Geoffrey Wood Quotes

Biography

Type: Writer

Born: 0

Died:

Geoffrey Wood is a writer of fiction, plays and the occasional sonnet.

Geoffrey Wood Quotes

They want explanation, not faith; God gives them faith as the explanation.

Faith is where they learn about their God; but Prayer is where they explore Him.

There will be a solidity to their faith which is very dangerous to our designs and difficult to dissolve. There is a luminosity to it. Just one Christian of that type can dispel years worth of diabolical delusion.

Where faith costs nothing, faith loses respect, even to those who possess it.

Faith is an act whereby they learn their God.

With addiction, a client’s fears can be ripened into some very pleasing fruit: Irritability, suspiciousness, isolation, paranoia, and finally on to that grand banana - the fear of Fear itself.

I shouldn’t need to remind you that it was words that created the universe and The Word that now holds it together. While your man was simply reading one little book, something not unlike Genesis was stirring in his skull, and you didn’t think to stop it?

When some one mortal yet eternal human merely being relying on precisely nothing but the audacious love of his Maker, calls on Him to part the Heavens, well, we are undone.

Courtesy, not control, that was His means. Just as He requested the stars to sing and they leapt into bright being, so request was to be their rule over bird and beast, seas and trees, mountains and moons and all the dancing distances between the heavenlies filled with the unending song of Creation.

There is a mathematics to all his relationships, underlying each and every one. He wants it to all add up in his head and he wants to do the adding. And should someone step outside his ciphers, the circle his mind has drawn, his trust evaporates.

Still, despite all our noise, this universe hinges on a melody, that’s the dismal truth of it. Oh, we can propagandize all we wish, it doesn’t change the fabric of things. This universe was not made for the fallen, only the redeemed.

Though I despise it, I do not doubt His Love for the creatures. I have seen it - His ever-reaching outward for any hand that might reach back. At His love, I tremble yet believe.

So in a man’s mind, he appraises, negotiates, defines, delineates, weighs the information, and that includes God. As you can see, this is a relationship of management, not trust. You don’t trust things you can manage, you manage them. And so, God as information is managed and no relationship of trust is fostered.

Properly understood, Imagination and Prayer are directly proportional - the more they pray beyond their bounds, they expand their vision beyond their resources, their experiences, their expectations.

Denial makes it easier to keep an addiction progressing smoothly along and, being a lie, it’s just better form.

Truth, with a capital T, was swapped for Fact with a capital F, then both lower-cased - facts the new trues.

In Joy, to lose one’s life is to gain it, and Joy never loses an opportunity to be lost in the other.

If we must tempt to Pleasure, how do we tempt to the least amount of Pleasure? Or better yet, tempt them to its opposite? But how to tempt them to pain.

In general, Americans would walk a mile uphill in the rain to avoid pain, unless the walk could be shorter and level and the day sunny, which they’d prefer.

Turning an experience about to observe it, results in a lessening of the experience directly proportional to the amount of observation. To think about it is, to some degree, to stop the pleasure, to stop the experience, to step outside it.

And so, wish becomes pang; the crave, an ache; pleasure, pain. Losing all its pleasure, anticipation cuts the opposite direction and becomes merely a constant, painful reminder of what they’ve lost, forever.

Indeed, if their wristbands asked them the question: “What-Would-Jesus-Buy” - well now, that could very well revolutionize the Christian church in America.

When sex was something godlike, Lust was the profane curiosity that killed many a straying cat. Now, having removed mystery, Lust is less a long-standing, overpowering yearning, more a sudden craving of the appetite. Less quest, more impulse buy.

Joy is that paradox where a man so trusts, is so enraptured, as to be caught up and lost in the other, while at the same time, being utterly known by the other, thus utterly himself.

With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook - that prissy little virtue, Temperance - for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.

They forget that for a Creator to create, He must be greater than His creation, thus He must be by definition not less than emotional.

Now they feel not only known and still loved, but also loved because they are known.

Selling a new lie is easy, but not so with un-teaching an old truth.

The eye is to light as the soul is to God.

Press them continually with memory and dream and have them waste their Present there.

Chant to him: “An individual thinks for himself.” Then roll that around in his head till it means: “If I didn’t think of it, it has no bearing on my life.

Grace runs downhill and now all his time is being redeemed.

True Prayer is the work of relationship, where He moves them from mere information about Him to a one-on-one experience with Him, so that now when they talk about “knowing God,” they mean more than, “I understand what you’re saying about God,” but also, “It fits my experience of Him.

They think that if they had more belief they would pray more, so keep them lacking. Never let them realize that the opposite is true: If they prayed more, they would have more belief.

