Great quotes from “Contemplative Youth Ministry: Practicing the Presence of Jesus”
Fair warning. I just typed these down and need to run out the door to get graited cheese for dinner : ) What does that mean? I haven’t really double checked for grammar or spelling. I may or may not get back it and fix anything that is wrong in that department. So, you were warned.
First, because I like it, a quote from “The Music of Silence: Entering the Sacred Space of Monastic Experience”
"T.S. Eliot observes, ‘humankind cannot stand very much reality.’ Why is it that we afraid to live in the now? We are afraid of becoming real, just like the toys in the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit. They all want to become real — that is the great dream of toys. But they are afraid, so they ask of the more experienced toys, "Does it hurt to be real?" That is the same fear we have. Does it hurt to encounter reality? As the old toy wisely answers, ‘When you are real, you don’t mind that it hurts.’
When we are in love, singing our lover’s praises is not work. Neither is chant. Gregorian chant it heartfelt praise. While at times it can be cry for anguish, an expression of our need, it always retains the overtones and the undertones of praise."
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These quotes are from “Contemplative Youth Ministry: Practicing the Presence of Jesus.” They are in no particular order. They are simply pulled out of the book.
"Youth are not blank slates, and Christianity is not words. That may seem obvious until you seek to share the Christian faith with young people. Then you may notice your first impulses involve words. ‘What will I say? What books should I read? What answers will I give? What discussion should I evoke? What blanks with young people need filling?" In sharing the faith with youth, most of us think about the words and empty spaces. if we go too seminary or step inside a Sunday morning worship service, we’re immersed in words. A newcomer to these settings might easily assume Christianity is words. It’s reading, preaching, memorizing, lecturing, preaching, and writing. It’s books, newsletters, worship bulletins… words, words, words.
But the central problem in sharing the Christian faith with young people doesn’t concern words; it’s deeper than that. The real crisis facing those of us who seek to share faith with youth is this:
We don’t know how to be with our kinds.
We don’t know how to be with ourselves.
We don’t know how to be with God.”
“Most adults are busy. We have no down time. We move from activity to activity, with few real relationships and little introspection. We’re distracted from our disctractions by our distractions. We live narrow lives. We tend to act as if we’re nothing more than our roles and our jobs. We become what Thomas Merton calls ‘the false self.’ Anthropologist Angeles Arrien relates that in many indigenous cultures, a dis-spirited or dis-connected person is diagnosed by asking four questions:
Where in your life did you stop singing?
Where in your life did you stop dancing?
Where in you life did you stop telling stories?
Where in you life did you stop listening to silence?"
"Anxiety is the inability to be present. It’s a state of agitation in which we lose our larger capacity to empathize , to love, to respond to the needs of others…. We feel life closing in, leaving fewer and fewer choices… we get suspicious, distancing ourselves from others, ourselves, and even God. Our actions become self-protective, reactive, and compulsive."
"I once asked a group of graduating high school students to give me their impressions of adulthood. For the next hour kids shared their observations and experiences with parents, teachers, and various adults in the community… [their conclusion:] Adults have no friends, adults have no passions, and adults are stressed out… [and fear that the teenagers are going to mess up]."
"Noah realized that being a Christian has consequences. That living life of love often results in suffering. That being like Jesus doesn’t mean simply being nice and having good morals — it often means facing the pain and evil in the world."
"[It's easy to understand why] parents, and church members, might want the youth to have Christian values and assurances, but we don’t want them to have the life of Jesus… they may become outcasts. They may develop a costly compassion for others. They may become more vulnerable to the pain and loneliness in the world.
I want them to know Jesus so they will know how to keep their hearts soft. I want them to become Christians because so they’ll know how to give and receive love — so they’ll avoid the burn-out life of materialism that deadens spirits and kills Creativity."
"One thing is clear: We can’t create love. We can’t conjure up God’s love by offering kids sugary smiles and inspirational posters. Even if we seek to serve kids — help them with homework, drive them to and from school — our good acts can seem heavy and oppressive if they don’t come from a spirit of love. We can’t create more love for ourselves or for our kids; because the truth is, love can’t be made, it can only be received. Love is a gift God offers us, a gift that asks only that we let down our resistances and yield."
"If love is a gift, then the first step in living into that love is to surrender. We need to stop trying to make kids love God (or make God love our kids)."
"I have observed too many churches and youth ministries whose methods expose a consistent distrust of God. These ministries embody a sense of urgency that communicates a God who is either a relentless taskmaster or completely incompetent. This is the ‘functional atheism’ of which Parker Palmer writes. In youth ministry it appears as an endless parade of duded-up Christian rock stars, hyperactive activities, word-heavy programs, and teen devotionals covered in exclamation marks!!!! There is a tangible sense that God must be dressed up or hidden behind high-energy music and charismatic speakers. Our churches and ministries seem deathly afraid of any kind of downtime. All silence and stillness is eradicated for fear that youth might find God disappointing, boring, or absent. It’s as if our church and ministry leaders suspect God has left the building, and so they stall with jabbering words and meaningless activities in hopes that crowd won’t become restless.
In contrast, Jesus isn’t afraid of reality. He isn’t afraid of doubts, or downtime, or disappointment, or boredom — in fact, I might even claim that he finds boredom, disappointment, and doubt critical to spiritual growth."
"The Christian life begins by receiving. We don’t know much about receiving in North America. For most of us, life is what you make of it. “What do you do?” – or for youth, “What are you going to do?’ – is often the first question we ask when we meet someone. For too many of us, our response to this questions becomes the basis of our identity. To live, in North America, is to do. The imagined purpose of life, both inside and outside the Christian church, is to become efficient and productive. Life is measured by the success of our individual efforts and ingenuity.
By contrast, a life of love is open-ended. Love isn’t in a hurry to get somewhere; it doesn’t live for the end result. Love takes pleasure in the here and now. Love seeks relationships. Love is not a means to an end. Love is its own reward. Paul writes that live is patient and kind; it bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things (1 Cor 13:4-7). If God is love (1 John 4:7-8), then these characteristics are not descriptions of love, but also descriptions of the God who is alive and working within every moment.
Jesus is the best teacher of how to live a life of love. One of the most significant differences between Jesus and other people is that Jesus is a good receiver. He receives food from a cheating tax collector. How allows a prostitute to pour expensive oil on his feet. He is willing to receive from God.”
“Rather than treat God as a means to an end, these disciplines and exercises invited one to “be” with God, to move inside and seek the presence of God without expectation. This was new to me, and in direct contrast to a Christian upbringing that, until then, was focused on words, moral principles, and good works, It had never occurred to me to actually seek to be with God, to open myself to God without an end in mind.
