God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I have been circling around God, that primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and still I don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

Rainer Maria Rilke

The world, always an imbroglio, is no different now than it is has ever been [sic].  It is the urge to reduce and purify that desacralizes the world, not the world's own ontological promiscuity.  We cannot be guilty of mixing up this world with another or of cutting the string that once tied us to a higher plane because this world (i.e. these transcendences) is all there is.  If the gods exist, they live and move and have their being in the same motley pluriverse as every other object. 

The good news is that, "as soon as there is no other world, perfection resides in this one" (PF 233).  Every object is simply and perfectly whatever that object is.  "There is no rear-world behind to be used as a judge of this one" (RS 118).  This does not mean that legitimate judgements cannot be made, but it does mean that non-messy, non-provisional, non-concatenated judgments cannot be made.  It means that the messiness of these judgments does not stem from our poor access to what is real, but from the messiness of the real itself.  And it means that, with nowhere else to go, "God has come down from Heaven to Earth" and he too must go "to work to discuss, through experimentation with possible worlds, the best of deals, the optimum that no one is allowed to calculate in others' stead" (PN 177).

..if we can manage to renounce our dreams of revolution and reduction, then "the most ordinary common sense suffices for us to take hold, without am inute of apprenticeship, of all the tools that are right here at hand" (PN 163).  This work of acknowledging both the modesty and adequacy of the tools an dinstruments at hand--of confessing both the "perfection" and sufficiency of the grace of this disheveled world--is the work of an experimental metaphysics.  and, if there were to be such a thing, it would be the work of an experimental religion as well.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pgs. 47-48.

The world will resist you.  It will exceed your grasp.  It will gractivce indifference towards you.  Like a borrowed shirt, it will fit you imperfectly, it will be loose in the neck, short in the cuff, and the tag will itch.  The world will irritate you, bruise you, thwart you, anger you.  In the end, it will even--for at least a time--kill you.  Suffering the indignity of these rounds, yo will, be default, be tempted to just flit from one offense to the next, simmering in frustration, stewing in quiet desperation.  But to live, you will have to let these offenses go.  You will have to learn how to make and accept recompense.  You will have to forget the fiction of cash equivelances and barter with whatever is at hand.  You didn't get what you wanted?  Or even what you needed?  Your life was repurposed by others fro something other than what you had in mind?  Join the party.  I'm sympathetic, but in the end these objections are going nowhere.  That bus, while always idling, never actually leaves the station.  You presume a world that doesn't exist, and you fantasize a fixer-God who, unlike ours, is Himself doing something other than divinely serving, borrowing, and repurposing.  Ask instead, what were you given?  where were you taken?  what was your recompense?  Learn to like lemonade.

Adam S. Miller, Rube Goldberg Machines, pg. 57

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs.  If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.  God became Man for no other purpose.  It is even doubtful...whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose.

-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

...all this talk about punishment and rewards, about justice and merit an deserts, can be wrongheaded and misleading.  We are not in some contest to rack up points.  We will not someday wait with bated breath to see what prize or pain is meted out by a great dispenser of trophies.  We cannot so trivialize life that we make of it a coliseum where we wage moral combat like spiritual gladiators, for a presiding Authority on high to save or damn according to our performance.  Where would be the purpose in all of that?  He might take the measure of our souls at any moment and deal with us accordingly, saving Himself, not to mention us, a great deal of trouble.

How much more meaningful is a life designed for spiritual formation, rather than spiritual evaluation.  All tests evaluate, and life is no exception.  But the most meaningful and productive tests are those that assess with an eye to improvement, that measure in order to remedy, and that improve and prepare us for the next stage in an upward process of advancement. For these reasons, all talk of heaven that operates in terms of earning rather than becoming is misguided.  Such ideas misconstrue the nature of God, His grace, and the salvation He offers.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 87

We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out.  That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character...What we are worshipping we are becoming.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

quoted in Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 87

We find ourselves in a universe pervaded by laws that define the relationship of action and consequence. Some are manmade: speed and you get a ticket; rob and you go to jail; break curfew and you're grounded.  Some are physical: let go of a rock and it drops; expose potassium to air and it forms hydrogen gas; mix baking soda and vinegar and you get a frothing pot worthy of the witch's concoction in Shakespeare's Macbeth.  And some laws are moral: nurturing hatred cankers the soul; practicing kindness and forbearance develops serenity.

Parents and police officers alert us to the first category.  Physicians and chemists may give us fluency in the second.  But nothing short of trial and error will convert us to the unyielding strictures of the third.  To be adept at the first entails outward behavior.  Mastering the second challenges our mind.  but to live in harmony with the moral law of the universe requires body and soul, heart and mind, the will and the affections of the undivided self.  This is the meaning of Jesus' words that living the highest and holiest law; loving God, requires "all your heart, and...all your soul, and...all your mind."

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 84

Commandments are the expression of those eternal laws that will lead us to  a condition of optimal joyfulness.  They are the beacon lights of greater realities that define the cosmic streams in which we swim.  Operating in harmony with those realities, as a swimmer who works with the current rather than against it, empowers and liberates us to fill the measure of our creation. 

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 83

Our task is to school our appetites, not suppress them, to make them work in concert with a will that disciplines the spirit as much as the flesh.  For desire has both spiritual and bodily expression, and our life is a journey to purify both.  Along the way, we discipline and honor the body, even as we aspire to perfect the soul, finding in the end that the body and spirit, fitly framed together, do indeed provide the deepest joy.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 72

The narrative that develops is of a universal condemnation.  The entire human race is lost, fallen, damned, waiting and hoping for rescue, for salvation. 

Surely this is a perverse vision and a slander upon God.  It suggests His plan was derailed before it got off the ground, that He is a brilliant repairman but a poor designer. God's creation of the human race begins in catastrophe and is in need of salvaging. 

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 64

"Call  a life worse," [Plato] said, "if it leads a soul to become more unjust,and better if it leads the soul to become more just."

We have no way of knowing, of course, why some are born in health and affluence, while others enter broken bodies or broken homes, or emerge into a realm of war or hunger. So we cannot give definite meaning to our place in the world, or to our neighbor's.  But Plato's reflections should give us pause and invite both humility and hope.  Humility because if we chose our lot in life there is every reason to suspect merit, and not disfavor, is behind disadvantaged birth.  A blighted life may have been the more courageous choice--at least it was for Plato.  Though the first act of the play was obscure its hidden details make any judgments in this second act so much foolish speculation.  So how can we feel pride in our own blessedness, or condescension at another's misfortune?  And Plato's reflections should give us hope, because his myth reminds us that suffering can be sanctifying, that pain is not punishment, and that the path to virtue is fraught with opposition.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 60-61

...birth is ascent, not fall, and life's purpose is educative, not punitive.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 60

...Birth into this world represents a step forward in an eternal process of development and growth, not a descent or regression from a primal goodness.  God's work is therefore first and foremost educative and constructive, not reparative. 

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 52