” ‘100% of the [church] fathers were 85% orthodox.’ ” (>>)

“I watched and had the strangest impulse to take off my shoes. It’s one thing to read about Christ in bibles and books. It’s quite another thing to meet him in person.” (>>)

“The quake and the resulting tsunamis are being called the worst natural disaster in modern history… The death toll from the tsunamis and the resultant floods was reported to be more than 59,000, with tens of thousands of people reported missing, and over a million left homeless. The head of the European Union’s humanitarian relief operation, Guido Bertolaso, has stated, ‘I fear that in the end it will be more than 100,000 deaths.’ “ (>>)

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Since Ralph claims that he “knew at least 7 [of the songs from the playlist quiz] off the top of [his] head, and could have gotten a few more if [he] had time to think about it”–and since that post drew more comments than all the quotes of the past two months put together–I’ve decided to do one more round. (And if that sentence exhausted you, it’s Buechner‘s fault.) I’d also like to add a little twist: the songs will be ranked, with the more obscure ones worth more points.

1 Point
1) “Good times come and good times go / I only wish the good times would last a little longer.”
2) “Salvation is a fire in the midnight of the soul / It lights up like a can of gasoline”
3) “I don�t believe you, you�re not the truth / No one could look as good as you / Mercy!”
4) “I’d do anything just to fall asleep with you / Will you remember me? ‘Cause I know I won’t forget you”
5) “I wanna publish zines and rage against the machines / I wanna pierce my tongue / It doesn’t hurt, it feels fine”

2 Points
6) “It didnt seem to bother him, he didnt seem to mind / His cathartic life just buried somewhere in the timeline”
7) ” ‘It’s time to fight back’, that’s what Huey said / two shots in the dark now Huey’s dead.”
8) “I don’t need somebody new on the television, ‘Send your money and we’ll send you a new life’ “
9) “You know he’s been around the world / Last night he flew to Baghdad in his magical armchair”
10) “We love like God but you don’t belong here”

3 Points
11) “Another evening falls, she finds me here at the window / She doesn�t need to ask, it�s always the same thing / She�s waited four long years, I know there can�t be many more”
12) ” ‘You’re day will come, hold on.’ / I’m not that strong, at all”
13) “Who’d have thought it would end like this, without even a good-bye kiss? / No one could say we didn’t try / The years flew past, we tried to make it last / But the love got left behind”
14) “So I keep telling myself something’s going to change / Maybe I’ll get lucky then I can smile again / ‘Cause that’s what I want to do / I want to smile for you”
15) “We went to the Philly Pizza Company and ordered some hot tea / The waitress said, ‘Well no, we only have it iced’ / So we jumped up on the table and shouted, ‘Anarchy!’ “

4 Points
16) “We could get a little place down by Gilmour Park / You could do a little time and save my broken heart”
17) “When I come home feelin’ tired and beat / I go up where the air is fresh and sweet / I get away from the hustling crowd / And all that rat-race noise down in the street”
18) “He climbed his ladder / There was nothing there and now it’s a long way down”
19) “If you take me out, please don’t forget to take me home / If you take me to a party, please don’t forget the microphone / If we take my car, then please don’t try to touch the radio / ’cause the midnight sun is burning, bringing peace into my soul!”
20) “I’m so tall, can’t get over me / I’m so low, can’t get under me”

(Click here for the answers)

“A part of me will always be sick, too, for a person I came to know, also in Manchester, during those same years. When the Baptist church, of which she was a member, was without a minister one winter, I took the services every Sunday for a few months, and that was how we met. She was a woman well on into her seventies, very thin, very stooped. She had been married a number of times, and for years, as a widow, had been living alone, on welfare, in the one small apartment left inhabitable in a house that had been gutted by fire a few years earlier. Shaking hands at the church door after the service one Sunday morning, I had said to her–neither expecting nor much caring about an answer–‘How are you?’ and she looked up at me out of her wry, beleaguered old face and said, ‘As well as can be expected.’ Just that and no more, then made her way down the steps and out into the cold.” (>>)

“When I was in college, the fundamentalist evangelical types had no effect when they buttonholed me—I made fun of them. And yet a scientist, who taught of the evidence for God in physics, and who occasionally had some salt in his language, had a profound impact. If he had been different in all things (as Bob means it, if I understand correctly), including his evangelism, I would have ignored him just like I ignored the others who were different in all things.” (>>)

“While she sorts through my mess, I close my eyes and say, ‘please, please, please, please, please let her find something good. If not good, at least something cute and endearing.’ ” (>>)

I’m a little disapointed that you guys didn’t get more correct answers to the playlist quiz than you did. But I’ll forgive you ’cause that boosts my ego as a music snob (you can politely ignore the impulse to suggest that this simply means that nobody reads my blog, thankyouverymuch). And, since you’re needing my wisdoms bad, here are the answers, complete with links to full-length, high quality MP3s where available.

