Mcentyre Quotes

Maybe I can stalk you again sometime.” “Absolutely.

You just, barged in and flipped my entire world upside down,” he says, voice heated. “I didn’t know what to do.

Once I started I couldn’t put it down. It was so addictive . . . like a train wreck.

The story is told of Mother Theresa that when an interviewer asked her. "What do you say when you pray?" she answered, "I listen." The reporters paused a moment, then asked, "Then what does God say?" and she replied, "He listens." It is hard to imagine a more succinct way to get at the intimacy of contemplative prayer.

A good conversationalist directs attention, inspires, corrects, affirms, and empowers others. It is a demanding vocation that involves attentiveness, skilled listening, awareness of one’s own interpretive frames, and a will to understand and discern what is true.

Good conversation is a courtesy, a kindness, a form of caritas that has as its deepest implicit intention binding one another together in understanding and love.

Truth-telling is difficult because the varieties of untruth are so many and so well disguised. Lies are hard to identify when they come in the form of apparently innocuous imprecision, socially acceptable slippage, hyperbole masquerading as enthusiasm, or well-placed propaganda. These forms of falsehood are so common, and even so normal, in media-saturated, corporately controlled culture that truth often looks pale, understated, alarmist, rude, or indecisive by comparison. Flannery O’Connor’s much-quoted line ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd’ has a certain prophetic force in the face of more and more commonly accepted facsimiles of truth - from PR to advertising claims to propaganda masquerading as news.

[George] Steiner makes two other points worth mentioning about the consequences of language abuse: as usable words are lost, experience becomes cruder and less communicable. And with the loss of the subtlety, clarity, and reliability of language, we become more vulnerable to crude exercises of power.

...spoken confession releases us into forgiveness. Speaking enacts the attitude of repentance that is the precondition of healing and restoration. Like the naming of God's attributes and promises in praise, the particularity and specificity of what is named accounts for much of the psychological efficacy of confession.

Conversation is an exchange of gifts. Native American tribal wisdom teaches that when you encounter a person on your life path, you must seek to find out what gifts you have for one another so that you may exchange them before going your separate ways. This seems true even of daily encounters with those we know well. We come into one another's presence bearing whatever harvest of experience the day has offered, and we foster relationship by making a gift of what we have received.

The best listeners I know pause over words. ‘That’s an interesting way of putting it,’ they muse, or they ask. ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’ The consciousness that every word is a choice, that each word has its own resonance, nuance, emotional coloring, and weight informs their sense of what is being communicated. This kind of listening comes close to what we engage in when we listen to music...A good listener loves words, respects them, pays attention to them, and recognizes vague approximations as a kind of falsehood.

Conversation, like good reading, nourishes.

In a broad and true sense, good conversation is life-giving: it inspires and invigorates...livelieness in our use of language, both oral and written, matters: how lively language is life-giving - how it may literally, physiologically, quicken our breath, evoke our laughter, raise our eyebrows, open our hearts, renew our energies. Lively language invents and evokes and sustains.

In reading a recent novel, I myself was convicted by a comment the mother makes to her adult daughter: ‘My dear, you’ve missed so many opportunities to say nothing.’ We do miss these opportunities, as well as opportunities to say less and say it more judiciously. And so we miss particular delights of finding words and speaking them into silences big enough to allow them to be heard.

Caring for language is a moral issue. Caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words. Words are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide, and nourish one another. We need to take the metaphor of nourishment seriously in choosing what we "feed on" in our hearts, and in seeking to make our conversation with each other life-giving.

We have become desensitized, in ways discussed earlier, to the electrifying power of the well-chosen word. But sometimes it breaks through like a ray of light through a cloud bank. We all know the experience of reading or perhaps writing a sentence that evokes with absolute laser-like precision a particular feeling, atmosphere, action, or thought which, being named, seems to take on brand-new life.

...there is no question that precision is difficult to achieve. Imprecision is easier. Imprecision is available in a wide variety of attractice and user-friendly forms: cliches, abstractions and generalizations, jargon, passive constructions, hyperbole, sentimentality, and reassuring absolutes. Imprecision minimizes discomfort and creates a big, soft, hospitable place for all opinions; even the completely vacuous can find a welcome there. So the practice of precision not only requires attentiveness and effort; it may also require the courage to afflict the comfortable and, consequently, tolerate their resentment.

When we converse, we act together toward a common end, and we act upon one another. Indeed, conversation is a form of activism - a political enterprise in the largest and oldest sense - a way of building sustaining community.

To see this way fosters not only gratitude but compassion for the creatures we behold. The sustained gaze required to find the adequate word engages us in contemplation and reminds us of the worthiness of what is given to us to witness.

Anyone who speaks through electronic media has had his or her patter carefully shaped by a script; the delivery - tone, intonation, emphasis - has been rehearsed:' He adds, "TV kills the human voice. People cannot argue with anything on the screen. TV images pass by too fast for young minds to consider or analyze them." No matter how "lively" the conversation modeled on television, the medium itself works to suppress the spontaneity, imagination, and attentive listening required in actual conversation.

Curiosity. It was Oliver Sacks who first made me reflect on curiosity as a form of compassion. An ingenious and creative neurologist now well-known for his “clinical tales,” he begins his work as diagnostician and healer with the implicit question ‘What is it like to be you?

Let me tell you a little story, is one of the treasures of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Stories are the oldest and most valuable equipment we have as a human community and as a people of faith. The power of stories lies not only or even mainly in their explanatory function, or in the ways they mirror a community back to itself, or in the examples they provide, or the analogies. That power lies also in the way stories allow us to focus and give shape to our hopes, and to come to terms with the inexplicable and bewildering freedom we have as creatures made in the image of God.

Tell the truth, but tell it slant...' is Emily Dickinson's advice.... I've been struck by how often slant is confused with bias - as though having a point of view, a set of assumptions, or a firmly held opinion is in itself unscrupulous or unfair. And as though neutrality is the mark of fairness or truth.

And sometimes words become objects of interest in themselves. Suddenly we notice them. We see and hear them the way poets do, as having vitality and delightfulness independent of their utility. Language may suddenly appear not as a closed system where meaning is simply constructed or a drably utilitarian system of reference, but as a dance - words at play - words not just meaning or reporting or chronicling or marching in syntactic formation, but performing themselves, sounding, echoing, evoking ripples of association and feeling, moving in curious sidelong figures rather than left to right in orderly lines.

A good conversationalist directs attention, inspires, corrects, affirms, and empowers others. It is a demanding vocation that involves attentiveness, skilled listening, awareness of one's own interpretive frames, and a will to understand and discern what is true. It may be that we don't often enough consider conversation as a form of social action, as a ministry, or as a spiritual discipline. That it may be all three, and that it is a significant part of our life and calling as people of faith, may be more evident if we consider what good conversation does. In a broad and true sense, good conversation is life-giving: it inspires and invigorates.

I have some misgivings about the popular question, "What would Jesus do?" It seems to me slightly presumptuous to imagine we know what Jesus would do on any occasion, given the startling ways he turned the law to his own profound purposes, violated conventional expectations, reframed the commandments, and upended class-based notions of human worth. "What did Jesus do?" on the other hand, seems like a useful question to keep raising ... And perhaps even more pertinent might be "What is Jesus doing?" How is the one who promised to be with us always in the Holy Spirit - blowing where it will , poured out on all humankind - moving among us and within us?

[Poems] train and exercise the imagination. Trained imaginations are what we need most at a time like this. That is what will enable us to reach across cultures and understand each other, to think of new models and modes of organization that might work better, and to wage peace, because the love of beauty is deeply related to the love of peace.

...in providing refuge and in challenging us - [stories] are instruments of healing. For all these reasons, the power of story is one we must not abdicate. The church needs to be a place where stories are told, where we are invited back into the stories we live by, and where we come to find ourselves at home again in a dwelling made of words that is reconstructed in every telling. We need good storytellers to keep us alive and imagining. The exercise of the imagination is the training ground of compassion. Stories educate the heart. Stories, like poetry, are related to prayer. They have an incantatory, invocational function. They call forth and focus our dread and desire. They are vehicles of confession, thanksgiving, petition.

Everyone who writes with care, who treats words with respect and allows even the humblest its historical and grammatical dignity, participates in the exhilarating work of reclamation. Each essay or poem is its own “raid on the inarticulate,” and every written work that forestalls the slow death of speech is a response to Wendell Berry’s challenge to “practice resurrection.

