The second law of survival states that there is no second law. Eat or be eaten. That’s it.”

My thoughts flow thus. Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.

My thoughts flow thus. Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief.

A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.

Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built: A No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Novel (10) (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency) (Mccall Smith, Alexander)

I keep saying the same things... i love this series!

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Quotes:

I am your sister. There was no simpler or more effective way of expressing a whole philosophy of life.

When we dismiss or deny the hopes of others, she thought, we forget that they, like us, have only one chance in this life.

“Who is this Rra Holmes?” asked the woman. “He was a very famous detective,” said Mma Ramotswe. “Over that way.” She waved a hand in the direction of north. “He lived in London. He is late now.”

The doors of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency had always been open to whosoever was in need. As Mma Makutsi well knew, they had sat and listened to the proud, the boastful, the arrogant, and even the moderately wicked. They had not condoned any of the human vices revealed to them, but they had always remembered that whatever the failings of the client, he or she was first and foremost a person in need of help.