How to Survive a Shipwreck: Help Is on the Way and Love Is Already Here
Jonathan Martin
Top 10 Best Quotes
“This fits the pattern of how God responds to human suffering: We come looking for answers; God sends a hot meal through a warm body. WE come looking for reasons for our hunger; God sends provision to feed us. We come looking for a sermon that will explain the complexity of the cosmos to us and satiate our desire for understanding; Christ responds with, "This is my body, given for you; this is my blood, shed for you." People try to offer us an explanation; God offers us a Eucharist.”
“The cross of Jesus says to us there is nothing God won't do to bring us home--except force us to choose him. The cross is God laying down his great power so we might be compelled by the beauty of his heart. He will not coerce us, but only woo us.”
“It is possible to fail, and not have our faith fail us. It is possible to lose our lives, and not lose our souls.”
“But it does not really matter how you got here or why; and it doesn’t really matter if it was God or the devil or yourself or some ancient chaos that spilled up from the bottom of the sea. What matters now is that you are drowning, and the world you loved before is not your world any longer. The questions of why and how are less pressing than the reality that is your lungs filling with water now. Philosophy and theology won’t help you much here, because what you believe existentially about storms or oceans or drowning won’t make you stop drowning. Religion won’t do you much good down here, because beliefs can’t keep you warm when you’re twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea.”
“wisdom is not having the right answers but having a proper sense of scale and perspective.”
“Us and them” religion is poison to the soul, and it often takes a lifetime of humiliation to detoxify us from it. In the Christian tradition, those who are”
“There is no walking into the kingdom of God, or into the grace of God. We can only be carried,”
“The first discovery of the shipwreck is that we have a higher capacity for pain than we ever could have imagined before we lost, before we failed, before we suffered…The surprise on the other side of the shipwreck is that, while your capacity for pain improved far beyond our wildest reckoning, now you have a capacity to feel everything deeper. You are capable of a depth of empathy and compassion that would have been unthinkable before…And from this new-found capacity for pain, for sorrow, for torment, for agony, for endless waves of grief, comes the biggest surprise of them all—your new-found capacity for joy.”
“The experience of drowning, through the lens of faith, is what Christians call "baptism." But no matter what you call it, the sensation of going under is entirely the same.”
“The cross of Jesus says to us there is nothing God won’t do to bring us home—except force us to choose him. The cross is God laying down his great power so we might be compelled by the beauty of his heart. He will not coerce us, but only woo us. And yet as long as we see Jesus through the distorted lens of bad religion, every invitation is perceived as a threat.”
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Book Keywords:
christianity, eucharist, drowning, love, losing, joy, grace, beauty, life-seasons, grief, loss, faith, suffering, sorrow