1) All Star United – Sweet Jesus
2) MxPx – You Walk, I Run
3) Diana Ross and the Supremes – You Can’t Hurry Love
4) Sam Cooke – Twistin’ the Night Away
5) Furthermore – Letter to Myself
6) Kanye West and Mase – Jesus Walks (remix)
7) Jars of Clay – Love Song for a Savior
8) Shaun Groves – Twilight
9) A.F.I. – Girl’s Not Grey
10) Joseph Arthur – In the Sun
11) The Clash – White Man in Hammersmith Palais
12) Dashboard Confessional – Hands Down
13) Death Cab for Cutie – Title and Registration
14) LA Symphony – Champion Bird Watcher
15) Bebo Norman – Everything
16) Buffy the Vampire Slayer – Going Through the Motions
17) Norah Jones – Come Away With Me
18) Too Bad Eugene – Nobody’s Home
19) The Postal Service – Such Great Heights
20) Derek Webb – Marvelous Light

“Michael Moore and Ann Coulter aren’t opposed to each other, they are each other: determined propagandists, using the language and mediums best suited to strike at the emotional core of their audiences. They do not work from a common set of facts, and would ignore them even if they existed. When they speak well, they’re Henry V on St. Crispin’s Day. When they speak poorly, they’re a spittle-flecked wacko with an ‘End of the World is Nigh’ sign. But that’s just a matter of presentation: they’re all lunatics, asking us to stop thinking and start feeling. And to start feeling what they want us to feel.” (>>)

“So many times I have to just stop and sigh and think about the vanity of intellectualized Christianity. In light of the Big Picture, the way we – I – obsess over our livejournals, our ‘Christian’ weblogs, our four dollar cups of coffee, our new laptop, our latest books which discuss the hippest topics like how we can decorate our houses to the Glory of God – it just all seems so trite. So vain. It is very obvious to me that there is no thrust for development of loving community in all these things. They are just cool to us – me – in themselves.” (>>)

“On Sunday, March 9 2014, Googlezon unleashes EPIC.” (>>)

“One of the hardest lessons I have had to learn in my life is not to think too highly of myself. At the same time, one of my greatest struggles was a sense of insignificance. I know it sounds like a contradiction, but both were true at the same time. Insecurity can breed arrogance. Pride is a wall that hides our fear.” (>>)

merry Christmas.

You can tell I’ve royally fucked up some important aspect(s) of my life when I resort to coming down off my high horse and posting something like this to cheer me up.

– – – –

Step 1: Get your playlist together, put it on random, and play
Step 2: Pick your favorite lines from the first 20 songs that play
Step 3: Post and let everyone guess what song the lines come from

1) “Would you sing me now to sleep?”
2) “I’ve forgotten what I’m running for / Maybe I’m running in place”
3) “But I keep on waiting, anticipating / For that soft voice to talk to me at night / For some tender arms to hold me tight”
4) “Here’s a fella in bluejeans / Dancin’ with a older Queen / Who’s dolled up in-a diamond rings…”
5) “A relationship may save you or enslave you / Count on both to happen”
6) “There’s something about this beat that gets me tranquilized / And when I play it at my shows I feel sanctified”
7) “Someday we’ll trust him and learn how to see him / Someday he’ll call us and we will come running”
8) “And so my soul is shared by two / The worst of me the best of you”
9) “I’d send God’s grace tonight / Could it be found?”
10) “If I find my own way how much will I find?”
11) “Why not phone up Robin Hood / And ask him for some wealth distribution”
12) “And you stood at the door with your hands on my waist / And you kissed me like you meant it / And I knew that you meant it”
13) “And all I find are souvenirs from better times / Before the gleam of your taillights fading east / To find yourself a better life”
14) “You wanna come with me ’cause I got Tony Hawk at the studio. Oh, you don’t like videos? How ’bout trips through the city, yo? Did I mention that I’m down with Arsenio?”
15) “I just want you to notice / I just want you to feel the same”
16) “I was always brave and kind of righteous, now I find I’m wavering”
17) “I wanna wake up with the rain falling on a tin roof / while [you’re] safe [here] in [my] arms”
18) “It’s been seven days / My brain’s such a hazy maze / It’s like before we had these rings / I don’t like to think such things”
19) “I am thinking it’s a sign that the freckles in our eyes are mirror images / And when we kiss they’re perfectly aligned”
20) “When we wander into valleys far from home / when shadows hover over our souls / find us in your mercy…”

(Click here for the answers)

“The place they weren’t… that was home.” (>>) [MP3]

