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

Eve's and Adam's decision to eat the fruit of the tree, and thus forsake their paradise, may be an allegory for--or perhaps a counterpart to--our own decision to accept the conditions of mortality, in exchange for a heavenly paradise.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 57

...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

Our lives are more like a canvas on which we paint, than a script we need to learn--though the illusion of the latter appeals to us by its lower risk.  It is easier to learn a part than create a work of art.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 50

Guilt, the legitimate remorse we feel for a deliberate decision to do wtrong, is all the proof we need that arguments about determinism and predestination are a philosopher's game.  Guilt is how we know we are free to choose.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 49

Legitimate guilt is to the spirit what the sharp protest of a twisted ankle is to the foot: its purpose is to hurt enough to stop you from crippling yourself further.  Its function is to prevent more pain, not expand it.  This kind of guilt comes from the light and beckons us to follow; its counterfeit takes us only deeper into the darkness of despair.  for, as William law wrote, "Christ never was, nor can be, in any creature but purely as a spirit of love."

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 49

My impression is that, informed and animated by a thoughtful faith in a wider horizon, the veil quite properly funnels the bulk of our attention to the here and now; on the time, people, problems, and opportunities of this day, this moment.  Despite glimpses of eternal purposes that come as gifts and hopes, my life unfolds in tremendous, all-but-complete ignorance of our mysterious universe.  There is no proving God to others.  Ultimate reality is not something we know; it is something in which we put our trust...The veil is not a curse or cause for existential lament;.  It is necessary to our stage of progression as beings.  While we search, listen, and pray for comfort and direction beyond our sphere, the veil--the necessary epistemic distance from this "beyond"--affords us freedom for independent action not possible if we could literally and readily see God smiling or frowning at each move.  And freedom independently to discern and choose between good and evil (morality) and good and bad (quality) is at the core of our purpose, as the powerful mythos of God suggests.

-Philip Barlow

quoted in Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 47

The woman of the parable who lost her coin gives...a clue, for she "would not have found it if she had not remembered it...It was lost only to the eyes; it was preserved in memory."  So it must be with
God, he reasons.  "How shall I find You if I am without memory of You?"  We can only seek what we have known, and knowledge of God, then, must be memory of God.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 39

Paul wrote a beautiful hymn to charity, which the King James translators rendered in part, "For now we see through a glass darkly."  By "glass" they meant a looking glass, a mirror.  The original actually reads, "We see in a mirror dimly" (NRSV).  In other words, we are the mystery yet to be revealed.  It is our own identity that we must struggle to discern, before we can rightly perceive our place in the cosmos and our relation to the Divine.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 38

Grattitude is an illogical response to a world that never had us in mind as an audience; but it is the fitting tribute to an original Creator who ancicipated our joy and participates fully in it.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 15

Darwin was sure that even those spectacles of nature that overwhelm us by their beauty, from the peacock's tail to the fragrance of an English rose, serve not man's purpose but their own, which is survival and reproducibility.  If anything in nature could be found that had been "created for beauty in the eyes of man" rather than the good of its possessor, it would be "absolutely fatal" to his theory.  In other words, maple leaves in autumn do not  suddenly transform into stained glass pendants, illuminated by a setting sun, in order to satisfy a human longing for beauty.  Their scarlet, ochre, and golden colors emerge as chlorophyll production shuts down, in preparation for sacrificing the leaves that are vulnerable to winter cold, and ensuring the survival of the tree.  but he tree survives, while our vision is ravished.  The peacock's display attracts a hen, and it nourishes the human eye.  the flower's fragrance entices a pollinator, but it also intoxicates the gardener.  In the "while," in that "and," in that "but it also," we find the giftedness of life.

Therein lies the most telling sign of a vast superabundance.  Nature's purposes and God's purposes are not in competition but work in tandem.  If the first works by blind necessity, the second works by generosity.  And in recognizing the giftedness, we turn from appreciation to gratitude; from admiration for the world's efficiency and order, to love of its beauty and grandeur.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 36

If God, like us, is susceptible to immense pain, He is, like us, the greater in His capacity for happiness.  The presence of such pain serves the larger purposes of God's master plan, which is to maximize the human capacity for joy, or in other words, "to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man."  He can no more foster those ends in the absence of suffering and evil than one could find the traction to run or the breath to sing in the vacuum of space. God does not instigate pain or suffering, but He can weave it into his purposes.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 33

To have an endless empathy, [Christ] would have to know a terror and abandonment and hopelessness beyond human conceiving, such that not mortal tongue could say, you don't know what I have known, you haven't been where I have been.  Exactly how this would be possible, who can say, but that is what He would have to experience.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 28

