{"author":"Robert Farrar Capon","author_id":"Robert+Farrar+Capon","total_quotes":20,"quotes":[{"text":"But all the while, there was one thing we most needed even from the start, and certainly will need from here on out into the New Jerusalem: the ability to take our freedom seriously and act on it, to live not in fear of mistakes but in the knowledge that no mistake can hold a candle to the love that draws us home. My repentance, accordingly, is not so much for my failings but for the two-bit attitude toward them by which I made them more sovereign than grace. Grace - the imperative to hear the music, not just listen for errors - makes all infirmities occasions of glory.","author":"Robert Farrar Capon","tags":["faith","freedom","grace","jesus","law","love"],"id":2134,"author_id":"Robert+Farrar+Capon"},{"text":"The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace–bottle after bottle of pure distilate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.","author":"Robert Farrar Capon","tags":["faith","grace","religion"],"id":5759,"author_id":"Robert+Farrar+Capon"},{"text":"Judgment, as it is portrayed in the parables of Jesus (not to mention the rest of the New Testament) never comes until after acceptance: grace remains forever the sovereign consideration. The difference between the blessed and the cursed is one thing and one thing only: the blessed accept their acceptance and the cursed reject it; but the acceptance is already in place for both groups before either does anything about it.","author":"Robert Farrar Capon","tags":["grace","jesus","judgment","parables"],"id":34278,"author_id":"Robert+Farrar+Capon"},{"text":"...There is therefore now no condemnation for two reasons: you are dead now; and God, as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, has been dead all along. The blame game was over before it started. It really was. All Jesus did was announce that truth and tell you it would make you free. It was admittedly a dangerous thing to do. You are a menace. Be he did it; and therefore, menace or not, here you stand: uncondemned, forever, now. What are you going to do with your freedom?","author":"Robert Farrar Capon","tags":["faith","freedom","grace","jesus","law","truth"],"id":81374,"author_id":"Robert+Farrar+Capon"},{"text":"Jesus not only revealed himself, he hid himself at the same time.","author":"Robert Farrar Capon","tags":["jesus"],"id":101967,"author_id":"Robert+Farrar+Capon"},{"text":"Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears.","author":"Robert Farrar Capon","tags":["celebration","faith","grace"],"id":108976,"author_id":"Robert+Farrar+Capon"},{"text":"What is good is difficult, and what is difficult is rare.","author":"Robert Farrar Capon","tags":["excellence","mastery","skill"],"id":116616,"author_id":"Robert+Farrar+Capon"},{"text":"However grand our sacramental downsittings and updressings may be, they remain only and precisely sacraments: real presences, under particular signs, of the happier order that faith can discover under any and all signs. They're a bit like the church. As long as we see them as an earnest of the kingdom, they're all right; when we put on airs and act as if they were the kingdom itself, they look just silly.","author":"Robert Farrar Capon","tags":["church","dinner-parties","dinner-party","faith","fancy","kingdom","sacrament"],"id":121656,"author_id":"Robert+Farrar+Capon"},{"text":"I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work.Let God worry about your modesty I want to see your enthusiasm. ","author":"Robert Farrar Capon","tags":["food","religion"],"id":141420,"author_id":"Robert+Farrar+Capon"},{"text":"[The] dinner party is a true proclamation of the abundance of being -- a rebuke to the thrifty little idolatries by which we lose sight of the lavish hand that made us. It is precisely because no one needs soup fish, meat, salad, cheese, and dessert at one meal that we so badly need to sit down to them from time to time. It was largesse that made us all; we were not created to fast forever. The unnecessary is the taproot of our being and the last key to the door of delight. Enter here, therefore, as a sovereign remedy for the narrowness of our minds and the stinginess of our souls, the formal dinner...The true convivium -- the long Session that brings us nearly home.","author":"Robert Farrar Capon","tags":["celebration","feasting","food"],"id":142038,"author_id":"Robert+Farrar+Capon"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":20,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}