{"quotes":[{"text":"Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent; one waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other- things that are of no real consequence- the door is shut, and can be opened only from the outside.',Letters from Prison - November 21, 1943.","author":"Dietrech Bonhoeffer","tags":["advent","justice","prison","prisoner","world-war-ii"],"id":14534,"author_id":"Dietrech+Bonhoeffer"},{"text":"It is now, at Advent, that I am given the chance to suspend all expectation...And instead to revel in the mystery.","author":"Jerusalem Jackson Greer","tags":["advent","christmas","faith"],"id":39399,"author_id":"Jerusalem+Jackson+Greer"},{"text":"Politicians compete for the highest offices. Business tycoons scramble for a bigger and bigger piece of the pie. Armies march and scientists study and philosophers philosophise and preachers preach and labourers sweat. But in that silent baby, lying in that humble manger, there pulses more potential power and wisdom and grace and aliveness than all the rest of us can imagine.","author":"Brian D. McLaren","tags":["advent","christ","christmas"],"id":39720,"author_id":"Brian+D.+McLaren"},{"text":"What does matter is that you understand this one great truth I have learned in my life: having knowledge, even at the expense of leaving the Garden, has been worth it. For it is through this great gift of knowledge that I have understood something of the Creator's power - yes, even the Creator's love. Out of what seemed punishment, came a great good; out of physical pain, all of you have emerged. The pain has been forgotten while the pleasure of your presence endures. Adam and I have known joy - how would we have tasted it had we not known its opposite, sorrow? And we have seen how darkness is dispelled when light arrives, night and day, after night and day. We never tire of it.","author":"Katerina Whitley","tags":["advent","bible","eve","genesis","inspirational","old-testament"],"id":81006,"author_id":"Katerina+Whitley"},{"text":"Into this world, this demented innin which there is absolutely no room for him at all,Christ comes uninvited.","author":"Thomas Merton","tags":["advent","christ","christmas"],"id":130319,"author_id":"Thomas+Merton"},{"text":"...And then, just when everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.","author":"Dietrich Bonhoeffer","tags":["advent","christmas","dietrich-bonhoeffer","evil","love"],"id":165099,"author_id":"Dietrich+Bonhoeffer"},{"text":"The thing I love most about Advent is the heartbreak. The utter and complete heartbreak.","author":"Jerusalem Jackson Greer","tags":["advent","christmas","faith"],"id":167297,"author_id":"Jerusalem+Jackson+Greer"},{"text":"God travels wonderful ways with human beings, but he does not comply with the views and opinions of people. God does not go the way that people want to prescribe for him; rather, his way is beyond all comprehension, free and self-determined beyond all proof. Where reason is indignant, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps us away: that is precisely where God loves to be. There he confounds the reason of the reasonable; there he aggravates our nature, our piety—that is where he wants to be, and no one can keep him from it. Only the humble believe him and rejoice that God is so free and so marvelous that he does wonders where people despair, that he takes what is little and lowly and makes it marvelous. And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.","author":"Dietrich Bonhoeffer","tags":["advent","broken","dietrich-bonhoeffer","incarnation","lowliness","wonder"],"id":183240,"author_id":"Dietrich+Bonhoeffer"},{"text":"Paul gives us an astonishing understanding of waiting in the New Testament book of Romans, as rendered by Eugene Peterson, 'Waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don't see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.' With such motivation, we can wait as we sense God is indeed with us, and at work within us, as he was with Mary as the child within her grew.","author":"Luci Shaw","tags":["advent","eugene-peterson","hope","luci-shaw","prophetic-imagination"],"id":218353,"author_id":"Luci+Shaw"},{"text":"In many people Christ lives the life of the Host. Our life is a sacramental life.This Host life is like the Advent life, like the life of the Child in the womb, the Child in the swaddling bands, the Christ in the tomb. It is a life of dependence upon creatures, of silence and secrecy, of hidden light. It is the life of a prisoner.","author":"Caryll Houselander","tags":["advent","catholic","catholicism","christ","christian","christianity","god","host","incarnation","jesus","jesus-christ","life"],"id":231344,"author_id":"Caryll+Houselander"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":20,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}