Best 52 quotes of Jamie Arpin-ricci on MyQuotes

Above all is the centrality of love at the heart of vulnerable faith. Vulnerability will thrive only where love abounds—a love that is generous, gracious, patient, compassionate, humble, curious, joyful, and full of hope. In the absence of fear and the bondage it inflicts on us, love will put down roots, grow, and extend its reach far beyond our expectations or natural capacity. Love we once reserved only for those closest to us can be offered even to those who would persecute us. Enemies are transformed into sisters and brothers and friends.

An unattended grief all too easily becomes poisonous guilt and shame.

...Be careful not to mistake early incompetency as inherent weakness.

By making God more monstrous than us, we circumvent the need for redemption.

Civility is an affectation if it is not informed by some deeper quality of character.

Deviant' is the weapon of the normative to discredit and demonize the Other.

Disgust is a learned behaviour that finds fertile soil in ignorance, yielding a bountiful harvest of alienation, oppression, and hate.

Do we honestly believe that the best witness we can have as Christians before a watching world is to show moral perfection? While that might convince some, our odds of pulling it off seem less than slim. In truth, the most compelling witness to our faith can be a willingness to humbly accept responsibility for our failings and seek to restore relationships at any cost.

Forgiveness and consequences are not mutually exclusive.

God is less interested in you performing well and more interested in seeing you flourish.

Gradualism veiled as hope is all too often a balm to the privileged and a poison to the oppressed.

If our social justice is guided by retribution, we will simply perpetuate the use and abuse of power to inflict violence.

If your orthodoxy doesn't fully affirm compassion- if it is not, itself, deeply compassionate- then it is no orthodoxy at all.

If you think it is more important to be moral than loving, you probably don't understand what either word really means.

Incarnation is good news not because it offers us a way out of the mess of this world, but because it shows us what God's love looks like here and now.

In most of the Western world, where Christianity still enjoys a significant amount of privilege, especially when practiced by middle-class, white Christians, Jesus is seen as the heroic figure, the ultimate example of godliness, holiness, mercy, compassion, and justice—as well he should! He is God-made-flesh, after all. However, given that, when we identify with Jesus in the act of foot washing where we take the role of Jesus, all too often we are unconsciously (though sometimes all too consciously) assuming those characteristics onto ourselves. In trying to be Jesus to others, we can assume a posture of spiritual superiority and/or paternalism. The recipients of our service, “the least of these”, are then seen as the needy recipients of our goodness. Again, while affirming the value in such acts of humble service, too often miss how such posturing fails to recognize the radical presence of Christ as “the least of these”.

It is critical to note that our biases against the other are empowered less by our assumptions of their otherness and more by our assumptions about our own normality.

It is entirely possible to work for justice without thirsting for blood.

It is in the face of this radical revisioning of ourselves as the community of Christ that our relationship to “the least of these” is formed. They don’t represent a threat to our lives, both physically (in their demands on our resources, in the loss of safety) and existentially (in how they expose our pretense, our privilege), but they actually can be seen as Christ Himself. Not in some romantic, shallow way in which we take in the homeless beggar only to have him later throw off his rags to reveal himself as Jesus, rewarding us for our righteousness. No, we encounter Christ in them because the process we have gone through has demonstrated to us that in the other—in those most different from us—our own inadequacy is exposed, offering us the opportunity to embrace the gift of the transforming cross.

It's important to take life very seriously. That is why we must laugh at every opportunity.

No one has ever been saved from drowning by sympathy.

Often it is the poor who recognize emptiness before the rest of us—and for obvious reasons. While I am not suggesting that poverty predisposes people to some form of righteousness, I have seen how their circumstances often free them from much of the pretense that our relative privilege affords us. So while the poor are not godlier on the basis of their poverty, they are often at least more authentic in their brokenness, and thus, perhaps, closer to honestly recognizing what true emptiness is.

One of the clearest indications of privilege is the freedom to opt out.

One of the deadliest tools of powerful systems is narrow definitions of what is "normal" and the reduction of difference to deviance.

One of the most common criticisms of my theology is that I have placed compassion ahead of orthodoxy. Aside from the fact that this is a very false assumption, as my stances are based on deeply studied convictions, there seems to be another assumption that compassion and orthodoxy are inherently at odds, with the latter being more more authoritative. God is "compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth". That is no mere sentiment. If your orthodoxy doesn't fully affirm compassion- if it is not, itself, deeply compassionate- then it is no orthodoxy at all.

Rather than elevating poverty to a form of righteousness, Jesus is instead calling for a revolution of imagination around the nature of what we consider true blessing.

...Relationship is not about positional authority but about dynamic mutuality.

Shalom is what love looks like in the flesh. The embodiment of love in the context of a broken creation, shalom is a hint at what was, what should be, and what will one day be again. Where sin disintegrates and isolates, shalom brings together and restores. Where fear and shame throw up walls and put on masks, shalom breaks down barriers and frees us from the pretense of our false selves.

Sometimes the silence of God is simply Him waiting for us to accept what we already know to know right and true.

Strength of conviction for ones faith is celebrated by the church- except when that conviction runs contrary to the status quo.

The excesses of identity politics pale in comparison to the monolithic normative realities that dominate our culture.

The fire of fear blazes with the fuel of ignorance leaving nothing but the ashes of hate behind.

The healthy introvert understands that their personality is not a deterministic, fixed reality that they are powerless against. Being an introvert is never an excuse to shirk responsibility or to justify bad habits.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness could not colonize it.

The level of 'acceptable' dishonesty we Christians allow to avoid facing uncomfortable truths betrays our ideals as shallowly held.

The mission of God’s people is not simply directed at saving people’s souls from a bad life-after-death into a good life-after-death, but it addresses and hopefully touches the injustice and violence around us—poverty, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, war, environmental destruction—where salvation, justice, and peace can merge.

The practices and disciplines of building and sustaining community could fill volumes (and has). From mystics to anthropologists, we learn how critical the quality of a community is to the health and well-being of people. Yet, community remains one of the most elusive goals to so many of the Christians and churches in our individualistic Western societies. When we encounter true community, we are not encountering mere healthy relationships of equality and moral uprightness, but we are witnessing, and being invited to participate in, the divine nature of God.

The problem is not that people are called to die to their sin, but rather that too many Christians are lined up with hammer and nails ready to help.

There is more hope in honest brokenness than in the pretense of false wholeness.

There is nothing like the moving solidarity of survivors to bring out seemingly boundless impulse to deflect, deny, and defend.

The seeds of liberation are planted across the common table as we break bread together.

The weaponization of belonging is one of the most "anti-christ" dynamics I have ever encountered.

This emphasis is directed primarily at the here and now, as Christ-embodying communities of active love in the midst of the world. All of creation is caught up in the restorative work. The mission of God’s people is not simply directed at saving people’s souls from a bad life-after-death into a good life-after-death, but it addresses and hopefully touches the injustice and violence around us—poverty, racism, sexism, economic exploitation, war, environmental destruction—where salvation, justice, and peace can merge.

We celebrate the differences among us, even that which we cannot reconcile, not in denial of the absolute, but in the gift of humility that those differences require of us. Without denying our differences, we no longer allow them to categorize or divide us. It is in the diversity that the image of God is most fully reflected in and through us.

When circumstances demand that we do something that is not natural to our temperament or talents, we must sometimes intentionally choose by discipline what we inherently lack by nature.

When I realized that I was an introvert and what that meant, I actually became more outgoing, more confident in social situations, and began to enjoy scenarios I used to find unbearable. Why? Because, in understanding what I needed with respect to replenishing my energy, I was able to set limits and boundaries that freed me to be more engaged.

When Mary asserts explicitly that God is on the side of the poor, we can understand it within the tension of what it means to be blessed as the poor in spirit. Rather than elevating poverty to a form of righteousness, Jesus is instead calling for a revolution of imagination around the nature of what we consider true blessing. Jesus is here declaring that the humble and repentant heart is the fertile soil of his kingdom.

When you assume the goodness in one group is an exception but believe the goodness in your group is the norm, you're probably being prejudiced.

When you're accustomed to being considered 'normal', difference feels like a perversion.

Willingly embracing the emptiness of the tomb is more difficult for those of us in places of privilege. We have so much “stuff,” so many activities and endless sources of distraction and busyness to fill any potential emptiness, that our pretense is better fortified against any attempts to expose it, whether through circumstance or intentionality. This is why, in part, Jesus speaks so strongly against the love of money. He did not demonize money itself, but recognized how easily we become enslaved to a different master, in bondage to mammon, instead of following Christ in loving service of God and others.