Stuff Rebekah Likes

January 2012

3 posts

“To Ms. Foley and other political reporters: When someone like Elizabeth Santorum tells you that she has gay friends and her gay friends support her “family platform” — gay people shouldn’t be allowed to have families — your subject is making an astonishing claim. Your response should be to demand the names and phone numbers of these gay friends. Tell the homophobe that you will need to verify the existence of her gay friends because you’re a journalist, not a stenographer. You’ll either catch the homophobe in a revealing lie — what does it tell us that even bigots like Rick and Elizabeth Santorum perceive a political risk in being perceived as homophobic? — or land a fascinating interview with a crazy-ass faggot.” —Savage Love | Savage Love | Pittsburgh City Paper (via amywhipple)

Jan 11, 20123 notes

“The tragedy is that we are so possessed by fear we do not trust our innermost self as an intimate place but anxiously wander around hoping to find it where we are not. We try to find that innermost place in knowledge, competence, notoriety, success, friends, sensations, pleasures, dreams, or artificially induced states of consciousness. Thus we become strangers to ourselves, people who have an address but are never home and hence can never be addressed by the true voice of love.
Here we come to see what discipline in the spiritual life means. It means the gradual process of coming home to where we belong and listening there to the voice that desires our attention. It is the voice of the “first love.” St. John writes, “We are to love…because God loved us first” [1 John 4:19]. It is the first love which offers us the intimate place where we can dwell in safety. The first love says: “You are loved long before other people can love you or you can love others. You are accepted long before you can accept others or receive their acceptance. You are safe long before you can offer or receive safety.” Home is the place where that first love dwells and speaks gently to us. It requires discipline to come home and listen, especially when our fears are so noisy they drive us outside ourselves. But when we grasp the truth that we already have a home, we may at last have the strength to unmask the illusions created by our fears and continue to return again and again and again.” —Henri Nouwen, Lifesigns

Jan 9, 2012

“What [my mother] taught me is that the deliverance God offers you from pain is not no pain — it’s that the pain is actually a gift.” —Stephen Colbert, in this great NYT mag profile.

Jan 5, 20121 note