Miller Adams Quotes

The only difference between the Adamic man and the man of today is that the one was born to Paradise and the other has to create it.

God did create a world without sin. We just screwed it up.

In itself, doubt is neither good nor bad. Its value depends on what you do with it.

Kiss me again. Let me imagine for a moment that you belong to me. The memory will keep me company in my solitude.

Faith is more like being faithful to your husband or wife than it is like believing in magic. Fidelity is key. You may fall in love with someone because of how well they complement your story, but you’ll prove yourself faithful to them only when you care more for the flawed, difficult, and unplotted life you end up sharing with them. Faith isn’t the opposite of knowledge. Rather, like love, faith perfects knowledge by practicing fidelity to it.

Grace doesn't grease the wheels of the law. Grace isn't God's way of jury rigging a broken law. It's the other way around. The law is just one small cog in a world animated entirely--from top to bottom, from beginning to end--by grace.

Considering what Adam went through to appreciate Eve to the utmost, I wondered how beautiful it is that you and I were created to need each other. The romantic need is just the beginning, because we need our families and we need our friends. In this way, we are made in God’s image. Certainly God does not need people in the way you and I do, but He feels a joy at being loved, and He feels a joy at delivering love. It is a stinking thought to realize that, in paradise, a human is incomplete without a host of other people. We are relational indeed. And the Bible, with all its understanding of the relational needs of humans, was becoming more meaningful to me as I turned the pages. God made me, He knows me, He understands me, and He wants community.

Work, chained to its outcome, is misery. Do what you can, do it better than you’re able, and let things happen as they may. The action, not its fruit, is your business. The outcome is not your concern. If God is going to show himself to you in the work that you shoulder, he will only do so if you’ve stopped craving an approving audience and, instead, work out your own salvation.

Let God grow in you. Hear his voice in your need. Let Jesus resurrect you right now, in this life, even before you’re done dying. Let him put your spirit back in your hungry body.

Grace isn’t God’s improvised response to sin. Sin is our ongoing refusal of God’s already given grace.

At some point, God will ask you to sacrifice on his altar not only your stories about your own life but your version of his stories as well. Your softly lit watercolor felt-board version of scripture stories and church history must, like all your stories, be abandoned at his feet, and the messy, vibrant, and inconvenient truths that characterize God's real work with real people will have to take center stage. If they don't, then how will God's work in your hungry messy, and inconvenient life ever do the same? When God knocks, don't creep to the door and look through the peephole to see if he looks like you thought he would. Rush to the door and throw it open.

I won't deny that it is possible for our restless hearts to find rest in God, but I do want to deny that this rest results from the satisfaction of our desires. God does not save us from our hungers by satisfying them. God saves us from the tyranny of our desires by saving us from the impossible work of satisfying them. [from the essay "The God Who Weeps: Notes, Amens, and Disagreements)

He fingered the mound of faggots on which the wooden martyr stood. That's where all of us are standing now, he thought. On the fat kindling of past sins. And some of them are mine. Mine, Adam's, Herod's, Judas's, Hannegan's, mine. Everybody's. Always culminates in the colossus of the State, somehow, drawing about itself the mantle of godhood, being struck down by the wrath of Heaven. Why? We shouted it loudly enough--God's to be obeyed by nations as well as men. Caesar's to be God's policeman, not His plenipotentiary successor, nor His heir. To all ages, all peoples. --"Whoever exalts a race or a State or a particular form of the State or the depositories of power...whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God....." Where had that come from? Eleventh Pius, he thought, without certainty--eighteen centuries ago. But when Caesar got the means to destroy the world, wasn't he already divinized? Only by the consent of the peopel--same rabble that shouted: "Non habemus regem nisi caesarem," when confronted by Him--God Incarnate, mocked and spat upon. Same rabble that martyred Leibowitz.

That's where all of us are standing now, he thought. On the fat kindling of past sins. And some of them are mine. Mine, Adam's, Herod's, Judas', Hannegan's, mine. Everybody's. Always culminates in the colossus of the State, somehow, drawing about itself the mantle of godhood, being struck down by the wrath of Heaven.

Wisdom depends on a measure of good fortune. Broken by poverty and illness, even the wise become fools. But riches don’t guarantee wisdom either. Wisdom is just as easily destroyed by greed and bribes. As a result, no one is safe from idiocy until they’re dead. This is another reason why ends are better than beginnings. Patience

Hevesli oğlum ve hiç kimse olmayı seçmiş bu adam.

The gospel: a promise that joy does not depend on what is given but on its givenness.

The essence of care is to pay attention. Rather than being distracted by the past or the future, I pay attention in the present. I take care. I attend. I’m careful. My eyes are focused. My hands are deft and gentle. I can tie my shoes without rushing—over, under, loop, pull. I can wash a dish without fidgeting. I can stop and listen without daydreaming. I can sit in traffic without anger. Whatever I’m doing, I can do it with care.