Precise language surprises like a dancer's extra second of stillness in mid-air; word and experience come together in an irreproducible moment of epiphanic delight. The next time the word appears, it may have a different feel or color or emphasis. Contexts change; usage changes; assigned meaning shifts; words accrue rings of history like trees and become more dense with life.

Like metaphor, paradox as a habit of mind preserves us from simplistic linearity and literalism and keeps us attentive to the complex ways in which, so often, the opposite is also true. This habit of mind is deeply biblical; indeed, to listen for the uses of paradox in Jesus’ recorded teachings is to recognize how it always points us to a higher plane of understanding. To grasp paradox is a prerequisite not only for fathoming spiritual truths (and every spiritual tradition resorts to paradox to get at what is true as if there is no more direct route to truth), but also for thinking complexly and compassionately about this-worldly issues that affect us daily: how the rich may be poor; how power is a form of vulnerability; how saying no may be a way of saying yes.

The dumbing down, oversimplification, or flattened character of public speech may make our declamations and documents more accessible, but it deprives us all of a measure of beauty and clarity that could enrich our lives together. In more and more venues where speech and writing are required, adequate is adequate. A most exhilarating denunciation of this sort of mediocrity may be found in Mark Twain's acerbic little essay, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," in which he observes: When a person has a poor ear for music, he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he doesn't say it. This is Cooper. He was not a word-musician. His ear was satisfied with the approximate word.

But the high play of witty conversation can degenerate into exhibitionistic banter if it is not tempered by an opposite and perhaps even more important virtue, which is the capacity to hold one's peace, to wait to pause for thought, to consent to shared silence. Words need space. Witty, weighty, well-chosen words need more space than others to be received rightly, reckoned with, and responded to. That space, the silence between words, is as important a part of good conversation as rests are a part of a pleasing, coherent musical line.

The difference between hearing and listening is significant...Listening well means knowing when to interject questions, when to redirect the conversation, and, more importantly, in what terms to interpret the other's narrative. It means recognizing that the speaker is making purposeful choices, consciously or unconsciously, and considering what those purposes might be. It means accepting the tension between making judgments and withholding judgment as the other's story or line of reasoning unfolds. It means hearing and noting the omissions. And it means listening not only through the words spoken, but to them.

Normalizing the language of the marketplace within the academy and the church confuses and ultimately subverts our deepest purposes: in the one case, to promote critical thought and exchange of ideas free from coercion by those in positions of political or economic power, and in the other, to call people to something so radically different from the terms and paradigms of this world that it can be spoken of only in the variegated, complex, much-translated, much-pondered, prayerfully interpreted language of texts that have kept generations of people of faith kneeling at the threshold of unspeakable mystery and love beyond telling.

The silences in conversation honor and support the words they carry, as water supports the vessels that float on it. Only in silence can the "listening into" take place - the pausing over words, meanings, implications, associations - and the waiting - for the Spirit to speak, for the right response to a surface. At its deepest level, good conversation holds a balance we seek in prayer between speaking and listening, waiting for the unplanned, epiphanic moment that comes unbidden in the midst of what we thought we were pursuing. Those silences also distinguish substantive conversation from idle chatter that fills all the "air time" available, often as a protection against the silences in which a new thought might take us where we're not sure we want to go. When silences are allowed, conversation can rise to the level of sacred encounter.

Good conversation comes form just such flexibility. As observations come up, it meanders, following a course that tends in a particular direction, but moves responsively in new directions as associations are triggered, words are paused over to consider their implications, examples are invented, connections are made. Like jazz, it is a work of improvisation that entails listening intently for what the others are doing and moving with them. The curiosity which sustains that intensity pauses at every turn to notice what's happening, to raise new questions and pursue them. In a gentle pursuit of ideas, it makes room for the unexpected. Exercised in this way, curiosity becomes an avenue of grace. Conversation pursued in this spirit is full of surprise. It connects one idea or thought or analogy with another in ways that could not have been predicted.

