We thirst for something far greater than this world can satisfy. So we are always disappointed. Always. But disappointment is itself a gift. Disappointment drives our search for life. We go from one false promise to another, gobbling up things and people in great gulps only to find them go tasteless too soon. And that is the secret of contentment.

It’s when we discover that enough will never be enough that we can finally stop kicking and scratching our way through life, put it all down, and let God be the point of the compass for us. Then we are ready to link arms with the rest of the human race as partners in the great enterprise of life. Then we realize not only the insufficiency of the other on whom we have put the burden of our emotional satisfaction, but of ourselves as well. Because neither we nor they are God, we can finally be gentle with one another.

From Called to Question: A Spiritual Memoir by Joan Chittister (Sheed & Ward, 2004).

The surest way to uphold or restore our endangered church will be for each of her anxious children, in his own place and station, to resign himself more thoroughly to his God and Savior in those duties, public and private, which are not immediately affected by the emergencies of the moment: the daily and hourly duties, I mean, of piety, purity, charity, justice.

From “National Apostasy” by John Keble, quoted in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

Children are frequently astonished to discover that the psalmists so freely express the more unacceptable emotions, sadness and even anger, even anger at God, and that all of this is in the Bible that they hear read in church on Sunday morning.

Children who are picked on by their big brothers and sisters can be remarkably adept when it comes to writing cursing psalms, and I believe that the writing process offers them a safe haven in which to work through their desires for vengeance in a healthy way. Once a little boy wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” He began by admitting that he hates it when his father yells at him; his response in the poem is to throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town. The poem concludes: “Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.’” “My messy house” says it all: with more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boys made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?

From “Repentance” in Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books, 1998).

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think’st thou doest overthrow
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From pleasure, than from thee, much more must flow,
And sooner our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and souls delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

Holy Sonnet No. 10 by John Donne, quoted in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).

Palm Sunday some years back in Atlanta, I don’t remember which. But we are doing our thing—having our annual dramatic reading of the passion story, and it is going particularly well this year. We practiced hard and it shows. The narrator is great. Jesus knows his lines. And then the part comes when Pilate says what he says every year. What do you want me to do with this man? This is the signal for the whole congregation to get in on the action. And the crowd yells, CRUCIFY HIM! CRUCIFY HIM! Bloodcurdling effect. Very satisfactory.

And while the crowd’s pretended rage is still ringing in our ears, from about two-thirds back in the pews, comes a woman’s voice bellowing. NO. NO. NO. Not my Boy. No. Don’t. Not my Boy. And then sobs throbbing through the air to break your heart.

We are appalled, deeply appalled. What had been an audience is becoming something else. What is happening? Somehow 400 observers are transformed into a body of witnesses. I crane my neck and see that someone sitting near her comforts her. Well, thank God. They look for all the world like Mary and John lost at the foot of the cross, her head collapsed on the shoulder of her pew-mate, whose name, I remember, is actually John.

We sit in silence, all of us, for a timeless time. For what had been a well-done scripted and rehearsed play has become anamnesis, has become Real Presence. And the veil of the temple is torn in two. She is there at the foot of the cross. Perhaps you would have diagnosed her as mentally ill or maybe drunk—but she is there and she is our host and takes us there too.

What if we had ushered her out? What a loss. But we didn’t and she was peculiar and beautiful and rich with gifts to give and plugged into the power like I’ve never seen before. Where else would such a woman belong on Palm Sunday during the Passion of Our Lord but in the Body of Christ?

From “Behold Your Mother” in Alive and Loose in the Ordinary: Stories of the Incarnation by Martha Sterne. © 2006. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com.

Augustine says that Christ is present among those who are ‘in severe trial’, and goes on to say that ‘we progress by means of trial. No one knows himself except through trial’. How true that is. The cross is about being broken. Many years ago I worshipped in a ‘storefront church’ in the London docks, and one of our favourite hymns was ‘Jesus, keep me near the Cross’. The chorus is:

In the Cross, in the Cross,
Be my glory ever
Till my raptured soul shall find
Rest beyond the river.

A large West Indian lady, known by all of us as Aunt Matilda, always sang ‘ruptured’ instead of ‘raptured’, and her voice was so powerful that the whole congregation followed her. Yet in a way she was right. The cross does involve a rupture, a break, a cleavage. It is a moment of division and disturbance, a point of crisis, a breaking point.

From We Preach Christ Crucified by Kenneth Leech. Tenth anniversary edition. Copyright © 1994, 2005. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY. www.churchpublishing.org.

In praying over the incidents in the New Testament where Jesus is moved to anger, I’ve come to understand that anger, in and of itself, isn’t wrong. Jesus did indeed get angry—very angry—but he never lashed out in manic rage. When Jesus chased the money changers from the temple, he “fashioned a whip out of cords” (John 2:15). In meditating on this scene, I kept asking myself why he would take the time, in a moment of rage, to make a weapon. In some ways, the action makes him seem intent on inflicting severe physical punishment. As I puzzled over the incident, I grew more confused. A friend of mine, a scientist who has a reason for everything, has a theory: “I think he was giving himself time to channel the anger and get it under control. He didn’t want to lash out in a blind rage. He wasn’t seeking hand-to-hand combat. He was slowing himself down.”

From Praying Thieves and the God Who Loves Them No Matter What by Anne Marie Drew. © 2006. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com.

If the truth of God is disclosed and the glory of God is manifest in Jesus, then the truth of God must be this, and the glory of God must appear in this—that God so initiates and acts that He destines Himself to enter into passion, to wait and to receive.

Of His own will and freedom God so acts as to enter into passion, to encompass His own passion. This, as John sees it, is the truth of God, and it is in this that the glory of God is manifested at its deepest level. The glory of God is disclosed at its primary level in the work and activity of God; but that glory appears at its deepest level when the activity of God achieves the exposure of God, when by His working God destines Himself to the necessity of waiting. One might say that the ultimate glory of God’s creativity is the creation of His own exposure to that which He has created: that of all that God has done in and for the world the most glorious thing is this—that He has handed Himself over to the world, that He has given to the world not only power of being but also that power to affect Himself which is best described as power of meaning.

From The Stature of Waiting by W. H. Vanstone. © 1982, 2006. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com.