Notes from ‘The Call’ by Os Guinness. A most excellent book.
“I would say that responsiblity for oneself is a knife we use to carve our own inimitable features in the panorama of Being; it is the pen with which we write into the history of Being that story of the fresh creation of the world that each new human existence always is.” – Vaclav Havel
“Responsibility does establish identity, but we are not responsible because of our identity; instead we have an identity because we are responsible.” – Vaclav Havel
“The kitchen is the studio where life is created…only you are the artist who draws the painting of your life.”
The Caller sees and addresses us as individuals – as unique, exceptional, precious, significant, and free to respoind. He who calls us is personal as well as infinite and personal in himself, not just to us.
“The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call ‘Myself’ becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop” – C S Lewis.
“He doth it all comfortably though he meet with little encouragement from man, whereas an unbelieving heart would be discontented that he can find no acceptance, but all he doth is taken in the worst part.” – Puritians
“If I respected him, I would care about his opinion. But I don’t, so I don’t.” – Winston Churchill
“I hear it said,” Churchill remarked in a speech in the House of Commons on September 30, 1941, that “leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture.”"Nothing is more dangerous…,” hes said another time, “than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll – always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature.”
“I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt.” – Harry Truman
“Do you know, Gordon Pasha,” snarled the cruel King John of Abyssinia in an earlier incident, “that I could kill you on the spot if I liked?”
“I am perfectly well aware of it, Your Majesty,” Gordon replied. “Do so at once if it is your royal pleasure. I am ready.”
“What, ready to be kills?”
“Certainly. I am always ready to die….”
“Then my power has no terrors for you?” the king gasped.
“None whatever!” Gordon answered, and the king left him, amazed.
“What at once, and struck me was the way in which his oneness with God ruled all his actions, and his mode of seeing things. I never knew one who seemed so much to ‘endure as seeing Him who is invisible.” “To live with God, and for God” – John Bonar
Moses was arrested at the sight of a bush, burning yet not burned up – as if God were telling him from the very beginning that his call would set his life on fire, but the fire would not consume him.
“God of Abraham, God of Issac, God of Jacob,
not of philosophers and scholars” – Memorial by Blaise Pascal
The call came to Pascal so deeply that he became a man consumed by divine fire that touched his life and work.
We are living in a time when leaders “take full responsibility” for their mistakes and solemnly intone that “the buck stops here” – but never resign or appear to acknowledge any guilt.
Responsibility is obedience by another name.
What we do then, when no one sees but God, is the test of our true responsibility. The Audience of One.
“Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God – the responsble man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. Where are these responsible people?” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Ethics.
“You have given so much to me. Giver me one thing more – a grateful heart.” – George Herbert.
Count von Bismarck liked to say that a stateman’s main task was “to listen until he hears the rustle of God’s robe, then leap up and grasp the hem of the garment.”
“Chance, Fortune, Luck, Destiny, Fate, Providence seems to me only different ways of expressing the same thing, to wit, that a man’s own contribution to his life story is continually dominated by an external superior power.” – Winston Churchill
Hindsight may have the benefit of 20/20 vision, but in real life the capacity to act is often greatest when the clarity to see is worst. Conversely, by the time everything is crystal clear, freedom to act may be heavily constrained.