When their minds mingle with His magnanimity, something of eternity rubs off on their imaginations.

The Bible is the one book we’ve most succeeded in having them never read as a book. Keep it that way.

Gratitude, not guilt, as motivation is always His starting point, thus guilt as a motivation leads nowhere.

In every human act of charity, something larger, greater, divine has come down to visit the act.

It seems The Adversary needs neither their guilt nor their request, but simply their return. In other words, since repentance is the process whereby guilt is turned into gratitude, He doesn’t mind if they skip a step and go directly to gratitude.

They think virtues are man-made, only exist because they exist, but if no human had ever existed, The Virtues would persist for they hold their being from the very Presence of the Adversary Himself.

And keep them thinking in terms of 'being good' as this is not an end so much as a means to something else - happiness, respect, self-esteem, etc… And whatever their true end is, take it away, and so goes their goodness.

I have witnessed the pleasant result of producing a human who faithfully claims to be a Christian, but who on some fundamental level does not think Christianity actually works. And just one Christian of this type turns off dozens from trying out Christianity for themselves.

Even if their guilt actually does produce a good action, it will be the saddest good action you’ll ever see, and it will be of no use to them because their goal is not to obey, but to feel less guilty, thus nothing about their souls will be reshaped.

We’ve spent centuries moving them away from that word virtue and especially The Virtues and that’s precisely how we did it - by making it lower case.

As a motivation - for humans, but Christians especially - guilt is always wrong and can never move them to do anything He wants of them. Never let them realize that.

If we can keep the Christians thinking of themselves as sinners not sons and daughters, we can make them view their relationship to The Adversary as a negative-sum-game: They fall in a hole, He pulls them out, they fall back in, etc... That way they never get anywhere; they’re always either standing next to a hole or down in it.

Guilt, if cultivated in a Christian client, can render their Christianity worthless to themselves and others.

The Adversary, of course, simply wants them to lay down their sins, guilt and all, and follow Him. But this type holds on to their sinfulness and their guilt for it, because otherwise, they’d have no relationship with Him at all. And, of course, no relationship can be based on guilt and survive.

I’ve seen a disobedient client simply turn his attention toward The Adversary and ask “Are You still there?” and suddenly all was made well between them.

You see my point? The average person has a very average notion of goodness to which they aspire averagely. To aspire to goodness in any remarkable way would be ‘undemocratic’.

That dusty hill we can scarcely look upon and then only with pain, The Adversary, also with pain, does and must ever witness The Crucifixion.

Make them imagine repentance more like an appearance in court before a cranky old judge, less like a child knocking on his father’s study door to have a chat.

They view repentance as the thing they have to do in order to earn forgiveness, therefore the more difficult they make it, the more credit they tally up.

Remember, this type doesn’t really believe He’ll forgive them, by repenting they are trying to earn what they do not think, in any case, He will pay.

Their guilt plus their repentance should have equalled forgiveness. But they don’t feel forgiven, so they failed, which makes them feel guilty, which was why they repented in the first place, so they’re stuck right where they started: Guilty.

And recently, we installed another word in its place which, to their minds, has a wholly positive connotation. We say ‘Gluttony’. They say ‘Consumerism’.

If they ever envision Goodness as a thing that exists outside them, some real thing they’ve been called to participate in by their actions, well then, we’re headed right back toward The Virtues.

For example, your man might think: I don’t steal. Maybe on my taxes, everyone does that, but not in the way I heard so and so stole from his company. See? Those men for whose opinion he cares approve of embezzlement in one area, not the other. He uses them to maintain a claim on goodness while at the same time stealing.

The more we train a man to labor, deliberate, dictate and demand over the inconsequential, the less capable his mind becomes of holding that of consequence.

We have deficited upon their attention in the most disorderly fashion.

That sense of entitlement is precisely where we want them because the right to happiness is directly opposed to one of The Adversary’s greatest curatives - gratitude.

Somehow they fail to see that for someone aggravated by depression, self-help will be useless, indeed, it is precisely the self that needs to be forgotten.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happy hour, the long weekend, the all-inclusive island resort, the sunny beach vacation. Happiness is somewhere else, someplace with boat drinks, some secret, distant state of bliss which if they were given would bore them in minutes.

They prefer a God of an altogether softer flavor. Nothing too extreme. Complaisance, not magnanimity. They do not think upon the “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God.” They prefer to think in terms of “God liking them.” That’s the God they’ve conjured for themselves.

Make good and sure your clients all call themselves Americans - proudly so, defiantly, loudly - but without any more thought about it than wearing a hat.

Besides, these box-checking Christians having such a majority is largely in our favor. Their ubiquity is inversely proportional to their efficacy.

