Author: llwilmoth

Emotions Don’t Come Single File

llwilmoth

Confusion about what you are feeling and why you are feeling it is very normal.

The reason is simple: you love lots of things. If what you love and care about shapes what you feel, then the fact that you love many things means you are always going to be simultaneously responding to different pieces of the world around you differently. While you will find that the cares connected to whatever you’ve focused your attention on have the biggest impact on your emotions, you’ll also find that other cares and other situations are always present in the background to some degree. (42)

… however, we need to remember that we will never exhaustively understand all the streams from our hearts into our emotions, and we don’t need to! Instead, all we need to do is bring whatever we do manage to understand to God and entrust him with all the hidden corners of our hearts, loves, and feelings that we can’t see into but he knows perfectly. (50)

Groves & Smith, Untangling Emotions (2019)

For All the Saints

llwilmoth

“In the economy of the Body of Christ, this becomes the ruling reality: every sign of love and grace bestowed on any person in the Church is given for the sake of all. The Church is truly the Church when the sanctity, the maturity, the freedom, the heroism of a holy person is understood not as some kind of threat or reproach to my own lack of those qualities but as gifts and resource for me, helping me to become a little less unholy, idle and unheroic than I might otherwise be – both directly, by way of example and inspiration, and less visibly through the self-forgetting prayer and intercession of those gifted by God with holiness.”

Rowan Williams, Passions of the Soul (2024), 67.

Gordon Lathrop on Church

Quote llwilmoth

It is most likely Paul himself who privileges this name [ekklesia] for those Christian communities, which otherwise might have been much like other Hellenistic supper clubs and like-minded associations. And his privileging of this name had a reforming, pastoral intent. Paul’s extensive use of the word — sometimes in the plural for the various assemblies; sometimes in the […]

Bonhoeffer on perseverance in faith

llwilmoth

You do not have your faith once and for all. The faith that you will confess today with all your hearts needs to be regained tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, indeed, every day anew. We receive from God only as much faith as we need for the present day. Faith is the daily bread that God gives us. You know the story about manna. This is what the children of Israel received daily in the desert. But when they tried to store it for the next day, it was rotten. This is how it is with all the gifts of God. This is how it is with faith as well. Either we receive it daily anew or it rots. One day is just long enough to preserve the faith. Every morning it is a new struggle to fight through all unbelief, faintheartedness, lack of clarity and confusion, anxiety and uncertainty, in order to arrive at faith and to wrest it from God. Every morning in your life the same prayer will be necessary: I believe, dear Lord, help my unbelief.

from The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Fortress, 2012), 203.

PS Farrer on Committing to God

Bonhoeffer on Building the Church

Quote llwilmoth

Yet it is not we who are to build, but God. No human being builds the church, but Christ alone. Anyone who proposes to build the church is certainly already on the way to destroying it, because it will turn out to be a temple of idolatry, though the builder does not intend that or […]