David Dark Quotes & Sayings

If we've deluded ourselves into thinking that our angry mass emails or conversation-stopping talking points serve as a ministry or carry out the purposes of God, we need to slow down and take a breath. — David Dark

To make sense of plastic on the mind and to develop a resistance to the perverse patterns that will otherwise run our world for us, I believe an activity of this sort - by way of a blog, an especially redemptive conversation with a coworker, a water coloring or a playlist - is absolutely crucial. It can be done. And when we do it, we begin to see things we didn't know. We have to try to make sense. We have to make time for artful analysis, which is the way we clear a space for the possibility of sanity. It is an outlet for honesty. — David Dark

What the pundits call wishy-washiness, the Bible calls repentance. — David Dark

My so-called love for humanity, for instance, isn't something I get to carry around in my heart. It has to find application among the weird, desperate people who populate my daily experience. It has to put on flesh. If it doesn't, I might take pleasure in the warm, fuzzy feeling of my personal, private faith, but it wouldn't be appropriate to call it Christianity. — David Dark

[...] The little everyday neglect of imagining other people well can add up to a lifetime of flawed, perverted vision, an expenditure of soul in a waste of emotionalism. — David Dark

Religion is born out of questions, not answers. — David Dark

I'm not sure anyone's ever experienced enlightenment, been born again, been called to repentance or decided to sell their belongings on account of a system. The voice, the tale, the image, the parable that gets through to you
that wins your heart
religiously is the one that makes it past your defenses. You've been won over, and you probably didn't see it coming. You've been enlisted into a drama, whether positively or negatively, and it shouldn't be controversial to note that it happens all the time. When you really think about it, there's one waiting around every corner. It's as near as the story, song or image you can't get out of your head. Religion happens when we get pulled in, moved, called out or compelled by something outside ourselves. It could be a car commercial, a lyric, a painting, a theatrical performance or the magnetic pull of an Apple store. The calls to worship are everywhere. — David Dark

Religion isn't best understood primarily as a collection of beliefs held by backward people with fear and trembling for most of human history (religion as brainwash). It is rather, among other things, a scriptorium of beleaguered witness, a record of collated information, both fragmentary and sometimes systematic, with which we may feel compelled to reckon as it somehow, across history, reckons with us, an inheritance, if you like, of difficult wisdom. — David Dark

There's a whisper of revolution whenever people really speak to one another and really listen. — David Dark

Pervert is a verb, and we do it all the time. To pervert is to degrade, to cut down to size - and we do it to people in our minds. We devalue them. We reduce them to the limit of our appetites, of our sense of what might prove useful to us, of our sense of what strikes us as appropriate. ...we often only file them away - these living and breathing human beings - into separate files of crazy-making issues - talk. When we think of a person primarily as a problem ... we're reducing them to the tiny sphere of our stunted attention span. This is how perversion works. Perversion is a failure of the imagination, a failure to pay adequate attention. — David Dark

And for the sake of humility
a characteristic crucial to sacred questioning we might do well to confess that we're capable at any moment of such bad religion ourselves. — David Dark

Apocalyptic shows us what we're not seeing. It can't be composed or spoken by the powers that be, because they are the sustainers of "the way things are" whose operation justifies itself by crowning itself as "the way things ought to be" and whose greatest virtue is in being "realistic." Thinking through what we mean by "realistic" is where apocalyptic begins. — David Dark

Feeling offended is invigorating. Feeling offended is a reassuring sensation. It's easier than asking ourselves if the redeeming love of God is evident in the way we communicate with people. — David Dark

You never hear people put it this way, and I don't intend to start a trend, but when we consider the ever-evolving process of a person's thinking, the way a person imagines and organizes the world, it could almost seem appropriate to ask each other from time to time, How's your religion coming along? How's it going? Born again, or the same old, same old? Did you successfully distinguish darkness from light in the course of your day? Is there a fever in your mind that won't go away? Mind if I prescribe a poem? — David Dark

[...] Like the God in whose image people are made, people are irreducible. There's always more to a person - more stories, more life, more complexities - than we know. The human person, when viewed properly, is unfathomable, incalculable, and dear. Perversion always says otherwise. — David Dark

[...] Like calling someone a fool or an idiot. It's one of those things Jesus tells us never to do. Calling someone a pervert without acknowledging our own inner pervert might lead to the destruction - or at least the perversion - of our own soul. We become perverts in our determination to catch a pervert. — David Dark

I eventually came to suspect that any God who is nervous, defensive, or angry in the face of questions is a false god. I began to realize that I often ascribed to God the traits of people who are ill at ease, anxious, and occasionally hateful and who even presume from time to time to speak on God's behalf. — David Dark

The movement called Christianity cannot be understood apart from the Jewish concept of shalom. The Christian gospel does not call people to give their mental assent to a certain list of correct propositions, nor does it provide its adherents with a password that will gain them disembodied bliss when they die and the pleasure of confidently awaiting their escape until then. Shalom is a way of being in the world. The Christian gospel invites us to partake in shalom, to embody shalom, and to anticipate its full realization in the coming kingdom of God. — David Dark

In our confusion, we're accustomed to according the titles of good news and "a positive message" to the most soul-sucking, sentimental fare imaginable. Any song or story that deals with conflict by way of a strained euphemistic spin, a cliche, or a triumphal cupcake ending strikes us as the best in family entertainment. This is the opposite of apocalyptic. Apocalyptic maximizes the reality of human suffering and folly before daring a word of hope. The hope has nowhere else to happen but the valley of the shadow of death. — David Dark

Show me a transcript of the words you've spoken, typed, or texted in the course of a day, an account of your doings, and a record of your transactions, and I'll show you your religion. — David Dark

We probably ought to be careful about deciding we're feeling offended; it can get old after a while. We become offended in all the ways God isn't. The seat of offendedness (like the seat of judgment) can be a real tricky spot to occupy. Before we know it, it can become a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. It becomes all we're known for, and when we're all caught up in all the things we're against, we forget the beauty of the things we're supposed to be for. We forget what the kingdom of God looks like and all the wonderfully odd characters taking up residence there. We forget to revel in dappled things. We forget we're dappled. — David Dark

The kingdom of the world is becoming the kingdom of God, and it doesn't depend upon our acknowledgement or faithfulness to it within our highly-charged present. It's coming anyway. It is and was and is to come. We have the privilege of watching and praying and noticing in the glorious meantime, especially in what appear to be the unlikeliest of corners. To reimagine now is our work and our pleasure. Look harder. It is at hand. — David Dark