Have you ever heard a friend returning from a party describe how merry it was? Unless you're very, very old, I suspect not. The word survives in American usage almost exclusively as a vestigial reminder of certain obligatory feelings of good cheer around Christmastime. But merriment itself seems to belong to a place beyond the looking glass - something we can imagine wistfully as we step into the world of Austen or Dickens, but can't bring back into the milieu of the contemporary cocktail party. Merriment seems to evoke two conditions of community life we have largely lost: a common sense of what there is to laugh about, and a certain mental health - what Williams James would have called "healthy-mindedness" - that understands darkness, but doesn't succumb to cynicism. Merriment has fallen into near extinction by a disuse that both signals and hastens the demise of such attitudes.

There are generous and inventive ways to enjoy words and to reclaim them as instruments of love, healing, and peace. All of us who speak, read, write, and listen to each other have opportunities to do that and to foster the kinds of community that come from shared stories and surprising sentences.

For he will speak peace to his people. . . . psalm 85:8 Peace is a language. To “speak peace” is very different from speaking of peace. To speak of peace is to reason about it. But to speak peace is to impart it. The promise in this psalm is that God will make peace with us and among us. But the phrase also serves as a reminder that our words are acts. When we speak, we may stir up animosities, suspicions, jealousies, or old hurts — or we may impart peace. Peace may be “uttered” not only in gentleness of voice when we speak, but in the choice of words that reframe, redirect, or surprise us into reconsidering. Sometimes a way of describing the problem or conflict as an opportunity for invention or imagination or learning can enable those who are stuck in a point of view to see a new way.

Caring for language is a moral issue. Caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words. Words are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide, and nourish one another. We need to take the metaphor of nourishment seriously in choosing what we “feed on” in our hearts, and in seeking to make our conversation with each other life-giving.

Any effort to find reliable reporting needs to start not with questions about the sources but with questions about ourselves. What are my responsibilities as a citizen? As a person of faith? As a consumer? As a leader? As a parent? As an educator? What am I avoiding knowing? Why? What point of view am I protecting? Why? How have I arrived at my assumptions about what sources of information to rely on? What limits my angle of vision? Have I tried to imagine how one might arrive at a different conclusion? How much evidence do I need to be convinced? What kind of persuasion works most effectively for me? How do I accredit or challenge authority? The answers to these questions are not simply personal. Some of them involve serious theological reflection on the relationship between the Kingdom of God and the state, what it means to give Caesar what is Caesar’s and God what is God’s, and whether and how to participate in the conduct of worldly affairs.

Truth is elusive. Truth avoids institutional control. Truth tugs at conventional syntax. Truth hovers at the edge of the visual field. Truth is relational. Truth lives in the library and on the subway. Truth is not two-sided; it's many-sided. Truth burrows in the body. Truth flickers. Truth comes on little cat's feet, and down back alleys. Truth doesn't always test well. Truth invites you back for another look.

Trained imaginations are what we need most at a time like this. That is what will enable us to reach across cultures and understand each other, to think of new models and modes of organization that might work better, and to wage peace, because the love of beauty is deeply related to the love of peace.

There are gracious and inventive ways to enjoy words and to reclaim them as instruments of love, healing, and peace. All of us who speak, read, write, and listen to each other have opportunities to do that and to foster the kinds of community that come from shared stories and surprising sentences.

Truth is elusive. Truth avoids institutional control. Truth tugs at conventional syntax. Truth hovers at the edge of the visual field. Truth is relational. Truth lives in the library and on the subway. Truth is not two-sided; it‘s many-sided. Truth burrows in the body. Truth flickers. Truth comes on little cat‘s feet, and down back alleys. Truth doesn‘t always test well. Truth invites you back for another look.

The final lines of one of Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets ... have stayed with me as a valuable standard against which to measure my motives when I write and teach hoping to keep my work relational, and to do it with a servant's heart: 'Love in the open hand, nothing but that ungemmed, unhidden, wishing not to hurt, as one would give you cowslips in a hat swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt, I bring you, calling out, as children do, 'Look what I have! - And these are all for you.

Naming is an exercise of power. Renaming involves a transfer of power. Unnaming is a stripping of power from the unnamed and often an abuse of power on the part of those who presume to reduce names to numbers, for instance. It takes courage to name what is being deliberately and defensively obscured. Plain language is not always welcome.

As with every abstraction, we need to tie the word to actualities to keep it from floating into the euphemistic ether where it can do as much harm as carbon.

