Week 2: Place and Belonging Notes

“Collective people who bear the image of God…If God really is three parts in one like they say, it means God’s wholeness is a multitude.” p. 7
“When we neglect the physical, it is inevitably suffocates the image of God who ate, slept, cried, bled, grew and healed.” And whether or not the origin of that negated is hatred, it will indeed end in hatred.” p. 60
“God makes a home for things be fore God makes the the thing.” p. 18
“Alienation and trauma of place are best met not with dislocation but with belonging, with a defiant rootedness, even if those roots stretch out to new and safer places.” p. 19
Getting Lost can be a kind of healing “To find a manner of anonymity, to experience that dreadful thing we call ‘blending in,’ can be a kind of haven.” p. 20
“I hope God really is preparing a place for us. When God talks about getting her house ready, is she expecting us all at once? Does she have a gate, does she keep it open all through the night? Maybe she will tell me the secrets of where I came from.”
We were made for belonging…Our pining for belonging can do frenetic things to the soul.” p. 70
“I say you have to learn how to be with and part of something in order to know how to be alone.” p. 70
“We don’t just welcome you or accept you; we need you. We are insufficient without you.” p. 72
“To bear the image of God in its fullness, we need each other. Maybe each culture, every household, every community bears that image in a unique way.” p. 73
“There is something to being chosen that is uniquely healing. I communicates to the soul that one is desired not passively but with active longing.” p. 75
I wonder if God feels as alienated from as we do from him. Christ just boldly inviting himself over to houses for dinner. Roaming around telling people to stop everything and follow him. Multiplying food, but making everyone sit down in groups to eat it. He knew how to make his own belonging. Do we?” Zecheus p. 75
“But a life lived with trust only in the self is exhausting. It is not freedom; it is a yoke that falls helplessly and incessantly on you.”p. 77

Author: katyandtheword

Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ. She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible. "Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal. Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times. View all posts by katyandtheword