A Spirituality for the Road

WMF has a relatively hefty pre-departure reading list(there's a link to it in the right hand column)...and a first term reading list too. our community is reading one a month and doing book discussions on them. i love, absolutely love the WMF reading list. every book is a treasure - most of which i never would have read on my own - but oh, they're fantastic.

last month we read, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by Paulo Friere. lots of great stuff to chew on in there, but here's one quote i loved, "Witness which has not borne fruit at a certain moment and under certain conditions is not thereby rendered incapable of bearing fruit tomorrow."

While in Nepal Sheila and i read "a Spirituality of the road" by David Bosch - again absolutely amazing. here are some of my favorite sections of the book. i know they're long - they're just so good, and speak so beautifully to my heart...these words of hope ring in my head as we celebrate Resurrection! (all David Bosch unless otherwise noted)

"So often life is, for us, such a desperate struggle against evil, injustice, darkness, squalor, that we allow ourselves to be robbed of the peace of mind which is a precondition for all our involvement. Our activities then easily become divorced from the tender intimate love which gave them birth and ought to remain their mainspring."

"For it is better for them to find you (God) and leave the question unanswered than to find the answer without finding you. - St. Augustine

"There is something else to this. If we remain at a safe distance, there is a real danger of us becoming callous and insensitive in the face of the squalor and misery so many people in the Third World are suffering. There is also an opposite danger of being completely suffocated and burdened beyond endurance by the awareness of guilt feelings because we are unable to alleviate the distress of these people. Many missionaries feel the poverty, squalor, evil and sin of others so acutely that both their sanity and their faith are endangered. In other cases this leads to over-compensation which frequently manifests itself in new forms of paternalism and condescension.
the answer lies, once again, not in the right balance between callousness and oversensitivity, but rather in giving ourselves wholeheartedly, as if everything depends on us, while at the same time casting all our concerns on the Lord as if everything depends on Him. We should neither attempt to rationalize away all our responsibility and involvement nor allow ourselves to be so crushed by the unbearable burden of what we think we ought to do but cannot accomplish."

"We do not yet experience the kingdom in its fullness. We still live in the unredeemed world, but we may walk with our heads held high; we know that the kingdom is coming because it has already come. We live within the creative tension between the already and the not yet, forever moving closer to the orbit of the former. We christians are an anachronism in this world; not anymore what we used to be, but not yet what we are destined to be . We are too early for heaven, yet too late for the world. We live on the borderline between the already and the not yet. We are a fragment of the world to come, God's colony in a human world, his experimental garden on earth. We are like crocuses in the snow, a sign of the world to come and at the same time a guarantee of its coming."

"Christian hope does not spring from despair about the present time, however; it is based on that which is already a reality. It is both possession and yearning, response and activity, arrival and journey. Hope is the connecting line between the already and the not yet, between the penultimate and the ultimate. We dream about the future by working to make it come true."