I finished the book Cold Tangerines about a week ago. I would recommend it to anyone. I am going to blog quotes over the next several days from the book that really struck me.
Today the quotes are from the chapter Shalom.
"Shalom, it's the physical, sense-oriented, relational, communal, personal, ideological posture that arches God-ward."
"It's equilibrium and free-fall, balance and shake. I's a new dance, a new taste, the feeling of falling in love, the knowledge of being set free. It's that split-second cross between a fact and a feeling, something you would swear on in court of law but couldn't find words for if you tried."
"It's something you can't fake, so you have to lay yourself open to it, wide open and vulnerable to what it might ask of you, what it might require you to give up, get over, get outside of get free from. It feels, sometimes, like running farther than you thought you could run, legs shaking and lungs burning, feeling proud and surprised at what little old you can do."
"Shalom is about God, and about the voice and spirit of God blowing through and permeating all the dark corners that we've chopped off, locked down. It's about believing, and letting belief move you to forgive. It's about grace and letting grace propel you into action. It's about the whole of our lives becoming woven through with the sacred spirit of God, through friendship and confession, through rest and motion, through marriage and silence."
"Shalom is the act of life lifting up and becoming an act of worship and celebration, a sacrament, an offering."
"Shalom never happens on it's own. It happens when we do the hardest work, the most secret struggle, the most demanding truth telling. In those moments of ferocity and fight, peace is born. Shalom arrives, and everything is new. And when you've tasted it, smelled it, fought for it,labored it into life, you'll give your soul to get a little more, and it is always worth it."
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