In sin, we come unplugged. When we refuse the givenness of life and withdraw from the present moment, we’re left to wander the world undead. Zombie-like, we wander from one moment to the next with no other goal than to get somewhere else, be someone else, see something else—anywhere, anyone, anything other than what is given here and now. We’re busy. We’ve got goals and projects. We’ve got plans. We’ve got fantasies. We’ve got daydreams. We’ve got regrets and memories. We’ve got opinions. We’ve got distractions. We’ve got games and songs and movies and a thousand TV shows. We’ve got anything and everything other than a first-hand awareness of our own lived experience of the present moment.

Words can be powerful, but talkative fools make things worse. They don’t know how to shut up. They’re incapable of silence. They think that if they keep talking, they’ll eventually say something true. But even if they hit the truth, they won’t have the sense to know it. They can’t tell where they’re going or where they’ve been. They can’t even tell where they are! Fools drift aimlessly. A nation is in big trouble if its rulers are demagogues and its lawmakers are drunks. Laziness in high places leads to broken windows, leaky roofs, and weak walls. Given

In the body of Christ our weakness is an occasion for care rather than judgment. The body of Christ isn’t strong because it has no weaknesses. The body of Christ is strong because it’s the place where weakness is shared. And our weakness, our need for each other, is the very thing that seals this sharing. When I live in Christ, things get turned upside down. The end arrives at the beginning. The last becomes first. The greatest become the least, and the least become types of Christ. In Christ, we’re all bound together. If “one member suffer, all the members suffer with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26).

In the temple, I promise to consecrate everything to God. Part of this promise is financial. I promise, for instance, to consecrate all my money. But, in the end, the law of consecration isn’t about money—it’s about time. By working, I convert my time into money. Money is just time made fungible. In the end, the only thing I have to give is my time. If I cling to it, time will ruin me. If I think of my time as my own, then every unchosen obligation will feel like theft. Every call to give my time will feel like I’m being robbed of what ought to have been mine. I’ll roll out of bed in the morning expecting to do as I please instead of looking to serve. Occasions for care will look like failures to succeed. Quiet moments will look like boredom. Ordinary work will look like a waste of time. The only way to be saved from this ruin is to return this time to Christ. The only way to care for time is to give it away.

Douglas rejected medicine, in part because he wanted to be a writer-performer (although at least four top British writer-performers have been doctors—Jonathan Miller, Graham Chapman, Graeme Garden and Rob Buckman), and in part because it would have meant going off for another two years to get a new set of A-levels.

In the last ten days they sold only 9 books, 6 of which were mine. It is trickling along, Eve Adams* still selling a few now and then. Much réclame in Montparnasse. Have to keep away from [Café] Dôme and other places because I am constantly being introduced to jackasses who read the book and whom I don’t care to know. [. . .]

According to Isaiah it is necessary, at least for a time, that the messiah go unrecognized. It is crucial that, at least for a while, he remain hidden, that he not shine forth, that he have “no form, nor comeliness” and that he possess “no beauty that we should desire him” (Isa. 53:2). The Messiah’s coming must be delayed. This is necessary, at least in part, because the very act of recognition has messianic force. The shock of recognition changes us. The advent of the messianic depends on our seeing what was previously unseen. It should be no surprise, then, if the messianic is initially obscure, hidden under a rock, given in a grove, or stowed in a stable.

The only way to save myself from the future’s tyranny is to willingly sacrifice that future on God’s altar. I have to give the future away. I have to let it go. I have to stop trusting in it or hoping for it. I have to hand it over to Christ. I have to consecrate the whole of it. And I have to do so while remaining alive and embedded in time.

No more peeping through keyholes! No more mas turbating in the dark! No more public confessions! Unscrew the doors from their jambs! I want a world where the vagina is represented by a crude, honest slit, a world that has feeling for bone and contour, for raw, primary colors, a world that has fear and respect for its animal origins. I’m sick of looking at cunts all tickled up, disguised, deformed, idealized. Cunts with nerve ends exposed. I don’t want to watch young virgins masturbating in the privacy of their boudoirs or biting their nails or tearing their hair or lying on a bed full of bread crumbs for a whole chapter. I want Madagascan funeral poles, with animal upon animal and at the top Adam and Eve, and Eve with a crude, honest slit between the legs. I want hermaphrodites who are real hermaphrodites, and not make-believes walking around with an atrophied penis or a dried-up cunt. I want a classic purity, where dung is dung and angels are angels. The Bible a la King James, for example. Not the Bible of Wycliffe, not the Vulgate, not the Greek, not the Hebrew, but the glorious, death-dealing Bible that was created when the English language was in flower, when a vocabulary of twenty thousand words sufficed to build a monument for all time. A Bible written in Svenska or Tegalic, a Bible for the Hottentots or the Chinese, a Bible that has to meander through the trickling sands of French is no Bible-it is a counterfeit and a fraud. The King James Version was created by a race of bone-crushers. It revives the primitive mysteries, revives rape, murder, incest, revives epilepsy, sadism, megalomania, revives demons, angels, dragons, leviathans, revives magic, exorcism, contagion, incantation, revives fratricide, regicide, patricide, suicide, revives hypnotism, anarchism, somnambulism, revives the song, the dance, the act, revives the mantic, the chthonian, the arcane, the mysterious, revives the power, the evil, and the glory that is God. All brought into the open on a colossal scale, and so salted and spiced that it will last until the next Ice Age. A classic purity, then-and to hell with the Post Office authorities! For what is it enables the classics to live at all, if indeed they be living on and not dying as we and all about us are dying? What preserves them against the ravages of time if it be not the salt that is in them? When I read Petronius or Apuleius or Rabelais, how close they seem! That salty tang! That odor of the menagerie! The smell of horse piss and lion’s dung, of tiger’s breath and elephant’s hide. Obscenity, lust, cruelty, boredom, wit. Real eunuchs. Real hermaphrodites. Real pricks. Real cunts. Real banquets! Rabelais rebuilds the walls of Paris with human cunts. Trimalchio tickles his own throat, pukes up his own guts, wallows in his own swill. In the amphitheater, where a big, sleepy pervert of a Caesar lolls dejectedly, the lions and the jackals, the hyenas, the tigers, the spotted leopards are crunching real human boneswhilst the coming men, the martyrs and imbeciles, are walking up the golden stairs shouting Hallelujah!