“Later generations of Christian mystics dwelt upon the more desolate kinds of darkness to which the spiritual life can lead: the darkness in which all modes of prayer and spiritual practice become arid, and all consolation in the love of God seems lost. Even in the desolate dark night of the soul, indeed especially there, St. John of the Cross taught, God is present, purifying the soul of all passions and hindrances, and preparing her for the inconceivable blessedness of divine union. Along with dark knowing, there is dark loving, no less ardent for being deprived of all sensible and spiritual vision of the beloved. Therefore St. John can say, ‘Oh, night more lovely than the dawn, Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!’ ” (>>)

Last month I posted about how to force all links to open in the same tab/window in Firefox 0.9.2, but today I installed Firefox 1.0 and found that that preference was no longer working. To get the same effect in 1.0, you need to type about:config in the address bar, search for browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs and toggle it to true. Then, go to Options > Advanced > Tabbed Browsing and take your pick under “Force links that open in new windows to open in…”

Spike: What do you know? It’s your fault, the both of you! She belongs with me. I’m nothing without her.
Buffy: That I’ll have to agree with. You’re pathetic, you know that? You’re not even a loser anymore, you’re a shell of a loser.
Spike: Yeah. You’re one to talk.
Buffy: Meaning?
Spike: The last time I looked in on you two, you were fighting to the death. Now you’re back making googly-eyes at each other like nothing happened. Makes me want to heave.
Buffy: I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Spike: Oh, yeah. You’re just friends.
Angel: That’s right.
Spike: You’re not friends! You’ll never be friends. You’ll be in love ’till it kills you both. You’ll fight, and you’ll shag, and you’ll hate each other ’till it makes you quiver, but you’ll never be friends. Love isn’t brains, children, it’s blood… blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love’s bitch, but at least I’m man enough to admit it.

(>>)

“The overriding major theme is the parallel between the album and the opera Madame Butterfly. The story of both the opera and the album are similar; love found, love lost, lover lost. The opera revolves around the love between Butterfly and Captain Pinkerton (hence the album’s name and the name of the final track), while this album revolves around the various rejections and resulting confusion in Rivers’ life. The album mirrors Madame Butterfly in that it mirrors the progression of a confused and painful relationship.” (>>)

“Her heart, she had made clear, was not a tame thing that would come at my call. It was a wild and maybe wounded creature that only appeared in flashes between the trees. Capturing it would require care and caution. And patience. God, the terrible patience.” (>>)

“will i bleed repentance
on the canvas of my pain?
will confession be my evidence
that i want to change?” (>>)

“That‘s a song about commitment, really. I don’t think being married to someone is so easy, really. But I’m interested in the idea of marriage. I think it’s madness but it’s a grand madness. If people think it’s normal, they’re out of their minds.” (>>)

“I wish I could believe in God. I really do. I’d like to go to your church, and sing hymns, and be a part of something bigger than myself. I’m at the end of my life, and I don’t think I’ve made a real difference in the world. My life hasn’t really mattered to anyone. But, I just can’t believe in God, so…”

“You don’t believe in God? So what. Sometimes I don’t either. The important question in life is not a question of belief. What’s really important is whom you serve. I think it’s serving God that makes life meaningful.”

“You mean I could go to church, and sing, and do stuff, and all that, without believing in God?”

“Hell yes. I hope so, or else I better find another fuckin’ job.”

“You don’t believe in God?”

“Well, I do now, mostly. I still have my bad days. It’s complicated. Belief comes later for some people, for people like you and me.”

“What would I do? How would I get started?”

“I don’t know, I guess just come to church and sing.”

(>>)

A good mix.

“The truth in that song captured me long ago.” (>>)

“You’re looking for a cool church, filled with authentic Christians who aren’t judgmental, but also have convictions, and are hip and classic in just the right mixture. A church where people forgive each other, and love children, and worship in meaningful ways. A church with a swingin’ preacher who makes the bible come alive, and tells great stories, and is a wonderful inspiration, and plays disc golf too. A church that isn’t liberal or conservative, but seems to transcend weak-ass categories like those. A church where the hunger for truth is honored, and people can disagree but still love each other and share a plate of tacos. A church where people are committed to ‘The Christ Life’ and it shows in the fabulous and creative ways they love the world.” (>>)

“What, did you think communion bread was baked by little old ladies and delivered in baskets with red-checkered napkins?” (>>)

I put up a new banner image this morning.* A box of Bill’s Donuts will go to the first person who can correctly name 15 out of the 22 items pictured.

*On a side note, I’m not sure I like it better than the old one, but I ran out of time and just put it up. So, if you like the old one better, say so and maybe I’ll bring it back or work on the new one some more.

“I met a girl on the bus and asked her to marry me.” (>>)