Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
25 quotes
"The Kingdom of God is a tricky concept, and I was always taught it referred to our heavenly reward for being good, which, now that I actually read the Bible for myself, makes very little sense. Others say that the Kingdom of God is another way of talking about the church, and still others say that it's the dream God has for the wholeness of the world, a dream being made true little by little among us right here, right now. My answer? All of the above."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"I cared about Ben, but I was never in love with him. I was in love with what it said about me that I had a boyfriend like Ben, and that's just different."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"I carried a bravado about my drinking like I was a hero of debauchery. But on that Christmas Day, I felt like shit. I had a vague realisation that I was just trying to keep up with some version of myself that I had decided was accurate."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"No one is climbing the spiritual ladder. We don't continually improve until we are so spiritual we no longer need God. We die and are made new, but that's different from spiritual self-improvement."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"The movement in our relationship to God is always from God to us. Always. We can't, through our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to us. Most especially in the Eucharist and in the stranger."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"As a teenager, I loved how I looked in the outfit of using drugs and exercising poor judgement. I had tried it on, spun around in the mirror, and decided I would choose this look, this image, this identity. But eventually and without realising it, the ability to choose had gone. I had become what at first I had only pretended to be."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"Every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"From my father I heard only these words: "But you were born for such a day as this." He closed the book and my mother joined him in embracing me. They prayed over me and they gave me a blessing. And some blessings, like the one my conservative Christian parents gave to their soon-to-be-Lutheran pastor daughter who had put them through hell, are the kind of blessings that stay with you for the rest of your life. The kind you can't speak of without crying all over again."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"I know that people who don't believe in God might scoff at the idea that the creator of the universe has the time or inclination to try incessantly (and with not much long-term success) to change my heart. I get it. I just have no other explanation."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"God, please help me not be an asshole, is about as common a prayer as I pray in my life."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"It would seem that when we are sinned against, when someone else does us harm, we are in some way linked to that sin, connected to that mistreatment like a chain. And our anger, fear, or resentment doesn't free us at all. It just keeps us chained."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"Jesus taught us to pray, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us" not forgive us and smite those bastards who hurt us."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"Matthew once said to me, after one of my more finely worded rants about stupid people who have the wrong opinions, "Nadia, the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it." Damn."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"Knowing all of this makes me love and hate Jesus at the same time. Because, when instead of contrasting good and evil, he contrasted truth and evil, I have to think about all the times I've substituted being good (or appearing to be good) for truth."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"Repentance in Greek means something much closer to "thinking differently afterward" than it does "changing your cheating ways." Of course repentance can look like a prostitute becoming a librarian, but it can also look like a prostitute simply saying, "OK, I'm a sex worker and I don't know how to change that, but I can come here and receive bread and wine and I can hold onto the love of God without being deemed worthy of it by anyone but God."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"Fear not, brothers and sisters, God, who is full of grace and abounding in steadfast love, meets us in our sin and transforms us for God's glory and the healing of God's world. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, your sins are forgiven, be now at peace."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"But inevitably, when I can't harm the people who harmed me, I just end up harming the people who love me. So maybe retaliation or holding on to anger about the harm done to me doesn't actually combat evil. Maybe it feeds it. In the end, if we're not careful, we can actually absorb the worst of our enemy and on some level even become them."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"The Bible had been the weapon of choice in the spiritual gladiatorial arena of my youth. I knew how, wielded with intent and precision, the Bible can cut deeply, while on the one holding it can claim with impunity that "this is from God."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"Maybe demons are defined as anything other than God that tries to tell us who we are. And maybe, just moments after Jesus' baptism, when the devil says to him, "If you are the Son of God…" he does so because he knows that Jesus is vulnerable to temptation precisely to the degree that he is insecure about his identity and mistrusts his relationship with God. So if God's first move is to give us our identity, then the devil's first move is to throw that identity into question."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"We had started out caring about each other, but in the end none of us knew how to care for each other. But this experience taught me that a community based on the idea that everyone hates rules is, in the end, just as disappointing and oppressive as a community based on the ability to follow rules."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"This was the bonus to liberal Christianity: I could use my reason and believe at the same time."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"There's not enough wrong with it to leave and there's just enough wrong with it to stay," Matthew later told me. "Fight to change it."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"There's something about courting the darkness that makes some people see the truth in raw, twisted ways, as though they were shining a black light on life to illuminate the absurdity of it all. Comics tell you a truth you can only see from the underside of the psyche. At its best, comedy is prophesy and societal dream interpretation. At its worst it's just dick jokes."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint
"What they don't tell you when you get sober is that if you manage to stay that way, you will bury your friends. Not everyone gets to have a whole new shiny-but-messy life like I have, and I've never come up with a satisfying explanation for why that is."
Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint