Here’s one gem:

In Practice of Christianity, Ki- erkegaard writes: “If anything is to be done, one must try to in- troduce Christianity into Christendom.” The backdrop to his entire authorship was a Danish Lutheranism that had degener- ated into a nominal state-religion. Three things, in particular, marred the church of his day: (1) Intellectualism – the “direct mental assent to a sum of doctrines”; (2) Formalism – “battal- ions upon battalions” of unbelieving believers; and (3) Pharisaism – a herd of hypocritical clergy that ignore the Christianity they were hired to preach. It was in this climate that Kierkegaard felt compelled to reintroduce Christianity. He sought to provide a kind of map that would, for the sake of Christian truth, steer people away from Christendom. “An apostle’s task is to spread Christianity, to win people to Christianity. My task is to disabuse people of the illusion that they are Christians – yet I am serving Christianity.”

By Christianity Kierkegaard did not mean a system of cor- rect doctrine or a set of behaviors: “The struggle is not between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. My struggle, much more inward, is about the how of the doctrine. I say that someone can accept the whole doctrine, but in presenting it he destroys it.” Kierke- gaard’s contention was that despite sound doctrine, or the what of faith, “the lives people live demonstrate that there is really no Christianity – or very little.” Genuine Christianity, according to Kierkegaard, is anything but doctrine. It is a way of being in the truth before God by following Jesus in self-denial, sacrifice, suffering, and by seeking a primitive relationship with God. Unfortunately, doctrine is what people want. And the reason for this is “because doctrine is the indolence of aping and mimicking for the learner, and doctrine is the way to power for the teacher, and doctrine collects people.”

The book is being distributed for free by Plough publishing here

“Paul said there’s neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female… Perhaps we could add, there’s neither us nor them.” B. Draper

After three decades on this mortal coil you would think I’d have sorted this out by now.

“What does it mean to experience all the material of our lives as a an act of faith?”

That I’m responsible for paying attention to the Word of God right here in this locale. The assumption of spirituality is that always God is doing something before I know it. So the task is not to get God to do something I think needs to be done, but to become aware of what God is doing so that I can respond to it and participate and take delight in it.

[from 'The Contemplative Pastor' p4]

Serving is not always easy. In service there is joy, but also pain, service can be fun, but it is also hard work. We remind ourselves that we follow in the footsteps of the servant of all, the one who did not come to be served but to serve. He is our inspiration, and he is our strength. He is the one who calls us to serve, and yet he also also welcomes us in to his rest, the good shepherd who leads us to quiet places as well as walking with us through dark times. The one who walked the way of the cross and the one who brings resurrection life. In service we know both.

‘Show up’ seems to be coming at me from a few sources lately. David Taylor recently asked the artist Jim Janknegt to give his top tips for being a productive artist. ‘Show up’ came in at number 5 on his list of ten. He says:

“I generally stick to my schedule even when I don’t feel like it. 90% of getting things done is just showing up. If I show up and just sit in a chair and stare at my painting or fall asleep I have not lost my momentum. Inertia is hard to overcome. Once I get started, I don’t stop.”

In the following video Elizabeth Gilbert also places emphasis on showing up, for these is a sense that in the creative process there is more going on that what we bring to the work:

For the creative we must know both discipline and grace. We must practice our craft, put in the work, and most of all simply ‘show up’. But, there is also a sense of grace. For, where does the scientists hypothesis come from? Where did those first few words of that poem come from? How did I just know to write it that way? How did I just know, the line had to follow that curve? Grace, I believe is present in our creative work, but we must show up.

Sleep also works in this way, sleep is a grace for the body, it re-vitalizes and re-juvenates us, it gives us energy of the coming day, and reminds us that the world can continue spinning with out our intervention. But a good sleep pattern also requires a discipline of sorts, nothing complicated we simply have to show up. And in this place dreams are made.

FInally, (also from David Taylor) -

According to Schwartz, courtesy of the Harvard Business Review: “The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them—build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.”

Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

[Extract from 'The Mad Farmer Liberation Front' by Wendell Berry]

What we work for as success is rarely success. What outlasts us are rarely the things we imagined would. So in all our doing we need a sense of humility, we do not fully know the value of our actions.

Often, when I hear ‘seeds’ and ‘harvest’ (as in the poem above), I’m reminded of Jesus’ words concerning the kingdom of God. That is a crop I did not plant, nor will I harvest it. But, it is the crop of most significance, existing long before my birth and long after my death. I hope I live appropriately with that crop; watching it, learning of it, noting its characteristics and subtleties, tending it, making sure I am not polluting the soil, or trampling on the plants. Hoping my walking is not, me-making-my-mark, crop circles for my own ego, and so damaging the farmers crop.

Forgive me Father, where in ignorance and deliberate fault I have acted in ignorance to the ways of the kingdom.