In this way, the law is like water. There is no life without water. I have to have water. I have to learn how to keep the law. But without Christ, the law works against itself. It works against life,. It freezes solid. Without Christ, the law turns to ice and traps me in sin. Frozen, I die. Only as a type of Christ, only as a servant of Christ's love, does the law thaw. Christ is not only the light and life of the world. He is the life and light of the law.

The Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller reports that many adults are unable to remember their childhoods. According to Miller, these memories are repressed at a time when it is necessary for the child’s emotional survival to forget. To experience the pain of wounds inflicted by parents on whom the child is totally dependent is, in the child’s undeveloped mind, tantamount to death. And so the child learns not to feel—and eventually, not to remember—these hurts.

Also, don’t be that fool who runs around yelling: “The sky is falling, the sky is falling! Once upon a time the world was good! The old days were so much better! The world is about to end!” This is nonsense. There is nothing new under the sun. The world is as it has ever been: full of hungry, selfish, ignorant people who can’t see what’s right in front of them. Wisdom, like a windfall, can be good if you find it. It can help you see things for what they are. It can help protect you from your own foolishness. But wisdom has its limits. Consider

As F. Enzio Busche beautifully describes it: [If we are] enlightened by the Spirit of truth, we will then be able to pray for the increased ability to endure truth and not to be made angry by it (see 2 Ne. 28:28). In the depth of such a prayer, we may finally be led to that lonesome place where we suddenly see ourselves naked in all soberness. Gone are all the little lies of self-defense. We see ourselves in our vanities and false hopes for carnal security. We are shocked to see our many deficiencies, our lack of gratitude for the smallest things. We are now at that sacred place that seemingly only a few have courage to enter, because this is that horrible place of unquenchable pain in fire and burning. . . . This is the place where suddenly the atonement of Christ is understood and embraced. . . . With this fulfillment of love in our hearts, we will never be happy anymore just by being ourselves or living our own lives. We will not be satisfied until we have surrendered our lives into the arms of the loving Christ, and until He has become the doer of all our deeds and He has become the speaker of all our words.3

As challenging as it can be to not seem to be receiving anything back from God in prayer, Adam Miller proposes this as a pivotal moment: “When this happens, you’ll have to make a choice. You’ll have to decide whether to get up and leave the room or whether to continue in silence.” If the latter, “You may discover that God’s silence is not itself a rebuke but an invitation. The heavens aren’t empty, they’re quiet. And God, rather than turning you away, may be inviting you to share this silence with him. This is part of what atonement looks like: sitting in shared silence with God.”5

They say in Zen, waking up to life requires three things: great faith, great doubt, and great effort. Faith isn’t a way of going to sleep. It’s the work of waking up. And, in order to wake up, you’ll need both great faith and great doubt. In itself, doubt is neither good nor bad. Its value depends on what you do with it. You can doubt what’s real in order to stay asleep or you can doubt your daydreams in order to wake up. You can use doubt to protect you from the truth or you can use doubt to leave you vulnerable to it. You’ll have doubts regardless. Repurpose them for the sake of faith. Saving doubt is a strong solvent that can burn holes in your [worldview] and lead you back to the work of being faithful to life and, thus, to God. Practicing doubt for the sake of faith is hard work and it demands great effort. Great faith, great doubt, great effort.

The gospel is a promise and God’s promises aren’t bound by time. Promises defy time. They bring the future into the present. Promises are a certain way of looking forward. When I promised myself to my wife, I didn’t just bind myself to her in the present. I gave her my future. Without waiting for that future to arrive, without waiting to see what sorrows or joys would come, I promised. Dressed in white, we knelt at an altar in the temple and joined hands. We were terribly young. The mirrors, set face to face, reflected endless futures at which we couldn’t guess. Still, I loved her. I gave her all those futures as a gift. And we kissed. Now, promised to each other and sealed by a holy ordinance, we live as though those futures had already come. Now, in a very real way, our futures are already given as gifts in the present. And, now, we’re empowered by those promises to love each other in the present.

What may surprise many is that one of Lincoln’s greatest obstacles in preserving the Union was anti-war sentiment from folks not in the South, but in the North. Many Americans in the North saw no reason why States could not withdraw peacefully, if they wanted, from a political union freely entered into. These persons were called “Copperheads” by abolitionists and all others who supported Lincoln’s war policy. What is not well known is the fact that the four living former presidents of the time (Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan) all supported the Southern cause and disagreed with Lincoln’s aggressive policies. (John Brechinridge, Vice-President under Buchanan, 1856–1860, became a Confederate General in November of 1861.) They all recognized the Constitutional principle that the federal government does not have the authority to force a State to stay in the Union. Was

Flag icon It’s tempting to think that my present weakness makes me fundamentally different from Christ. And then, as a result, it’s tempting to think that such weakness must be incompatible with Christ’s divine strength. If this is true, then, to be like Christ, I would have to be untroubled by time and untouched by cares. I would have to avoid suffering rather than caring for it. But this is backwards. Christ’s strength doesn’t simply rescue me from my weakness and vulnerability. As I’ve argued, it seems clear that his strength doesn’t even save him from his own power to be acted upon. Christ is strong enough to be vulnerable. Similarly, my weakness leaves me exposed to Christ, vulnerable to his care, and open to sharing a life with him. This weakness is the ground we share. It’s the ground of life. It’s ground zero for God’s promise. Without this weakness, I wouldn’t need him. I’d be walled up, alone, inside my own perfect strength.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying not to be weak. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to put myself beyond the need for care. I’ve worked hard. I’ve exercised. I’ve earned degrees. I’ve written books. I’ve bought new clothes. I’ve driven new cars. These things aren’t bad in themselves. They can be good. They can, in fact, be done with care. They can be undertaken as acts of love, as means of service. But, as a rule, I haven’t done this. I’ve treated these things more as idols than as occasions for care. I’ve pursued them as props for projecting a fiction of worthiness, independence, and strength. But I am tired—so tired—of pretending not to be weak. I’m tired of pretending I’m not going to die. I’m tired of pretending I don’t need Christ. If I’m serious about Christ, then my only hope is to let these idols die. My only hope is to practice living with as much care and patience and attention as I can. In this sense, care is the work of no longer pretending to be strong. Care depends on finally being honest.

People just want to feel full. Hunger, though, is eternal. On this score, what advantage do the wise have over fools? What advantage comes from knowing how to get ahead? It’s better to learn how to be content with what’s right in front of your eyes than to perpetually stoke your cravings with plans and fantasies. Nothing’s more futile than daydreams. Wishing things were different can’t change the fact that things happen as they must. Wishing for a different world can’t change the fact that God knew from the start how everything would end. It’s useless to argue with God about your fate. God’s plans are unfathomable. The more time you spend propping up your fantasies with fancy words and careful arguments, the less you’ll actually accomplish. What made you think more words would help? Words can’t fix this! You can barely tie your shoes, why would you think that you—you of all people!—would be the one who finally, actually, understood the world and knew what was best in life? No. Life is short. Wisdom is rare. The future is obscure.

People who prefer to give or match often feel pressured to lean in the taker direction when they perceive a workplace as zero-sum. Whether it’s a company with forced ranking systems, a group of firms vying to win the same clients, or a school with required grading curves and more demand than supply for desirable jobs, it’s only natural to assume that peers will lean more toward taking than giving. “When they anticipate self-interested behavior from others,” explains the Stanford psychologist Dale Miller, people fear that they’ll be exploited if they operate like givers, so they conclude that “pursuing a competitive orientation is the rational and appropriate thing to do.” There’s even evidence that just putting on a business suit and analyzing a Harvard Business School case is enough to significantly reduce the attention that people pay to relationships and the interests of others. The fear of exploitation by takers is so pervasive, writes the Cornell economist Robert Frank, that “by encouraging us to expect the worst in others it brings out the worst in us: dreading the role of the chump, we are often loath to heed our nobler instincts.

How do you feel, my lord?” “Well enough to go downstairs for a while,” Devon said. “But I’m not what anyone would call spry. And if I sneeze, I’m fairly certain I’ll start bawling like an infant.” The valet smiled slightly. “You’ll have no shortage of people eager to help you. The footmen literally drew straws to decide who would have the privilege of accompanying you downstairs.” “I don’t need anyone to accompany me,” Devon said, disliking the idea of being treated like some gouty old codger. “I’ll hold the railing to keep myself steady.” “I’m afraid Sims is adamant. He lectured the entire staff about the necessity of protecting you from additional injury. Furthermore, you can’t disappoint the servants by refusing their help. You’ve become quite a hero to them after saving those people.” “I’m not a hero,” Devon scoffed. “Anyone would have done it.” “I don’t think you understand, my lord. According to the account in the papers, the woman you rescued is a miller’s wife--she had gone to London to fetch her little nephew, after his mother had just died. And the boy and his sisters are the children of factory workers. They were sent to live in the country with their grandparents.” Sutton paused before saying with extra emphasis, “Second-class passengers, all of them.” Devon gave him a look askance. “For you to risk your life for anyone was heroic,” the valet said. “But the fact that a man of your rank would be willing to sacrifice everything for those of such humble means…Well, as far as everyone at Eversby Priory is concerned, it’s the same as if you had done it for any one of them.” Sutton began to smile as he saw Devon’s discomfited expression. “Which is why you will be plagued with your servants’ homage and adoration for decades to come.” “Bloody hell,” Devon muttered, his face heating. “Where’s the laudanum?” The valet grinned and went to ring the servants’ bell.

supposed weakness on national security. Ours was a brief exchange, filled with unspoken irony—the elderly Southerner on his way out, the young black Northerner on his way in, the contrast that the press had noted in our respective convention speeches. Senator Miller was very gracious and wished me luck with my new job. Later, I would happen upon an excerpt from his book, A Deficit of Decency, in which he called my speech at the convention one of the best he’d ever heard, before noting—with what I imagined to be a sly smile—that it may not have been the most effective speech in terms of helping to win an election. In other words: My guy had lost. Zell Miller’s guy had won. That was the hard, cold political reality. Everything else was just sentiment. MY WIFE WILL tell you that by nature I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things. When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously; I assume that they must be saying what they do primarily to boost book sales or ratings, although I do wonder who would spend their precious evenings with such sourpusses. When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath. When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad deal. Still, I am not immune to distress. And like most Americans, I find it hard to shake the feeling these days that our democracy has gone seriously awry. It’s not simply that a gap exists between our professed ideals as a nation and the reality we witness every day. In one form or another, that gap has existed since America’s birth. Wars have been fought, laws passed, systems reformed, unions organized, and protests staged to bring promise and practice into closer alignment. No, what’s troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem. We know that global competition—not to mention any genuine commitment to the values

In motivational interviewing, there’s a distinction between sustain talk and change talk. Sustain talk is commentary about maintaining the status quo. Change talk is referencing a desire, ability, need, or commitment to make adjustments. When contemplating a change, many people are ambivalent—they have some reasons to consider it but also some reasons to stay the course. Miller and Rollnick suggest asking about and listening for change talk, and then posing some questions about why and how they might change.

Motivational interviewing pioneers Miller and Rollnick have long warned that the technique shouldn’t be used manipulatively. Psychologists have found that when people detect an attempt at influence, they have sophisticated defense mechanisms. The moment people feel that we’re trying to persuade them, our behavior takes on a different meaning. A straightforward question is seen as a political tactic, a reflective listening statement comes across as a prosecutor’s maneuvering, an affirmation of their ability to change sounds like a preacher’s proselytizing.

My job is to live, right now, as if I had already passed through death’s veil and into the presence of God. My job is to live my promised redemption in the present tense.

Folding my death into the present may or may not help me to get ahead in life. To be fair, life in Christ is not a useful way to live if I’m bent on earning money, looking fabulous, being comfortable, winning prizes, or becoming famous. It’s not a good strategy for capturing idols. In Christ, such things may or may not come. But, either way, they won’t matter. And, either way, I won’t need them. In Christ, I will have the one thing these idols could never give: I’ll be alive right now. And I won’t be alone.

This is the question Christ poses to me: Can I stop mortgaging my present with a lust for the future? Can I care for my enemies like God cares for his? Can I live in Christ such that nothing can stop me from seeing—despite all of its weakness, despite all of its glaring flaws, both big and small—the world’s present perfection? This is the test. The test is simple: can I look at my son, weak and stubborn and gangly, and see his perfection? Can I look at a leaf, weak and browning and chewed on, and see its perfection? Can I watch the sun’s light fail at the end of a hard day and see its perfection? Can I look at my own life—so fraught, so weak, so faltering, so inadequate, so distracted, so nearsighted—and care for it, perfectly, as Christ does? If it isn’t possible to begin to see such things now, there is no coming future that could save me. If anything can turn my heart back toward the present, it’s this kind of care. If anything can set my resurrection in motion, it’s this kind of care. If anything can break my hard heart and turn it back toward my parents and wife and children, it’s Christ. “Come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22: 20).

Love is a useful measure for distinguishing guilt from responsibility. Guilt is about me. It centers me on myself and weakens my power to care for myself and for other people. But responsibility faces the opposite direction. Responsibility is an act of love. It recognizes wrongdoing and repents of it. But rather than acting penitent out of fear or shame, it lets those self-centered feelings be crucified with Christ. Then, alive in Christ rather than in myself, I become capable of responding—even to my own weakness—with love.

Baptism is the mold into which my repentance is poured.

The gift of the Spirit is a kind of down payment on eternal life.

It’s not easy being part of the body of Christ. Christ is vulnerable. He can be hurt. Like God, he can weep. Whatever it may mean for the Father and the Son to be all-powerful, it clearly includes the power to “shed forth their tears as the rain upon the mountains” (Moses 7:28). It includes the power to suffer, to endure loss and catastrophe and disappointment and still be God. As Christ showed Enoch—to Enoch’s astonishment—“the God of heaven looked upon the residue of the people, and he wept” (v. 28). God wept because he commanded his children that “they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father; but behold, they are without affection, and they hate their own blood” (v. 33). God was wounded by his love for a people that had none.

Let’s use the word care (echoing the Latin word caritas for “charity”) to name Christ’s way of handling time. Let’s use it to name his way of handling sickness and loss and sin and death. Care, let’s say, is a name for that pure love of Christ (cf. 1 Corinthians 13:4–8). Care suffers long, is kind, envies not, and is not puffed up. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. It makes justice possible. It never fails. Though everything else passes away, care continues. And it continues because care is Christ’s response to the world’s continual passing away.

When I accept Christ as my master, I die early and time’s polarity gets reversed. Rather than always being attracted to the future, time becomes full and the present becomes magnetic. Drawn by the pull of the present into the thick of life, I’m resurrected early. But when I’m absorbed in caring for this present world, time doesn’t go away. Goals don’t go away. Desires don’t go away. The future doesn’t go away. The law doesn’t go away. They all remain in play. In the present, I care for time, I don’t escape it. But now, rather than being idols, all these things become types. I still have goals, but I don’t put my trust in them. These goals become types. I still have desires, but I don’t put my trust in them. These desires become types. I still keep the law, but I don’t put my trust in the law. I put my trust in Christ.

It’s tempting to think that my present weakness makes me fundamentally different from Christ. And then, as a result, it’s tempting to think that such weakness must be incompatible with Christ’s divine strength. If this is true, then, to be like Christ, I would have to be untroubled by time and untouched by cares. I would have to avoid suffering rather than caring for it. But this is backwards. Christ’s strength doesn’t simply rescue me from my weakness and vulnerability. As I’ve argued, it seems clear that his strength doesn’t even save him from his own power to be acted upon. Christ is strong enough to be vulnerable. Similarly, my weakness leaves me exposed to Christ, vulnerable to his care, and open to sharing a life with him. This weakness is the ground we share. It’s the ground of life. It’s ground zero for God’s promise. Without this weakness, I wouldn’t need him. I’d be walled up, alone, inside my own perfect strength.

Every day I ask the world to give me something that it can’t. I ask my wife to make me feel happy. I ask my work to make me feel loved. I ask my car or my house or my clothes to give me peace. I ask a movie or a football game to make life feel exciting and meaningful. I ask the church to be what I think it ought to be. And when this doesn’t work, I get bitter and go looking for something else that might have what I want. I invest some new thing with the hope that, when I get it, it could make me happy. This, though, is cruel and unfair. It’s cruel because peace and happiness aren’t even the kind of thing that the world, however willing, could give. Peace and happiness simply aren’t, at bottom, a function of the world being a certain way. They are a function of my relating to the world in a certain way. They’re a function of my caring for the world in a certain way. And when I put my trust in Christ—when I consecrate my time and treat my goals and desires as types—then I find that peace and happiness and love are already given, in plain view, in the ongoing work of caring for the world.

This is a different kind of life. In Christ, I still have goals, but, practicing care, I don’t do the work for the sake of these goals. I do the work for Christ. I do the work for its own sake. I learn to love the work. I still have goals, but these goals don’t own me. They don’t control me. They don’t master me. I don’t pin my happiness on achieving them. Christ is my master. And then, free from the tyranny of these goals, attentive to the work, the work itself improves. I become more patient and skillful, and success becomes more likely. No longer worshipping success, I’m more likely to succeed. But even if I fail—as I consistently will—the work will have been worth doing for its own sake.

No longer worshipping success, I’m more likely to succeed.

This is what it means to love someone: their obvious weakness cannot stop me from seeing their present perfection.

If I’ve chosen the future over the present, then I’ll be tempted to use that future to judge the present. I’ll be tempted to use that future to decide who’s worthy of my care and attention and who isn’t. Those who get in the way of that future are my enemies. Those who can help me secure that future are my friends. But, if I’ve chosen to let my future die and, now, live in Christ, then I won’t be able to carve up the world this way. I will see only one category: those who need care. Friend or enemy, helpful to my future or not, everyone will show up as needing me to bless them and care for them.

This is what’s different about Nephite Christianity: they lived in Christ before Christ came. They lived Christ’s future in their present.

This is what’s different about Nephite Christianity: they lived in Christ before Christ came. They lived Christ’s future in their present…This is what the Book of Mormon makes plain: to live a Christian life is to live in Christ as if he were already present.

In Christ, it’s possible to die while you’re still alive. And having died early, it’s possible for your resurrection to begin before you’ve even left this world. In Christ, time’s grip loosens and things start happening out of order. This is what a Christian life looks like: you’re born, you’re buried with Christ, your resurrection begins, and then you die. If Christ has his way, we’ll all die before we’re dead and every one of us will yield our lives, here and now, to an early resurrection.

Repentance, rather than being a name for how Christ was already at work in my life, already empowering and redeeming me, just felt like a form of court-mandated punishment.

No longer aiming through my loved ones, I can care for them. And no longer aiming through the law at a distant future in God’s presence, I can care for the law in Christ. I can live in God’s presence, now.

I don’t do the work for the sake of these goals. I do the work for Christ. I do the work for its own sake. I learn to love the work. I still have goals, but these goals don’t own me. They don’t control me. They don’t master me. I don’t pin my happiness on achieving them. Christ is my master. And then, free from the tyranny of these goals, attentive to the work, the work itself improves. I become more patient and skillful, and success becomes more likely. No longer worshipping success, I’m more likely to succeed. But even if I fail—as I consistently will—the work will have been worth doing for its own sake.

if I worship the goal of succeeding in my vow to keep the law—then I’ll be tempted to give up. Religion will feel like an impossible burden. I’ll be angry and ashamed.