In one Talmudic text, the passage made famous by Handel's Messiah is markedly recast to suggest that God, burdened by the sins of the world, appeals to His people to console Him, not the other way around.  "Comfort me, comfort me, my people, " the text reads.  As early as the days of Noah, the pain of humankind "grieved him to his heart."  In this connection, it is significant that the God of the Old Testament asks His people to "Make me a sanctuary, so that I may dwell among them."  In other words, the temple Solomon builds, like the tabernacle in the wilderness, is God's sanctuary and place of refuse, not ours.  For a being as good and pure as God to enter into this realm of darkness and depravity must be exquisitely painful on every level.  His love impels Him to visit His people in their distress, and the temple is His shield and refuge from the full onslaught of worldly pain and evil.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 26

A God without body or parts is conceivable.  But a God without passions would engender in our hearts neither love nor interest.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 25

God's pain is as infinite as his love.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 25

Adam and Eve became more, not less, like God insofar as they came to see the same moral distinctions He did.  This was precisely what He confirms, saying Adam and Eve have "become like one of us, knowing good and evil."  In all the centuries of Christian hand-wringing and breast beating that have followed int he wake of the Adamic decision, this fact seems to have disappeared entirely.  Humankind and God now share a common moral awareness, a common capacity to judge between right and wrong, a common capacity for love.

We are continuing with tragic and devastating exceptions, on the trajectory inaugurated by Adam and Eve, becoming ever more like god, as we become ever more adept at discerning good and evil, and nourishing the wellsprings of human love.  And in so doing, we grow more capable of discerning a kind and merciful God among His many counterfeits.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 20

The question is, have we good reason to believe we are even in the same ballpark as God when it comes to the values we hold dear?  The idea that God's thoughts are not our thoughts, His ways not our ways, has been used as a cudgel to beat into abject submission any who question a Deity's right to save whom He will and damn whom He will, to bless or curse as He chooses, to have His own heavenly notions about what is good and right.
In actual fact, it makes little sense to recognize in our conscience a reliable guide to what is virtuous, lovely, and praiseworthy in the world where god has placed us, while suggesting He inhabits a different moral universe...As the character in Elie Wiesel's play, The Trial of God, protests, if our truth "is not His as well, then He's worse than I thought.  Then it would mean that He gave us the taste, the passion of truth without telling us that this truth is not true."

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 19

Any God whose only response to pain and suffering is to inflict more pain and suffering, is not aGod Ivan [of the Brothers Karamazov] can worship....if gods such as Moloch, or the God of some Christians, exist, they do not deserve our reverence or our love.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 18

But sovereigns, like fathers, can have rightful authority to govern or direct us, with no claim whatwoever on our love--let alone adoration.  We cannot prove God exists, and certainly cannot prove that any god who exists is kind and merciful rather than cruel or indifferent.  But we can say that only the first type of god is one we would want to worship. We reject out of hand any suggestion that mere cosmic authorship or raw power whould itself call forth our loyalty or devotion.

...We do not concede that a god who creates us, or the entire universe for that matter, is beyond reproach or question by virtue of his power alone.  We certainly do not accord earthly parents unchallenged perrogatives over their own children, even if they sire, rear, and nourish them.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 15

Augustine reported approvingly that when asked what God was doing before creation, a churchman replied, "getting hell ready for those who pry too deep!"

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 14

"You like to tell true stories, don't you? he (my father) asked, and I answered, "Yes, I like to tell stories that are true."

Then he asked, "After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it?

"Only then will yo understand what happened and why.

"It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us."

Now nearly all those I loved and did not undersand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Of course, now I am too old to be much of a fisherman, and now of course I usually fish the big waters alone, although some friends think I shouldn't. Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening.  Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the big blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.  The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time.  On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops.  Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 104

Once my father came back with another question.  "Do you think I could have helped him?" he asked.  Even if I might have thought longer, I would have made the same answer.  "Do you think I could have helped him?"  I answered.  We stood waiting in deference to each other.  How can a question be answered that asks a lifetime of questions?

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 103

A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 102

"What have you been reading?" I asked.  "A book," he said (father).  It was on the ground on the other side of him.  So I would not have to bother to look over his knees to see it, he said, "A good book."

Then he told me, "In the part I was reading it says the Word was in the beginning, and that's right.  I used to think water was first, but if you listen carefully you will hear that the words are underneath the water."

