quiet vs. not so quiet

Taken in December 16, 2006, this is the main street of the little town of Saint Lazare where I live. Pretty quiet for a Saturday night. I am leaving for San Fancisco tomorrow morning to visit a friend for 5 days and I am looking forward to the change not only from cold weather, but from quietness. Dean just returned from 8 days in Los Angeles on a business trip so it has been extra quiet here this past week, though very productive and enlightening and important on my part. I am a contemplative person and do much of my learning and growing by thinking things through and listening to God and reading and writing and creating, but there is also this side of me that needs crowds of people and lots of hustle and activity and a certain wild spontaneity in order to learn and see and experience those things that just cannot be learned in solitude. I also highly regard one-on-one relationships, and would sacrifice just about anything else in order to spend some quality time with someone whom I consider dear to me. That is one of the reasons I am going to visit my friend, Lucy: because she is important and interesting and it is worth some time and money and effort on my part to let her know that. To paraphrase Solomon: there is a time for everything, a time to listen in quietness, a time to party and celebrate and not hold back, and a time to focus on those people that are important in your life. May I learn to be in tune with God's timing.

Comments

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go...

Esther's protest

I have been hesitant to write anything here pertaining to the student protests in Montreal, partly because I didn't believe I had any solutions to offer and partly because I just wanted to stay out of the controversial mess it has become. Besides, I have studying to do. But this weekend, something changed. I read the book of Esther. First, some background: the unrest started early in the year when a group of students decided to protest the tuition hikes proposed by the Quebec government ($325 a year for the next 5 years). Seeing that tuition rates have been frozen for almost ten years, it seemed reasonable to the government to increase them to reflect rising costs. This did not sit well with some students, and they organised an ongoing protest in which students were encouraged to boycott classes and refuse to hand in assignments. It has now grown into a movement which has staged several organise...

it's a mad mad mad world (of theology)

The mad dash for the end of term has begun. I have finished all my required readings and have jumped into research reading. One of my papers is on the madness of theology (the correlation seems more obvious to some of us than to others). Truly inspiring stuff, I am finding. Let me share a few quotes here: There is a certain madness in Christianity – in a desert God who is jealous and passionate, in a saviour who speaks in apocalyptic terms, in a life of sacrificial love, in the scandal of particularity. In principle, a confessional theology should bear the mark of this madness, but the mark or wound must constantly be renewed. - Walter Lowe, "Postmodern Theology" in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology , 2007. “In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the ‘Kingdom of God’ are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called the ‘world,’ resulting in what I call a ‘sacred anarchy.’ C...

outWORD by Matte Downey

Search This Blog