In the verses that lead up to this commandment ["Be ye perfect"], Christ isn’t urging me toward the kind of future moral perfection that might come from never breaking the law, good a goal as this may be. Instead, he’s urging me in the strongest possible terms to practice, in the face of a painful and imperfect world, a certain kind of care. “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies…

God’s care is whole, not broken into parts. It’s complete, not partial. This is what the Greek word for “perfection” (teleios) in Matthew 5:48 means: to be perfect like God is to be “whole” or “complete.” But what kind of perfection or wholeness is at stake when Christ asks me to be perfect like my Heavenly Father is perfect? Christ appears to have just said exactly what he means: he means the kind of love that is perfect because it is whole and not partial. He means the kind of love that is complete because it cares for both those who are evil and those who are good.

The test is simple: can I look at my son, weak and stubborn and gangly, and see his perfection? Can I look at a leaf, weak and browning and chewed on, and see its perfection? Can I watch the sun’s light fail at the end of a hard day and see its perfection? Can I look at my own life—so fraught, so weak, so faltering, so inadequate, so distracted, so nearsighted—and care for it, perfectly, as Christ does?

At a deeper level, at the level of the heart, sin is a problem because it can hijack the law and then wield the law as a weapon against the possibility of love. (p. 62)

The objective is not to be a leader or a follower, but a guide. Miller and Rollnick liken it to hiring a tour guide in a foreign country: we don’t want her to order us around, but we don’t want her to follow us around, either.

We’re all vulnerable to the “righting reflex,” as Miller and Rollnick describe it—the desire to fix problems and offer answers. A skilled motivational interviewer resists the righting reflex—although people want a doctor to fix their broken bones, when it comes to the problems in their heads, they often want sympathy rather than solutions.

Douglas Adams never lost his faith in the realignment of the synapses that occurs every time we pick up a good book and start reading, find something that interests us or makes us turn to the next page, so much so that when we look up, the world has changed. This is the abiding miracle of the book. We choose what happens next.

Living, she never ceases to die.

When you know that you (like Jesus) can’t do life on your own, then prayer makes complete sense. But it goes even deeper than that. Jesus defines himself only in relationship with his heavenly Father. Adam and Eve began their quest for self-identity after the Fall. Only after they acted independently of God did they have a sense of a separate self.1 Because Jesus has no separate sense of self, he has no identity crisis, no angst. Consequently, he doesn’t try to “find himself.” He knows himself only in relationship with his Father. He can’t conceive of himself outside of that relationship. Imagine asking Jesus how he’s doing. He’d say, “My Father and I are doing great. He has given me everything I need today.” You respond, “I’m glad your Father is doing well, but let’s just focus on you for a minute. Jesus, how are you doing?” Jesus would look at you strangely, as if you were speaking a foreign language. The question doesn’t make sense. He simply can’t answer the question “How are you doing?” without including his heavenly Father. That’s why contemplating the terror of the cross at Gethsemane was such an agony for Jesus. He had never experienced a moment when he wasn’t in communion with his Father. Jesus’ anguish is our normal. His prayer life is an expression of his relationship with his Father. He wants to be alone with the person he loves.

He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. —Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Sin acts as if God's original plan was for us to bootstrap ourselves into holiness by way of the law and then, when this didn't quite pan out, God offered his grace--but only the bare minimum--to make good the difference. This is exactly backwards. God's boundless grace comes first and sin is what follows.

It is the good news that causes the hearts of believers to jump for joy; the announcement to seekers that they have already been found; the divine notice to antagonists that their rejection isn't as big as their Father's acceptance. It is the gospel.

It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.

faith puts us there once and for all. Wall two of our new home then is called righteousness—the state of him who is as he ought to be, righteous, the condition acceptable to God.11 And this condition—just as we've seen—isn't provided by us. It was once and for all provided by Christ, through His faith and not our own, not of our works, not of our effort. Why this escapes us escapes me. It really is all about Jesus.

Insofar as the intervention of grace constitutes the core of religious experience, the constant aim of every religious movement ought to be a reduction of transcendence coupled with an unswerving dedication to immanence. Let metaphysics and science pursue the elaboration of transcendent, causal economies; the domain of religion is immanence and, more precisely, the immanence of what is actually given as a gift. Religious thinking will be religious in character precisely to the extent that it is capable of faithfully thinking immanence. Religion, for the sake of grace, forsakes transcendence.

Typically, images or paintings are designated as anamorphic when, in order for the image to appear, a particular line of sight must be adopted. The image only shows up when approached from the angle dictated to the viewer by the image's own set of conditions. In this sense, the viewer must 're-form' their perspective to match the perspective demanded by the image. We are not free to approach the image as we wish; the image is free to assign us a perspective proper to itself... Anamorphosis, then, describes the freedom of the phenomenon to give itself as it wishes and it measures the extent to which this freedom turns the tables on the one to whom it appears. To receive a phenomenon as it wishes to give itself is to yield control and suspend our own timetables and preconditions in order to be faithful to the conditions set by what gives itself.

Grace does not contest the powers-that-be through an effective show of verifiable strength but through a persistent and subversive recoding of how one defines what strength and weakness are.