Outrage... can (and often does) look like arrogance or offensiveness or, certainly, impropriety. But it can be what fuels love of justice and mercy.

But the more I see of the damage simplistic thinking can do, the more I admire and cling to John Keats's notion of "negative capability" which he defined as the capacity to dwell in ambiguity or paradox without any "irritable reaching after fact and reason." To allow room for wonder, speculation, uncertainty.

Naming is an exercise of power. Renaming involves a transfer of power. Unnaming is a stripping of power from the unnamed and often an abuse of power on the part of those who presume to reduce names to numbers, for instance. It takes courage to name what is being deliberately and defensively obscured. Plain language is not always welcome.

As with every abstraction, we need to tie the word to actualities to keep it from floating into the euphemistic ether where it can do as much harm as carbon.

Outrage... can (and often does) look like arrogance or offensiveness or, certainly, impropriety. But it can be what fuels love of justice and mercy.

But the more I see of the damage simplistic thinking can do, the more I admire and cling to John Keats's notion of "negative capability" which he defined as the capacity to dwell in ambiguity or paradox without any "irritable reaching after fact and reason." To allow room for wonder, speculation, uncertainty.

Eugene Peterson claims that "to eyes that can see, every bush is a burning bush:' Poems, when they are doing what they do best, offer us a glimpse of that fire.

The metaphorical habit of mind, one of the principal fruits of practicing poetry, allows us to penetrate walls of abstraction and arrive at truths accessible only by its means. Metaphor teaches us radical connectedness: that in this world of the five senses, all things bear meaning in relation to one another. Think, for instance, how richly and consistently biblical metaphors reaffirm our relationship to the natural world and in doing so teach us about our relationship to God. Images of water, rock, light, fire, and wind enable us to recognize the movement of the Spirit in all of creation. Images of food - bread and wine, milk and honey, meat and drink - offer particular insight into the radical intimacy of a God who enters into and participates in the most physical facts of life in the body. Animal images - the dove, the raven, the lion, the great fish - invite us to reflect on our likeness to other orders of being. And images drawn from human occupation - builder and shepherd, bridegroom and bride, warrior and king, father, mother, and child - not only mirror the rich diversity of relationship necessary to human community, but also show how all of those are gathered into relationship with a God who is more variously and persistently present than we think.

f the “Christian right” would acknowledge the existence of a Christian left, the community of believers might be able to deliver a lively witness to the capaciousness of our faith in spirited (and I used that term advisedly) debate.

It seems to me that the call to be stewards of words requires of us some willingness to call liars to account - particularly when their lies threaten the welfare of community. Certainly we need to do this with humility, aware of the ways in which each one of us has a heart that is “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jer. 17:9)...if there is to be health in the body politic and in the Body of Christ, healing involves naming the insults and offenses. It involves holding each other and our leaders accountable. It means clarifying where there is confusion; naming where there is evasion; correcting where there is error; fine-tuning where there is imprecision; satirizing where there is folly; changing the terms when the terms falsify.

The original charge of both the academy and the church was to be places that nurture the mind and the spirit. That mission involved both institutions deeply and consistently in producing and practicing poetry and in the play of the mind and imagination that required. For a good part of Western history, churchmen were expected and trained to be wordsmiths. What we see in the best of them - the theologians and the scholars, as well as the poets - is a capacity for play. Not humor - now always - though that is certainly one mark of the Spirit, but the receptive, intuitive readiness to recognize grace in any form and respond, the willingness both to obey and to suspend rules according to the demands of the situation - in a word, wit.

The exercise of the imagination is the training ground of compassion. Stories educate the heart. Stories, like poetry, are related to prayer.

I have limits. Perhaps I can stretch them. But respecting them, I have learned, is generally wiser than pretending they're not there. Because I don't have all the time in the world, I have this whole hour, this day. The duration of one cup of coffee. The time it takes to listen to one more winding sentence or to stay with a child on her slow way to sleep.

I like to think the "watch" part of the instruction [to watch and pray] might sound something like the way a child would call out, "Hey! Watch this!" ... You don't want to miss this ... and closer attentiveness to the ... invitations the Spirit offers... We are accompanied and witnessed and even when we fall asleep, watched.