Category / Quotes

This category keeps the quotes of much smarter others, and the sayings are usually about parenting.

by Michael

Marriage Limits Us

Much wisdom here…

David Swanson's avatarDavid W. Swanson

IMG_0024Maggie and I were married fifteen years ago today. After the ceremony in the beautiful stone chapel on our college campus, we receded down the aisle and into the muggy night air. The Blue Ridge Mountains – so beautiful  in that western corner of North Carolina – guided our pick up truck and twenty-one year old bodies away from the friends and family who’d gathered to bear witness. We drove into the dark night, toward something new.

All these years later it’s hard to remember what we thought we were moving toward, but I’m sure we imagined more. Somewhere wrapped within our expectations and desires was the sense that marriage opened doors and expanded horizons. And in so many ways it has. On Monday evening I tossed fresh asparagus in  olive oil and reminded Maggie that she’s responsible for my much expanded palate. Too trivial? Well then, you must not understand…

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by Michael

Name the Reality

One casualty of that frantic schedule has been the Christian practice of prayer before meals, a practice often referred to, appropriately, as “giving thanks” or “saying grace.”  Christian parents honor the vows they make at their children’s baptisms to nurture their children in Christian faith in a variety of ways.  Some try to teach their children, with at best mixed results, how they should understand themselves and their world.  But whether they recognize it or not, all parents teach their children by how they themselves live.  Surely one of the most important things Christians do is teach their children to name the reality of God’s grace in their daily lives and to express gratitude for that grace and for their life before God by praying before meals.  It is one thing for a child to grow up in a Christian home and church in which the language of Christian faith may occasionally be heard.  It is something else altogether for a child to hear and learn how to speak not just about Christian faith, but the language of faith, the language of God’s grace in reference to the realities and events of their daily lives.

From George Stroup’s Before God (pgs. 160-161), a solid book that’s hardly about parenting and very much about parenting

by Michael

When You Recall

When your child lives, he carries with him all his earlier selves, so that you cannot separate your individual memories of him from your view of him now, at this moment.  When you recall a particular event in your and your child’s shared past–a day at the beach, a Christmas morning, a sad, weary night of flight from the child’s shouting father, a sweet, pathetic supper prepared by the child for your birthday–when you recall these events singly, you cannot see the child as a camera would have photographed him then.  You see him simultaneously all the way from infancy to adolescence to adulthood and on, as if he has been moving through your life too rapidly for any camera to catch, and the image is blurred, grayed out, a swatch of your own past pasted across the foreground of a studio photographer’s carefully arranged backdrop.

From Russell Banks’ story, “The Child Screams And Looks Back At You”

by Michael

Where Wounds Become Insignificant

When a wounded child climbs into its mother’s lap, it draws so much strength from the mother’s presence that its own wound becomes insignificant.  So too with us when we climb into the lap of our great Mother God.  Our crisis soon domesticates and comes into a peaceful perspective, not because it goes away, but because the presence of God so overshadows us.

When I read this in Forgotten Among the Lilies, I thought of Eliot, next to Bryce, slipping at the table Sunday, nearly falling to the floor but stopping as his ear clipped the chair.  Hard enough to sting.  Hard enough to crack the little eruption that is a child’s pain magnified by surprise and other people’s company.

I had one of his arms to lift him.  Maggie came over to pick him up because he was crying by then.  He complained about the pain and Maggie took him in her arms, his head to her shoulder, and convinced him by her hug that he would live through it.

He calmed as long as she held him.  Then he cried again, trading his mom for his dad.  David, master of redirection with the boys that he is, turned Eliot’s attention with a high-pitched question.

The image of a child in pain.  The image of a mother, then a father, and a few onlookers.  It seems like these words are easily seen.

by Michael

Try Great Things

One day the teacher, Frederick Wilkerson, asked me to read to him.  I was twenty-four, very erudite, very worldly.  He asked that I read from Lessons in Truth, a section which ended with these words: “God loves me.”  I read the piece and closed the book, and the teacher said, “Read it again.”  I pointedly opened the book, and I sarcastically read, “God loves me.”  He said, “Again.”  After about the seventh repetition I began to sense that there might be truth in the statement, that there was a possibility that God really did love me.  Me, Maya Angelou.  I suddenly began to cry at the grandness of it all.  I knew that if God loved me, then I could do wonderful things, I could try great things, learn anything, achieve anything.  For what could stand against me with God, since one person, any person with God, constitutes the majority?

That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums.  And it also liberates me.  I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys.  I am ripples of waves on silvery seas.  I’m a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.

From Maya Angelous’s Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now

by Michael

Conversation with Eugene Peterson & Correctives to Pastoral Job Descriptions

One of my favorite people is Eugene Peterson.  He’s up there with Howard Thurman, Gardner C. Taylor, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Henry Nouwen in terms of heroes.  In this video he talks about being a pastor.  If this is meaningful to you, you should certainly read Peterson’s memoir, The Pastor.

by Michael

Mums and None of the Expected Characteristics

I read Barbara Holmes’ book on contemplative practices in the Black Church the other month, and the book was as amazing as it was historically grounding and refreshing.  In it she says, “Some sacred spaces bear none of the expected characteristics.”

It is within the spirit of contemplation and the gift of sacred spaces that I offer this poetic piece which Nate shared with me.  You may enjoy it, but hopefully you won’t (in the best way).  There is language in this that you may not want to blast:

by Michael

Parenting and the Divine Advantage

I think this quote can touch a lot of the places I’m walking through as a father.  It’s admittedly about a common prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, but it seems to relate to the giving and surrendering of the will, the offering of many little, hardly-noticed acts which are so common in parenting.  Can what a mother or father does be turned into the Divine’s advantage?  Can wiping a nose or a butt or a shoe be taken into the larger world of God’s stuff?  One would hope.

This is from Evelyn Underhill’s reflection on the phrase, “Thy Kingdom Come”:

Thus more and more we must expect our small action to be overruled and swallowed up in the vast Divine action; and be ready to offer it, whatever it may be, for the fulfillment of God’s purpose, however much this may differ from our purpose.  The Christian turns again and again from that bewildered contemplation of history in which God is so easily lost, to the prayer of filial trust in which He is always found; knowing here that those very things which seem to turn to man’s disadvantage, may yet work to the Divine advantage.

by Michael

Countee Cullen’s “Dad”

His ways are circumspect and bound

With trite simplicities;

His is the grace of comforts found

In homely hearthside ease.

His words are sage and fall with care,

Because he loves me so;

And being his, he knows, I fear,

The dizzy path I go.

For he was once as young as I,

As prone to take the trail,

To find delight in the sea’s low cry,

And a lone wind’s lonely wail.

It is his eyes that tell me most

How full his life has been;

There lingers there the faintest ghost

Of some still sacred sin.

So I must quaff Life’s crazy wine,

And taste the gall and dregs;

And I must spend this wealth of mine,

Of vagrant wistful legs;

And I must follow, follow, follow

The lure of a silver horn,

That echoes from a leafy hollow,

Where the dreams of youth are born.

Then when the star has shed its gleam,

The rose its crimson coat;

When Beauty flees the hidden dream,

And Pan’s pipes blow no note;

When both my shoes are worn too thin,

My weight of fire to bear,

I’ll turn like dad, and like him win

The peace of a snug arm-chair.