When it comes to objects, our salvation is intertwined. Neither can we be saved without them, nor they without us.

Among the Secoya, clear guidelines regulate preparation of the medicine. They are adamant about this preparation method and insist that the guidelines be followed. I've already discussed some fundamentals of harvesting the plants. When respected, all the elements and subtle factors combine to make a potent and efficacious medicine, necessary for a positive and healing ceremony.

Litchat, however, is singleminded. Seemingly, it can only conceive of a writer’s persona as one thing at a time: a prick, a detached brainiac, a suffering saint. Litchat is adamant, yes, and impervious to factual challenges, but that tends to be true of all strong opinions formed on a basis of incomplete and selective evidence. The weaker our footing, the more fiercely we defend it. We believe it not because it fits what we know—we know next to nothing, after all—but because we need to believe this particular thing at this particular time, regardless of what the truth may be. It suits our purposes to do so, and one of those purposes may be as flimsy as the desire to be excused from reading the books in question before telling the world what we think of them.

What you gonna do when Mr. Fulton Whitney hears about this debilment?” “It isn’t devilment,” Emma protested, bending close to the little mirror beside the door and pinching her cheeks to make them pink. “It’s a picnic and nothing more—the whole thing is perfectly innocent.” Daisy chortled, her great bulk quivering with amusement. “I declare that’s what Eve said to Adam. ‘The whole thing is perfectly innocent.’” Before

Welch became more confident that the press was reporting his words more accurately, but that worked against him because his discourses on the rise of the Illuminati or the Insiders made him sound strange to some, or worse. In September 1973, he sat for the Boston Globe and just purged. He told the reporter that it all began in Bavaria on May 1, 1776, when Baron Adam Weishaupt founded the Order of the Illuminati. It's all in a book by John Robinson, Welch explained. But the Illuminati were forced underground when Bavarian authorities raided their headquarters. The reporter's eyes probably widened. But by 1840, the Illuminati was strong and produced the Great Revolution of 1848 and the League of the Just Men, which hired Karl Marx to draft Das Kapital. The conspiracy was on the doorsteps of Russia by 1905, Welch continued, and in 1917, the agents of the Illuminati, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, threw over the czars, with funding from the Rotschilds. Welch was on fire now. The Insiders, he continued, went to Yale and Harvard, grew up with all the advantages, controlled American politics and international banking, and wanted to enslave everyone else. In 1912, the Insiders brought in Woodrow Wilson to drag the country into World War I. They convinced America to fight World War II with assistance from Insiders like President Roosevelt and George Marshall. They master-planned the civil rights revolution, and they work through the UN, the Council on Foreign Relations, and tax-free foundations. Perhaps the reporter nodded now and then, encouraging him on.

Motivational interviewing pioneers Miller and Rollnick

Adam Johnson (then a student; he would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction). I published a piece by young Jonathan

As challenging as it can be to not seem to be receiving anything back from God in prayer, Adam Miller proposes this as a pivotal moment: “When this happens, you’ll have to make a choice. You’ll have to decide whether to get up and leave the room or whether to continue in silence.

His shoulders slump just the slightest fraction, and his Adam’s apple jumps, and I quickly drop my stare to the table, feeling tears burning behind my lids at his silence. It’s a sign. An admission. Just not the one I’d been hoping for.

[The Book of Mormon] is given to you as a Urim and Thummim, as your own personal seer stone. Look into it and learn how to see the world by its light. And as you do, you'll be shown not only how to say but to do what the Lord requires.

In the absence of definitive resolutions, morality is the business of preventing any settlement from being treated as final.

I know neither who I am nor what I want, but others say they know on my behalf, others who define me, link me up, make me speak, interpret what I say, and enroll me. Whether I am a storm, a rat, a lake, a lion, a child, a worker, a gene, a slave, the unconscious, or a virus, they whisper to me, they suggest, they impose an interpretation of what I am and what I could be” (PF 192).

Findings from thirty years of research on life satisfaction show that happiness requires having clear-cut goals in life that give us a sense of purpose and direction. When we make progress toward satisfying our most cherished needs, goals, and wishes in the sixteen areas of life that contribute to contentment, we create well-being. Our research also shows that when we make progress toward attaining goals in one area of life, we raise our overall life satisfaction in other areas because of the potent “spillover” effect.

Christ tells Moroni that “if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness” (Ether 21:27). And, more than that, he tells him that “I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them

You don't have to spend your life watching television. You don't have to spend your life clicking on links or scrolling through feeds. You don't have to live distracted and divided and disappointed. You don't have to live a life of quiet desperation. Pour yourself out. Live with great care. In everyday life, this is what an early resurrection looks like.

Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up by Marie Kondo; Lisa Jewell’s The House We Grew Up In; The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living by Meik Wiking; and Coming Clean by Kimberly Rae Miller.

Badiou, Marion and St Paul: Immanent Grace.

the lie that any gap in our knowledge, any boundary on our power, or any limitation on our choice is something to fear, challenge, and resist. It’s a deception that Adam and Eve fell for, and we are still falling for it today. Instead of entrusting ourselves to God’s goodness, we believe our own control will serve us better.