My favorite lines about Christ's "Second Coming" are in the story "A Christmas Memory," by Truman Capote. In this autobiographical piece of great delicacy, the author describes his last Christmas with the woman who brought him up. The author is seven at the time; she...
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life in between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted; thence proceeds...
What is the purpose of a choir? It's not to perform difficult music before a silent and intimidated (or irritated) congregation. It's not there to impress the faithful. It's there to encourage the faithful to find their voices to praise God in his holiness. It is...
I believe deliverance begins with questions. It begins with people who love questions, people who live with questions and by questions, people who feel a deep joy when good questions are asked. When we meet these people--some living through history and art--things...
Our language is insufficientOur intellect does not grasp youOur imagination cannot get hold of youAlthough we do not know what to call you, we are called by you.
Each musician must come to experience the dignity, rightness, and eventual joy of putting things aside, of emptying oneself and taking the form of a servant. Such musicians must be able to move back and forth, gracefully, servingly, and willingly, from the symphony to...
To worship is to quicken the conscience of the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God. All this is gathered up in that...
What if [instead of just the “wow” moments in worship] we actively pursue the joy of the ordinary? What if in this season of Lent, when we verbalize our “ashes to ashes” condition , we give God glory for the profound nature of His handiwork without feeling that we...
Perhaps our worship of God in the shadow of the glory of the past occurs because we fasten our attention on heroes of the faith of bygone days. The giants of yesteryear grow bigger each day with the food of our imagination until their size is tremendous. To be sure,...
Believers throughout the centuries have tried to describe God, but very few have been satisfied with their descriptions. Their words turn out to be too frail to do the job. …The best any of us has ever been able to do is to describe what the experience of God is...