Pastoral Quotes

“Solitude is a chosen separation for refining your soul. Isolation is what you crave when you neglect the first.”
― Wayne Cordeiro, Leading on Empty: Refilling Your Tank and Renewing Your Passion

“Bees blew like cake-crumbs through the golden air, white butterflies like sugared wafers, and when it wasn't raining a diamond dust took over which veiled and yet magnified all things”
― Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

“She wakes in a puddle of sunlight.
Her hands asleep beside her.
Her hair draped on the lawn
like a mantle of cloth.”
― Roman Payne, Hope and Despair

“My Love wakes in a puddle of sunlight.
Her hands asleep beside her.
Her hair draped on the lawn
like a mantle of cloth.
I give her my life
for our love is whole
I sing her beauty
in my soul.”
― Roman Payne

“As a pastor, I do not speak for my community. I speak from it.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“… the countryside and the village are symbols of stability and security, of order. Yet they are also, as I have noted, liminal spaces, at a very narrow remove from the atavistic Wild. Arcadia is not the realm even of Giorgione and of Claude, with its cracked pillars and thunderbolts, its lurking banditti; still less is it Poussin’s sun-dappled and regularised realm of order, where, although the lamb may be destined for the altar and the spit, all things proceed with charm and gravity and studied gesture; least of all is it the degenerate and prettified Arcady of Fragonard and Watteau, filled with simpering courtier-Corydons, pallid Olympians, and fat-arsed putti. (It is only family piety that prevents me from taking a poker to an inherited coffee service in gilt porcelain with bastardised, deutero-Fragonard scenes painted on the sides of every damned thing. Cue Wallace Greenslade: ‘… “Round the Horne”, with Marie Antoinette as the dairymaid and Kenneth Williams as the manager of the camp-site….’) No: Arcadia is the very margin of the liminal space between the safe tilth and the threatening Wild, in which Pan lurks, shaggy and goatish, and Death proclaims, from ambush, et in Arcadia ego. Arcadia is not the Wide World nor the Riverbank, but the Wild Wood. And in that wood are worse than stoats and weasels, and the true Pan is no Francis of Assisi figure, sheltering infant otters. The Wild that borders and penetrates Arcady is red in tooth and claw.”
― G.M.W. Wemyss

“If I know the classical psychological theories well enough to pass my comps and can reformulate them in ways that can impress peer reviewers from the most prestigious journals, but have not the practical wisdom of love, I am only an intrusive muzak soothing the ego while missing the heart.

And if I can read tea leaves, throw the bones and manipulate spirits so as to understand the mysteries of the universe and forecast the future with scientific precision, and if I have achieved a renaissance education in both the exoteric and esoteric sciences that would rival Faust and know the equation to convert the mass of mountains into psychic energy and back again, but have not love, I do not even exist.

If I gain freedom from all my attachments and maintain constant alpha waves in my consciousness, showing perfect equanimity in all situations, ignoring every personal need and compulsively martyring myself for the glory of God, but this is not done freely from love, I have accomplished nothing.

Love is great-hearted and unselfish; love is not emotionally reactive, it does not seek to draw attention to itself. Love does not accuse or compare. It does not seek to serve itself at the expense of others. Love does not take pleasure in other peeople's sufferings, but rejoices when the truth is revealed and meaningful life restored. Love always bears reality as it is, extending mercy to all people in every situation. Love is faithful in all things, is constantly hopeful and meets whatever comes with immovable forbearance and steadfastness. Love never quits.

By contrast, prophecies give way before the infinite possibilities of eternity, and inspiration is as fleeting as a breath. To the writing and reading of many books and learning more and more, there is no end, and yet whatever is known is never sufficient to live the Truth who is revealed to the world only in loving relationship.

When I was a beginning therapist, I thought a lot and anxiously tried to fix people in order to lower my own anxiety. As I matured, my mind quieted and I stopped being so concerned with labels and techniques and began to realize that, in the mystery of attentive presence to others, the guest becomes the host in the presence of God. In the hospitality of genuine encounter with the other, we come face to face with the mystery of God who is between us as both the One offered One who offers.

When all the theorizing and methodological squabbles have been addressed, there will still only be three things that are essential to pastoral counseling: faith, hope, and love. When we abide in these, we each remain as well, without comprehending how, for the source and raison d'etre of all is Love.”
― Stephen Muse, When Hearts Become Flame: An Eastern Orthodox Approach to the Dia-Logos of Pastoral Counseling

“Because a thing is going strong now, it need not go strong forever . . . This craze for motion has only set in during the last hundred years. It may be followed by a civilization that won't be a movement, because it will rest on the earth. All the signs are against it now, but I can't help hoping, and very early in the morning in the garden I feel that out house is the future as well as the past.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“Kessler depicts his developing intimacy with a handful of dairy goats and offers an enviable glimpse of the pastoral good life. Yet he also cautions, "Wherever the notion of paradise exists, so does the idea that it was lost. Paradise is always in the past." The title Goat Song is a literal rendering of the Greek word traghoudhia, tragedy. Reading it, I was reminded of Leo Marx's analysis of Thoreau's Walden. In The Machine in the Garden, Marx names Thoreau a tragic, if complex pastoralist. After failing to make an agrarian living raising beans for commercial trade (although his intent was always more allegorical than pecuniary), Thoreau ends Walden by replacing the pastoral idea where it originated: in literature. Paradise, Marx concludes, is not ultimately to be found at Walden Pond; it is to be found in the pages of Walden.”
― Heather Paxson, Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (California Studies in Food and Culture)

“When a pastor is led by what people demand of them and not what God demands of them a shepherd turns into a wolf”
― John M Sheehan

“Sometimes I used to hear a farmer speaking sharp and loud to his servants; but it was so far away that it only reminded me pleasantly that other people were hard at work in some distant place, while I just sat on the heather and did nothing.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North & South

“There were hundreds of worlds like it, most of them littered with the usual Elder Culture ruins, the usual secrets waiting to be unlocked. This one had been colonised by an atechnic cult sixty years ago. Maybe they were living the life of pastoral utopianism they’d planned; maybe they had descended into savagery and were roasting and eating prisoners of war captured in tribal wars fought with stone-tipped spears. No one knew nor cared.”
― Paul McAuley, Into Everywhere

“pergunte a si mesmo se seu ministério é reativo ou proativo” (pp. 29)”
― Colin Marshall, The Trellis and the Vine: The Ministry Mind-Shift that Changes Everything

“Devemos ser exportadores de pessoas treinadas, em vez de acumuladores de pessoas treinadas.” (pp. 33)”
― Colin Marshall, The Trellis and the Vine: The Ministry Mind-Shift that Changes Everything

“Se treinarmos e enviarmos obreiros a novos campos... nosso ministério local pode não crescer em números, mas o evangelho avançará por meio destes novos ministros da Palavra.” (pp. 33) – Comentário: prova que crescimento não é medido pelo número de membros.”
― Colin Marshall, The Trellis and the Vine: The Ministry Mind-Shift that Changes Everything

“a ênfase não está no crescimento da congregação como estrutura – em números, finanças e sucesso – e sim no crescimento do evangelho, à medida que ele é pregado e pregado de novo sob o poder do Espírito” (pp. 45-46)”
― Colin Marshall, The Trellis and the Vine: The Ministry Mind-Shift that Changes Everything

“I sing the cycle of my country's year,
I sing the tillage, and the reaping sing,”
― Vita Sackville-West, The Land

“No, the shepherd’s life in poetry has always been an ideal in which the negative features, the tearing of oneself away from the great world and the disregarding of its customs, have been the decisive elements. It was a kind of sport to imagine oneself in a situation which held the promise of liberation from the fetters of civilization whilst retaining its advantages.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