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 95

Conversation between Norman and his father about Paul's quandry

"You are too young to help anybody and I am too old,"  he said.  "By help I don't mean a coutesy like serving chokecherry jelly or giving money.
"Help," he said, "is giving part of yourself ot somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.
"So it is," he said, using and old homiletic transition, "that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don't know what part to give or maybe we don't like to give any part of ourselves.  Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. and even more often, we do not have the part that is needed.  It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, 'Sorry, we are just out of that part.'"
I told him, "you make it too tough.  Help doesn't have to be anything that big."
He asked me, "Do you think your mother helps him by buttering his rolls?"
"She might," I told him.  "In fact, yes, I think she does."
"Do you think you help him?" he asked me.
"I try to," I said. "My trouble is I don't know him. In fact, one of my trouble is that I don't even know whether he needs help.  I don't know, that's my trouble."
"That should have been my text," my father said.  "We are willing to help Lord, but what if anything is needed?
"I still know how to fish," he concluded.  "Tomorrow we will go fishing with him."

As the heat mirages on the river in front of me danced with and through each other, I could feel patterns from my own life joining with them.  It was here, while waiting for my brother, that I started this story, although, of course, at the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.  But I knew a story had begun, perhaps long ago near the sound of water.  And I sensed that ahead I would meet something that would never erode so there would be a sharp turn, deep circles, a deposit, and quietness.

The fisherman even has a phrase to describe what he does when he studies the patterns of a river.  he says he is "reading the water," and perhaps to tell his stories he has to do much the same thing.  Then one of his biggest problems is to guess where and at what time of day life lies ready to be taken as a joke.  And to guess whether it is going to be a little or a big joke.

For all of us, though, it is much easier to read the waters of tragedy.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 63-64

The cast is so soft and slow that it can be followed like an ash settling from a fireplace chimney.  One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 43

I had not choice now but to cast into the willows if I wanted to know why fish were jumping in the water all around me except in this hole, and I still wanted to know, becasue it is not fly fishing if you are not looking for answers to questions.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 42

You can't catch fish if you don't dare go where they are.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 42

Something within fishermen tries to make fishing into a world perfect and apart--I don't know what it is or where, because sometimes it is in my arms and sometimes in my throat and sometimes nowhere in particular except somewhere deep. Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 37

It is a shame I do not understand him (Paul)

Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help.  We are probably those referred to as "our brother's keepers," possessed of one of the oldest and possibly one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting of instincts.  It will not let us go.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 28-29

Sunrise is the time to feel that you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you who you think needs help even if he doesn't think so.  At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 28

It is a strange and wonderful and somewhat embarrassing feeling to hold someone in your arms who is trying to detach you from the earth and you aren't good enough to follow her.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 26

I could never be talked into believing that all a fish knows is hunger and fear.   I have tried to feel nothing but hunger and fear and don't see how a fish could ever grow to six inches if that were all he ever felt.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 19

That's how you know when you have thought too much--when you become a dialogue between You'll probably lose, and You're sure to lose.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 18

My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe.  To him, all good things--trout as well as eternal salvation--come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, pg. 4

Moroni’s formula for spiritual rebirth is to “deny ourselves of all ungodliness” and “love God with all your might, mind, and strength” so that “by his grace we may be perfect in Christ.” Since ungodly thought and behavior only drags us deeper into the “natural man,” keeping moral laws and commandments helps to stabilize our lives and environment so we can begin to love at the soul level. This type of love for God is impossible when our attention is focused on sin (the Prodigal Son) or on our status, worthiness, and success in external obedience (the Elder Son). It is only possible as one learns the practices of the inner path, such as meditation and contemplative prayer, where one communes spirit to spirit with God. It is this communion that gives us access to the purifying influence of the grace of God that perfects us or restores our soul nature.

Philip G. McLemore, Hindering the Saints: Taking Away the Key of Knowledge

I actually think fiction is the best way to understand humans’ personal attempts at connection with God. And that’s because fiction can only be about one person, or two people, or maybe one family; and in its specificity, we can see this search for connection at work. That’s why we love stories, why the Bible is full of stories, why Jesus spoke in stories.We can only understand truth in its human context or form, I think. That’s not to say that philosophy or theology isn’t worthwhile, just that for most of us, what touches us, what’s meaningful about God—it sounds corny—but it’s in our hearts. It can’t be intellectualized.

 

Brady Udall, Interview in Dialogue Journal.

A centered spiritual life looks beyond the present and asks, ‘how will it end?’ How will it end for me, for my family, for my community and indeed for the world? From a contest over clothing, to brutal social violence, our current social course seems to be all-symptomatic of a human failing to privilege grace over nature.

