Sunday-Ps. 146:5-10 links God the Creator to God the liberator. It is a shorthand for Hebrew ethics. The stability of creation seems to flow into a stable form of social action.What would a prayer for justice look like for you in 2016?
Monday-"The second-century bishop and theologian St. Irenaeus wrote that the true pilgrim was to live life in a state of ‘apavia’, a Latin word which means “roadlessness.” He called for a posture of deep trust in the leading of the Spirit, rather than human direction. In essence, he taught that the place where we don’t know where we’re going is also the place of greatest richness.".--- Christine Valters Paintner
Tuesday-"God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings AS THEY ARE; not an ideal world, but the REAL WORLD. ...this is for God the ground of unfathomable love. God establishes a most intimate unity with this. God becomes human, a real human being. While we exert ourselves to grow beyond our humanity, to leave the human behind us, GOD BECOMES HUMAN; and we must recognize that God wills that we be human, real human beings. While we distinguish between pious and godless, good and evil, noble and base, God loves REAL PEOPLE without distinction.
Wednesday-"But it is not enough to say that God embraces human beings. This affirmation rests on an infinitely deeper one, a sentence with a more impenetrable meaning, that God in the conception and birth of Jesus Christ has taken on humanity BODILY. God overrules every reproach of untruth, doubt and uncertainty raised against God's love by entering as a human being into human life, by taking on and bearing bodily the nature, essence, guilt, and suffering of human beings. God becomes human out of love for humanity. God does not seek the most perfect human being with whom to be united, but takes on human nature AS IT IS. Jesus is not the transfiguration of noble humanity but the Yes of God to real human beings, nor the dispassionate Yes of a judge but the merciful Yes of a compassionate sufferer. In this Yes all of the life and all the hope of the world are comprised. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 84-85
Thursday-"We're standing the middle of an awesome mystery - life itself! - and the only appropriate response before this mystery is humility. If we're resolved that this is where we want to go - into the mystery, not to hold God and reality but to let God and reality hold us - then I think religion is finally in its proper and appropriate place" (73). Rohr
Friday-"If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite." -William Blake
Saturday-"Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living. Descartes too was mistaken; 'Cognito ergo sum' -- 'I think therefore I am'? Nonsense. 'Amo ergo sum' -- 'I love therefore I am.' Or, as with unconscious eloquence St. Paul wrote, 'Now faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.' I believe that. I believe it is better not to live than not to love." (William Sloane Coffin)
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