Thursday, March 8, 2012

Notes and Quotes From "The Sacred Romance"

I'm half way done with the book. This is me documenting the stuff that really spoke to me and a few other things relating to what spoke to me.


"The LORD is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him."

Lamentations 3:25


You long to be in a love affair, an adventure. You know it.


We learn to enjoy the juicy intrigues and secrets of gossip. We make sure to maintain enough distance between ourselves and others, and even between ourselves and our own heart, to keep hidden the practical agnosticism we are living now that our inner life has been divorced from our outer life.


The beauty of sunsets and rainbow gets "explined away" - but there is still the miricle of light. Don't let science and psychology explain away the beauty. The beauty is still there.


The deepest part of our heart longs to be bound together in some heroic purpose with others of like mind and spirit.


There was a girl I loved but couldn't love (intimacy requires a heart that is released and mine was pinned down with unknown fears and grief.)


"The Message from the Arrows" is always the same: Kill your heart. Divorce it, neglect it, run from it, or indulge it with various addictions to numb it.


My heart is good,because it was made for Someone good.


Life will flourish when we give it away in love and heroic sacrifice. God is good. You can release the well-being of your heart to him.


"If I don't want so much, I won't be so vulnerable." Instead of dealing with the Arrows, we silence the longing. Thatseems to be our only hope. And so we lose heart.


"Romance is the deepest thing in life, romance is even deeper than reality." -G.K. Chesterton


We constantly try to make sense out of our experiences. We look for coherence, a flow, an assurance that things fit together.


Most of us sense that we are alone in this world. No one has ever been there for us with the strength, tenderness, and consistency that we long for. Even in the best situations, people will eventually let us down.


I was made for nobal things.


Scripture is a cosmic drama - creation, fall, redemption, future, hope - drastic naratives that you can apply to all areas of your life.


Like Indiana Jones's love interests in the movies, we find ourselves caught up in an adventure of heroic proportions with a God who both seduces us with his boldness and energy and repels us with his willingness to place us in mortal danger.


How can I trust a lover who is so wild? You could love him if you knew his heart was good.


In stories, we love the hero because he is one of us, an dyet somehow rises above the fray to be better and wiser and more loving as we hope one day we might prove to be.


What if we saw God not as Author, the cosmic mastermind behind all human experience, but as the central character in the larger story? What could we learn about his heart?


God may not always be obvious, but He is there: discernible, knowable, reachable, dependable, and ever weloming.


The best things in life were meant to be shared.


One early mystic says we were created out of the laughter of the Trinity.


Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love. This fact may explain why God sometimes seems shy to use his power. "God's problem is not that God is not able to do certain things. God's problem is that God loves. Love complicates the life of God as it complicates every life." -Douglas John Hill


From "Disappointment with God" :

Suppose there was a king who loved a humble maiden.

The king was like no other king.

Every statesman trembled before his power. No one dared breathe a word against him, for he had the strength to crush all opponents.

And yet this mighty king was melted by love for a humble maiden.

How could he declear his love for her?

In an odd sort of way, his kingliness tied his hands. If he brought her to the palace and crowned her head with jewels and clothed her body in royal robes, she would surely not resist - no one dared resist him.

But would she love him?

She would say she loved him, of course, but would she truly?

Or would she live with him in fear, nursing a private grief for the life she had left behind?

Would she be happy at his side?

How could he know?

If he rode to her forest cottage in his royal carriage, with an armed escort waving bright banners, that too would overwhelm her. He did not want a cringing subject. He wanted a lover, an equal.

He wanted her to forget that he was a king and she a humble maiden and to let shared love cross the gulf between them.

For it is only in lov ethat the unequal can be made equal.

The king clothes himself as a beggar and renounces his throne in order to win her hand. The Incarnation, the life and death of Jesus, shows once and for all God's heart towards us.


"Our hope is in his determination to save us and he will not give in." -Simon Tugwell


We were made for The Garden. The heart of the universe is still perfect love.


We long to be known and we fear it like nothing else.


Identity is bestowed. We are who we are in relation to others. But far more important, we draw our identity from our impact on those others - if and how we affect them. We long to make a difference in the lives of others, to know that we matter, that our presence cannot be replaced by a pet, a possession, or even another person.


The gospet says we were stolen from our True Love and he launched the greatest campaign in the history of the world to get us back. When we turned our back on him, he promised to come for us. He sent personal messengers; he used beauty and affliction to recapture our hearts. After all else failed, he conceived the most daring of plans. Under the cover of the night, he stole in the enemy's camp incognito, the Ancient of Days disguised as a newborn. God risked it all to rescue us. Why? What is it that he sees in us that causes him to act the jealous lover, to lay siege both on the kingdom of darkness and on our own idolatries as if on Troy - not to annihilate, but to win us once again from himself? This fierce intention, this reckless ambition that shoves all conventions aside, willing literally to move heaven and earth - what does he want from us?

What he is after is us - our laughter, our tears, our dreams, our fears, our heart of hearts.


The evaluation of your soul, which is drawn from a world filled with people still terribly confused about the nature of their souls, is probably wrong.


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