Will it end with the reproduction of all of our cultural norms, folkways and mores intact? If so, the Book of Mormon makes clear that the compounding interest on ‘business as usual’ is ultimately too high a price to pay. We are finally called to a life of spiritual integrity, where all parts of ourselves work in a harmony with each other. Where the admonishment to be people of grace bears itself out in our personal as well as our political yearnings. Where our churched spaces are characterized not only by the spiritual animation that is a central tenant of the religious life but also by a daily and public life that mirrors that animation. Where we, on a daily basis, powerfully catalyze social and cultural transformation – because our vision and hope in a joyous end is more potent and motivating than our yielding to the inevitability of the final grisly, brutal apocalyptic downfall of the human race?

-Gina Colvin, "On Pants and Shootings: How Will it End?"

Every craving that we experience finds a suitable object that satisfies and fulfills that longing.  Our body hungers; and there is food. We thirst; and there is water.  We are born brimming with curiosity; and there is a world to explore an the sensory equipment with which to do so.  Other ennobling passions both encompass and transcend bodily longing.  We crave intimacy and companionship; and there is human love, as essential to happiness and thriving as any nutrient.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 12-13

If it really is true that [the human] is merely the inevitable culmination of an improbably chemical reaction...involv[ing]'merely material' atoms, then the fact that he has been able to formulate the idea of 'an improbable chemical reaction' and to trace himself back to it is remarkable indeed.  That chemicals which are 'merely material' should come to understand their own nature is a staggering supposition.

Joseph Wood Crutch, The Great Chain of Life

Quoted in Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 11

Astrophysics may give a credible account of the origin of the stars, and Darwin might explain the development of the human eye, but neither can tell us why the night sky strikes us with soul-peircing quietude, or why our mind aches to understand what is so remote from bodily need.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 11

Neither the new believer nor the new doubter has necessarily progressed or reached enlightenment.  Nor has either one necessarily forced the evidence to fit a preconceived model of belief or doubt.  Rather, every time we turn our hearts and minds in the direction of giving meaning to our experiences, we are merely--and yet profoundly--arranging the evidence into a pattern--the pattern that makes the most sense to us at a given point on our journey.  Evidence does not construct itself into meaningful patterns.  That is our work to perform.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 9

Clearly, to aspire to be God is a sin; to desire to be like God is filial love and devotion.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 7

Life is not a lottery in which only the fortunate few born at the right time and place receive a winning ticket.  God's plan is wise enough, His love generous enough, that none will be left out.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 7

The call to faith is a summons to engage the heart, to attune it to resonate in sympathy with principles and values and ideals that we devoutly hope are true and which we have reasonable but not certain grounds for believing to be true.  There must be grounds for doubt as well as belief, in order to render the choice more truly a choice, and therefore the more deliberate, and laden with personal vulnerability and investment.  An overwhelming preponderance of evidence on either side would make our choice as meaningless as would a loaded gun pointed at our heads.  The option to believe must appear on one's personal horizon like the fruit of paradise, perched precariously between sets of demands held in dynamic tension.

Fortunately, in this world, one is always provided with sufficient materials out of which to fashion a life of credible conviction or dismissive denial.  We are acted upon, in other words, by appeals to our personal values, our yearnings, our fears, our appetites, and our egos.  What we choose to embrace, to be responsive to, is the purest reflection of who we are and what we love.  That is why faith, the choice to believe, is, in the final analysis, an action that is positively laden with moral significance.

...Only in the case of us mortals, there is something to tip the scale.  There is something to predispose us to a life of faith or a life of disbelief.  There is a heart that, in these conditions of equilibrium and balance, equally "enticed by the one or the other," is truly free to choose belief of skepticism, faith or faithlessness.

...Without constraint, without any form of mental compulsion, the act of belief becomes the freest possible projection of what resides in our hearts...The greatest act of self revelation occurs when we choose what we will believe, in that space of freedom that exists between knowing that a thing is, and knowing that a thing is not.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 4

The more we know empirically about the world, the more faith has become necessary. This is true on the level of both microbiology and physics as well as on the intergalactic level of astronomy. Empirical knowledge of the workings and character of physical life only keeps providing more evidence of our inability to find the rock-bottom reality of our material existence. So while our senses tell us that we live in a world that renders us meaningless and insignificant and that seems to defy our best efforts to make it intelligible, as if it were being perpetually made by a God too busy spinning off his many life forms to pay attention to our puny human lives, ...and have the audacity, bordering on insanity, to believe that our actions matter, that we can and should act on the world’s behalf.

George Handley, "Biocentrism at Sea"