“It is not without good reason that the literary tradition of pastoral poetry can look back on an almost uninterrupted history of over two thousand years since its beginnings in Hellenism. With the exception of the early Middle Ages, when urban and court culture was extinguished, there have been variants of this poetry in every century. Apart from the thematic material of the novel of chivalry, there is probably no other subject-matter 15 that has occupied the literature of Western Europe for so long and maintained itself against the assaults of rationalism with such tenacity. This long and uninterrupted reign shows that ‘sentimental’ poetry, in Schiller’s sense of the word, plays an incomparably greater part in the history of literature than ‘naïve’ poetry. Even the idylls of Theocritus himself owe their existence not, as might be imagined, to genuine roots in nature and a direct relationship to the life of the common people, but to a reflective feeling for nature and a romantic conception of the common folk, that is, to sentiments which have their origin in a yearning for the remote, the strange and the exotic. The peasant and the shepherd are not enthusiastic about their surroundings or about their daily work. And interest in the life of the simple folk is, as we know, to be sought neither in spatial nor social proximity to the peasantry; it does not arise in the folk itself but in the higher classes, and not in the country but in the big towns and at the courts, in the midst of bustling life and an over-civilized, surfeited society. Even when Theocritus was writing his idylls, the pastoral theme and situation were certainly no longer a novelty; it will already have occurred in the poetry of the primitive pastoral peoples, but doubtless without the note of sentimentality and complacency, and probably also without attempting to describe the outward conditions of the shepherd’s life realistically. Pastoral scenes, although without the lyrical touch of the Idylls, were to be found before Theocritus, at any rate, in the mime. They are a matter of course in the satyr plays, and rural scenes are not unknown even to tragedy. But pastoral scenes and pictures of country life are not enough to produce bucolic poetry; the preconditions for this are, above all, the latent conflict of town and country and the feeling of discomfort with civilization.”
― Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art Volume 3: Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

“It was blue like the gown she had discarded, but the fabric was cheap muslin that she covered with a thick white apron tied around her waist. In Paris she knew the style of dress was actually popular. It was called chemise à la reine, named after Queen Antoinette's fondness for all things pastoral. Only, Belle truly had fed chickens and washed laundry in hers. She thumbed the stubborn stain that had never come out, the one that Gaston had given her when he splashed her skirts with mud after his ill-fated proposal.”
― Emma Theriault, Rebel Rose

“Wer verlangt, sie [diese Sprache] müsse so sein, dass der moderne Mensch sich ohne Einübung sofort in ihr wiederfinden könne, verlangt Unmögliches. Dieses Postulat ähnelt dem, die Kirche müsse auf die Fragen des heutigen menschen antworten, ohne zu sagen, dass sie vielleicht lehren muss, die richtigen Fragen zu stellen. Als Leute von Jesus wissen wollten, welches der gerechte Verteilungsschlüssel bei ihrer Erbauseinandersetzung sei, da erklärte er sich für unzuständig. Seine Lehre war: "Suchet zuerst das Reich Gottes." Das heißt, er ließ sie nicht finden, was sie suchten, sondern sagte ihnen, was sie suchen müssten, wenn sie nicht umsonst gelebt haben wollten.”
― Robert Spaemann

“I sit by the lotus-lake, eat God,

& count water-pearls over waxy
petals. Again, I unpeel

the black sky & trace teal mountains.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“The prairie I grew up on teaches you to notice, to pay attention. The yolk of the sun as it slides across the dome of the sky streaking the world orange and indigo. The swish of grass in afternoon breeze. The screech of a grackle. During the Golden hour on the prairie, the North Dakota palette reveals the subtle differences between ochre, umber, and sienna.”
― Taylor Brorby, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land

“I mentioned how I had lived in the oil boom. I described the buttes of the badlands. The smell of the sage. The yolk-yellow breasts of the sage grass. How if you sat long enough, waited for the golden hour, then the entire sweep of the badlands surged into a riot of reds and purples and golds. I told him how there were ponderosa pines tucked into the southwestern pocket of North Dakota, but that they looked shrimpy compared to the ones here, in the rain-forest of the Olympics.”
― Taylor Brorby, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land