dual personalities

Tag: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

November 3, 2016

Variations on a theme

by chuckofish

Photo courtesy of the Missouri Dept. of Conservation

Photo courtesy of the Missouri Dept. of Conservation

“We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts.”

–Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

We’ve quoted Bonhoeffer before on the subject of thankfulness, but can we ever say it often enough? Probably not. It is so central to our well-being.

November is a good month to take a look at the things for which we are thankful, so I plan to do that.

Meanwhile, here’s a poem by W.S. Merwin:

Thank you my life long afternoon
late in this spring that has no age
my window above the river
for the woman you led me to
when it was time at last the words
coming to me out of mid-air
that carried me through the clear day
and come even now to find me
for old friends and echoes of them
those mistakes only I could make
homesickness that guides the plovers
from somewhere they had loved before
they knew they loved it to somewhere
they had loved before they saw it
thank you good body hand and eye
and the places and moments known
only to me revisiting
once more complete just as they are
and the morning stars I have seen

And I am thankful for the flyover view.

“Grumbling and gratitude are, for the child of God, in conflict. Be grateful and you won’t grumble. Grumble and you won’t be grateful.”
―Billy Graham

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December 9, 2015

Reason is indignant

by chuckofish

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“God travels wonderful ways with human beings, but he does not comply with the views and opinions of people. God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for him; rather, his way is beyond all comprehension, free and self-determined beyond all proof. Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps us away: that is precisely where God loves to be. There he confounds the reason of the reasonable; there he aggravates our nature, our piety—that is where he wants to be, and no one can keep him from it. Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.”

–Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God Is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas

 

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November 26, 2013

Ponder anew: counting our blessings

by chuckofish

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“Gratitude goes beyond the ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.”

― Henri J.M. Nouwen

So November is almost over. Advent starts this Sunday! Have I been successful in my effort to be more consciously thankful? I think so.

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer says, “Only he who gives thanks for little things receives the big things.”

This is so true. And, hey, what we may think of as small things are probably the Big Things. There are many, many things to be grateful for, but these are the main five in my book.

1. Home and family–so easy to take for granted–but my ordinary life is quite wonderful.

2. A church home: Isn’t it wonderful (to borrow a phrase) to have some place to go “where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came”?

3. Work: I am personally so grateful to have a job that I actually like and where I feel I am making a small difference.

4. Health–One of those things that I don’t really appreciate until I am sick or my knee hurts–so it takes some effort to think, hey, I feel pretty good today!

5. An inquiring mind: It’s so important to exercise this gift every day along with that not-so-athletic body! And there is also this:

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

So in these waning days of November as we ready ourselves for the festive national holiday of Thanksgiving, let us actually give thanks!

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September 19, 2013

Tout va bien

by chuckofish

Well, something nice happened to me yesterday.

I had had a long, hard day at work–leading a workshop at my flyover university. On the way home I needed to stop at the grocery store for a few things. Of course, it was raining.

It was one of those weird midwestern storms where you can clearly see the demarcation line of the storm: rain and sunny sky. It was thundering. By the time I was checking out it was pouring rain, a deluge of biblical proportions! But you could still see the sun shining off in the distance and god-rays shining down through the clouds.

Anyway, the amazing thing was–when I left the store, there were several young Dierberg’s employees waiting outside with big golf umbrellas to escort shoppers to their cars!

Dierbergs

Wasn’t that nice?

“In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.”

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

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