"Blog, blog" / "Who's there?": Discernment

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Discernment

I have learnt something new about discernment: it is important to have a realistic knowledge of oneself: abilities, gifts, skills, character and so on. So often, the enemy of the human promotes lowered self-worth and self-denigration sometimes, with particular subtlety, in the guise of spiritual humility; but it is damaging to think one is less (e.g. less capable) than the truth of the matter. If God has made (and is still labouring to make) me and God calls me, then if I deny or fail to recognise what God has made, I may miss God's call.

No comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Recently Read

: Jonathan Coe; The Rotters' Club

: Iain Matthew; Impact of God; Oh souls created for his greatness and summoned to it - what are you doing?!

: Jonathan Coe; The House of Sleep

: Hermann Hesse; Narcissus and Goldmund; It is not up to you to think about whether God hears your prayers, or whether the God you may imagine even exists. Nor is it up to you to think about whether our efforts are childish. In comparison with the One to whom our prayers are addressed, all our actions are childish. ... While one is singing one does not think about whether or not the singing is useful. One simply sings. You must pray like that too.

: Martin Laird; Into the Silent Land; “The specific focus [is] the practical struggle many of us face when trying to be silent — the inner chaos going on inside our heads, like some wild cocktail party of which we find ourselves the embarrassed host. ... [T]he foundational assumption [is] that union with God is not something we are trying to acquire; God is already the ground of our being.”; “The bottom line is this: minimise time given over to chasing thoughts, dramatising them in grand videos, and believing these videos to be your identity. Otherwise life will pass you by.”

: Iain M. Banks; Matter; “We have found that the underdisciplined child will bump up against life eventually and learn their lessons that way - albeit all the harder for their parents’ earlier lack of courage and concern. The overdisciplined child lives all its life in a self-made cage, or bursts from it so wild and profligate with untutored energy they harm all about them, and always themselves. We prefer to underdiscipline, reckoning it better in the long drift, though it may seem harsher at the time.”

: Annie Dillard; The Maytrees; The Maytrees were young long ago. They lived on what still seems antiquity's very surface.

Films seen recently

: Babel; If You Want to be Understood...Listen

: Deception; It's intimacy without intricacy.

: Sex in the City; The good ones screw you, the bad ones screw you, and the rest don't know how to screw you.

: Little Miss Sunshine; There's two kinds of people in this world, there's winners and there's losers. Okay, you know what the difference is? Winners don't give up.

: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian; You get treated like a dumb animal long enough, that's what you become. You may find Narnia a more savage place than you remember.

: Kung Fu Panda; There is no secret ingredient ...

Favourite Non-fiction

: David Abram; The Spell of the Sensuous; “We are human only in contact and conviviality with what is not human.”

: Ernest Becker; Denial of Death

: John D. Caputo; On Religion

: Pema Chödrön; When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times; Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.

: Don Cupitt; Taking Leave of God

: Annie Dillard; For the Time Being

: John Firman and Ann Gila; The Primal Wound; It is [the] wounded sense of self, [the] sense of emptiness and isolation, which underlies the violence, addiction and greed disrupting our live.; Part of the tremendous power of addictions is that they offer ways of avoiding the threat of nonbeing.

: Eugene Gendlin; Focusing

: Thich Nhat Hanh; The Miracle of Mindfulness

: William Johnston (tr); The Cloud of Unknowing; “Lift your heart up to the Lord, with a gentle stirring of love desiring him for his own sake and not for his gifts.”

: David Loy; Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism

: Gerald May; Addiction and Grace

: John Welwood; Ordinary Magic

: Rowan Williams; Silence and Honey Cakes

Favourite Rock/Pop

: The Beatles; The Beatles [White Album]; I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping,
While my guitar gently weeps

: J J Cale; Naturally; After midnight, we're going to let it all hang out

: Elvis Costello and Anne Sofie Von Otter; For the Stars

: Rob Dougan; Furious Angels; Cause love, like an invisible bullet has shot me down and I'm bleeding

: Bob Dylan; Blood on the Tracks; Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast

: Abdullah Ibrahim; Cape Town Flowers

: Keith Jarrett; The Köln Concert

: Joni Mitchell; Blue

: Van Morrison; Astral Weeks; If I ventured in the slipstream,
Between the viaducts of your dream

: Bruce Springsteen; The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle; Sparks fly on E Street when the boy prophets walk it handsome and hot