But as I say, if you look to the state of their souls you’ll find the situation nowhere near as grave as polls suggest. There’s more to being a servant of The Adversary than signing up.

And I’m glad to see that all three clients are male. Not that the females can’t be corrupted, I’ve just always found the males more amenable to temptation. The males have always had all the power, so that does much to explain it. As they say: Easy pickings.

First of all, don’t ever let them try to define that word “happiness” for themselves. They can’t and that’s precisely what we never want them to realize. Keep it a vague bright mist hovering about their heads. Locate it securely at the end of implausible rainbows. Hide it snugly in some corner of their thoughts they rarely visit.

Why not have a God in your back pocket for when you need Him? That’s all most of them mean by 'Christian.

Never let them try out this gratitude, for they would immediately discover that it supplies the first and most important component to happiness: Contentment.

Most of them don’t mind too much the idea of a God existing somewhere, just so long as He’s indulgent.

They really do occupy a scrumptious little dark corner of my heart!

Teach them the shame that tells the lie, “I am unforgivable,” when the truth is, “I feel unforgivable, but it was out of my control.” Never let them switch those round right or The Adversary will liberate them in a heartbeat, like a bird flying from a cage.

Remember, philosophically speaking, Americans are mongrels - practical materialists but with a dreamy streak of divine approval.

But here I’d like to add to what the Tempter’s Manual suggests. Depression, at its finest, is not a Future that they cannot hopefully construct, nor a shamed Past that hounds them, but an agonizing Present that they cannot escape. We want to disable their Present so that they cannot use it to look Heavenward.

I don’t even like the phrase ‘opportunity to sin’ because it implies the opportunity to obey.

No earthly act escapes its eternal echoes, echoes more substantial than the acts themselves.

A tiny adjustment, but a tasty one. Poof! And somewhere in the back of their minds the godlike thought glimmers.

They think that if they were allowed to do anything they desired, they would be satisfied and the more desires the better. But all desires divorced from The Desire eventually collapse in on themselves.

If we blind them to The Adversary - decrease their desire for The Desire - while at the same time encourage them to do anything else they desire with increasing “freedom of choice,” then eventually we snuff out desire while leaving demand in tact.

Finally, slowly, drippingly, degrade the term Choice down to its most meager means: The red car not the black one. The 9:25 showing, not the 7:15. Ritz not Wheat Thins.

Also, always encourage 'being good' over 'doing good.' Acts of goodness are the difficulty for us and should, of course, be avoided. 'Being good' is far less problematic, largely because it lacks definition and can be solely a state of mind completely unattached to reality.

Without God, reality is madness. Reason will tell you so. You either madly trust in God, or you trust in a world gone mad without him.

Your suffering only matters if it connects you to the suffering of others, if it heals them too.

If God gives you a hundred bucks, you better bet He’s going to ask you what you bought.

If God’s suggesting that I am expected to do good and also obligated to manufacture a genuine desire for it, this boat’s sunk, still sitting on the trailer in the driveway. A stack of things need to happen before I desire to be good…

Trust is crazy. You are a risky, risky, God. I didn’t sign up to be Amazing Trust Boy, and I did not sign up for Danger God. You’re flatly not safe…

Trust becomes the only road home, back to love.

You don’t change the world by telling it what to do, sitting at home, and telling it what you believe. You believe by throwing yourself into it. Making a leap, getting involved, then waiting, taking some one person’s place for a while, one suffering person at a time.

God didn’t give Moses ten fortune cookies in a to-go box. God didn’t lead the Israelites through the wilderness with a neon all-you-can-eat sign. And God doesn’t speak to people in bathrooms, public or otherwise.

It was like magic, but so much of magic is about misdirection, whereas so much of redemption is straightforward and ordinary, piercing true and lit with surprise.

When everything all in a moment comes together, surprisingly perfect, it doesn’t prove there’s a loving God; but if there is, isn’t it perfect when all in a moment, God proves how surprisingly He loves?

I say “illusion” of choice because, in many cases, the nature of their choices hardly reaches the level of will, but of merely perfunctory activity. For the most part, their desires are not too strong, they are too weak, apathetic and easily placated. They often can be tempted into doing Nothing.

As a rule, Americans are big on that word “choice” and some souls can be captured simply by dangling before the creature a continual, lifelong supply of things from which to choose.

The Americans’ great wealth (and their great love for it) makes it precisely the appropriate metaphor. Supply and Demand as a principle has permeated their minds. As a practice, it stains all the way down to their souls.

The Americans want a surplus stocked up to supply their every whim. And their appeals are much less requests, more demands. Indeed, the phrase might be more aptly put: Demand and Surplus.

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