redemption

These times of war and ruin will pass, and by love, you will be renewed and all terrible things shall be undone. Do you hear me, Fin Button?_ Jeannot pushed the hair from her face and though shaking yet, Fin nodded. __n the name of God I drew you from the water, and in his name shall you be delivered home.

Beauty like hers had no place in his life.

If this cursed and fallen worldholds such beauty as what I see,Imagine the beauty of paradisethat's gladly waiting for me.

If we are stretching to live wiser and not just smarter, we will aspire to learn what love means, how it arises and deepens, how it withers and revives, what it looks like as a private good but also a common good. I long to make this word echo differently in hearts and ears__ot less complicated, but differently so. Love as muscular, resilient. Love as social__ot just about how we are intimately, but how we are together, in public. I want to aspire to a carnal practical love__ros become civic, not sexual and yet passionate, full-bodied. Because it is the best of which we are capable, loving is also supremely exacting, not always but again and again. Love is something we only master in moments.

Christ died not so that you could freely go on sinning, and therefore, continue dying; He died rather so that you could freely grow in obedience, and therefore, start living.

You've only just discovered you have a heart. Let it beat a little.

If every time we choose a turd, society, at a great expense, simply allows us to redeem it for a pepperoni, then not only will we never learn to make smart choices, we will also surrender the freedom to choose, because a choice without consequences is no choice at all.

Worry only about what you control. The rest is war.

Be an instrument of redemption, there are still unreached people

We must not offer people a system of redemption, a set of insights and principles. We offer people a Redeemer.

We__e made it private, contained it in family, when its audacity is in its potential to cross tribal lines. We__e fetishized it as romance, when its true measure is a quality of sustained, practical care. We__e lived it as a feeling, when it is a way of being. It is the elemental experience we all desire and seek, most of our days, to give and receive. The sliver of love__ potential that the Greeks separated out as eros is where we load so much of our desire, center so much of our imagination about delight and despair, define so much of our sense of completion. There is the love the Greeks called filia__he love of friendship. There is the love they called agape__ove as embodied compassion, expressions of kindness that might be given to a neighbor or a stranger. The Metta of the root Buddhist Pali tongue, __ovingkindness,_ carries the nuance of benevolent, active interest in others known and unknown, and its cultivation begins with compassion towards oneself.

Was it you or I who stumbled first? It does not matter. The one of us who finds the strength to get up first, must help the other.

Sometimes friends make mistakes. Grievous ones that cry out for us to stay and prove we are true friends.

We'd rather have a grand spectacle of retribution of the 'wicked', than their silent walk towards redemption that our wishes questions the depth and nature of our love and hearts.

It is not true that everyone is special. It is true that everyone was once special and still possesses the ability to recover it.

The specific sufferings of Jesus do not amount to redemption: rather, redemption is wrought through the uniqueness of the person who suffered and the perfect charity for which, in which and by which he suffered. The uniqueness of the suffering of Christ, then, lies in the pro knobs, which is bound to the freedom through which the Son endures __very human suffering_ on account of love. To say that Jesus endured __very human suffering_ does not mean that he specifically suffered every thing that every person ever did or could suffer, but the he __ums up_ in this Passion the suffering so fate world, mystically including them in his own suffering and recapitulating them in the form of perfect love. The whole weight of this psychological and physical dereliction of humanity is, in Christ, suffered and sorrowed now within God himself, in the sense that the human sufferings of Christ are __ne_ with the divine filial relation that constitutes his unity with the Father.

You cannot mend the chromosome, quell the earthquake, or stanch the flood. You cannot atone for the dead tyrants_ murders and you alone cannot stop living tyrants. As Martin Buber saw it, the world of ordinary days __ffords_ us that precise association with god that redeems both us and our speck of world. God entrusts and allots to everyone an area to redeem: this creased and feeble life, __he world in which you live, just as it is, and not otherwise._ __nsofar as he cultivates and enjoys them in holiness, he frees their souls_he who prays and sings in holiness, eats and speaks in holiness_through him the sparks which have fallen will be uplifted, and the worlds which have fallen will be delivered and renewed.

Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, "Love your enemies." It is this: that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. Just keep being friendly to that person. Just keep loving them, and they can__ stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they__l hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That__ love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There__ something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies. (from "Loving Your Enemies")