Poets & Saints

Genesis 1:26a, 27 (NRSVUE)

Then God said,

"Let us make humans in our image,

according to our likeness."

So God created humans in his image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

God knows the self I was made to be.

Thomas Merton, from New Seeds of Contemplation

"Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.

This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist,

because God does not know anything about him.

And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.

My false and private self is the one who wants to exist

outside the reach of God's will and God's love,

outside of reality and outside of life.

And such a self cannot help but be an illusion."

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Psalm 139:23-24 (NRSVUE)

Search me, O God, and know my heart;

test me and know my thoughts.

See if there is any wicked way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting.

Search me, O God, and know my heart.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Brothers Karamazov

(translated by Michael R. Katz)

"The main thing is, stop telling lies to yourself.

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lies

reaches a point where he cannot recognize any truth

in himself or in anyone surrounding him,

and so he loses all respect for himself and for others.

Once he respects no one, he stops loving;

to occupy and distract himself,

he yields to passions and coarse inclinations

and ultimately sinks to bestiality in all his vices,

and all this comes from incessant lying to himself and to others."

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Luke 5:8, 10b-11 (NKJV)

When Simon Peter saw it,

he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying,

"Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!"

And Jesus said to Simon,

"Do not be afraid.

From now on you will catch men."

So when they had brought their boats to land,

they forsook all and followed Him.

Do not be afraid. Follow me.

Brian Zahnd, from Unseen Existences

"Don't be afraid of me; follow me.

If you follow me, I will make you into a new person,

the person you were always meant to be.

This is what the pilgrimage of the soul is all about:

following Jesus through life until we become our true self,

a self that we may initially know nothing about."

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Revelation 21:3-4 (NRSVUE)

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

"See, the home of God is among mortals.

He will dwell with them;

they will be his peoples,

and God himself will be with them and be their God;

he will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more;

mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

for the first things have passed away."

God will wipe every tear from my eyes.

J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Return of the King

"Well, here at last, dear friends,

on the shores of the Sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth.

Go in peace! I will not say: do not weep;

for not all tears are an evil."

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John 11:25-26 (NRSVUE)

Jesus said to her,

"I am the resurrection and the life.

Those who believe in me,

even though they die, will live,

and everyone who lives and believes in me

will never die.

Do you believe this?"

Christ shares my sorrow and holds my future.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from Letters and Papers from Prison

"God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross.

He is weak and powerless in the world,

and that is precisely the way, the only way,

in which he is with us and helps us.

Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence,

but by virtue of his weakness and suffering...

only the suffering God can help."

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John 11:33-35 (NIV)

When Jesus saw her weeping,

and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping,

he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.

"Where have you laid him?" he asked.

"Come and see, Lord," they replied.

Jesus wept.

In the silence, Jesus weeps with me.

Brian Zahnd, from Unseen Existences

"Yes, Jesus knew he was about to raise Lazarus,

he knew it even before Lazarus died.

Yet even knowing he would soon raise Lazarus,

Jesus helped shoulder the burden of that bitter half hour

with Mary and Martha by grieving with them.

During heaven's silence when it appears our prayers go unanswered

and our grief unassuaged, Jesus weeps with us."

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John 11:3, 5 (NIV)

So the sisters sent word to Jesus,

"Lord, the one you love is sick."

Now Jesus loved Martha

and her sister and Lazarus.

I am loved as a friend, and I am not alone.

Henri Nouwen, from Out of Solitude

"When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us,

we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures,

have chosen rather to share our pain

and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion,

who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement,

who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing

and face with us the reality of our powerlessness,

that is a friend who cares."

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Psalm 84:5-7 (NIV)

Blessed are those whose strength is in you,

whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.

As they pass through the Valley of Baka,

they make it a place of springs;

the autumn rains also cover it with pools.

They go from strength to strength,

till each appears before God in Zion.

Even in the valley of weeping, there are springs.

Charles Dickens, from Great Expectations

"Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears,

for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth,

overlying our hard hearts.

I was better after I had cried, than before,

more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude,

more gentle."

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Proverbs 4:18 (NRSVUE)

But the path of the righteous is like the light of dawn,

which shines brighter and brighter

until full day.

I am being dazzled, gradually, into the light.

Brian Zahnd, from Unseen Existences

"I've been gradually dazzled by Christ into a much more hopeful and glorious theology. But along the way I've also learned that I have to tell it slant. I can't always expect someone to see in five minutes what it's taken me fifty years to see. In our pilgrim journey we need to be careful not to blind others with what we have seen. We dazzle... gradually."

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Luke 8:9–10 (NRSVUE)

Then his disciples asked him

what this parable meant.

He said, "To you it has been given

to know the secrets of the kingdom of God;

but to others I speak in parables,

so that 'looking they may not perceive,

and hearing they may not understand.'"

The story is working in me before I understand it.

Eugene Peterson, from The Contemplative Pastor

"Jesus' favorite speech form, the parable, was subversive. Parables sound absolutely ordinary: casual stories about soil and seeds, meals and coins and sheep, bandits and victims, farmers and merchants. And they are wholly secular. As people heard Jesus tell these stories, they saw at once that they weren't about God, so there was nothing in them threatening their own sovereignty. They relaxed their defenses. They walked away perplexed, wondering what they meant, the stories lodged in their imagination. And then, like a time bomb, they would explode in their unprotected hearts."

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