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Cowardice asks the question: Is it safe? Expediency asks the question: Is it politic? Vanity asks the question: Is it popular? But conscience asks the question: Is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular -- but he must take it simply because conscience tells him it is right.
- Martin Luther King Jr.,
from his address, "To Chart Our Course for the Future" (1968).
Oldschool
02-19-2009, 08:07 AM
Very true...
How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment, we can start now, start slowly changing the world!
- Anne Frank,
Anne Frank's Tales From the Secret Annex
Oldschool
02-19-2009, 10:44 PM
Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself - and be lenient to everybody else.
- - Henry Ward Beecher
The bread that you possess belongs to the hungry. The clothes that you store in boxes, belong to the naked. The shoes rotting by you, belong to the bare-foot. The money that you hide belongs to anyone in need.
- Saint Basil,
fourth century theologian and monastic
Oldschool
02-21-2009, 09:39 AM
Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
Hope is belief in the plausibility of the possible, not only the necessity of the probable.
- Moses Maimonides,
Jewish philosopher (1135-1204)
Peace can only last where human rights are respected, where people are fed, and where individuals and nations are free.
- Dalai Lama
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The struggle to maintain peace is immeasurably more difficult than any military operation.
- Anne O'Hare McCormick,
first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.
- Frederick Douglass,
from his speech celebrating West India Emancipation Day (August, 1857)
Oldschool
03-01-2009, 07:39 AM
The firmest friendships have been formed in mutual adversity, as iron is most strongly united by the fiercest flame.
- Charles Caleb Colton
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Humility is what gives us the vision to look upon our world with fresh eyes. Humility enables us to respect others enough to put down our spurious images of ourselves and open our arms, as individuals and as a nation.
- Joan Chittister
Oldschool
03-08-2009, 01:52 PM
Mark Twain - “Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.”
The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood.
- Martin Luther King Jr
God has no other hands than ours.
- Dorothee Sölle,
German theologian and writer, Suffering (1973).
The first principle of nonviolent action is that of noncooperation with everything humiliating.
- César Chávez
Oldschool
04-08-2009, 12:18 AM
Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many--not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
- Charles Dickens
Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear ... Christendom adjusts itself far too easiliy to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
As long as people use tactics to oppress or restrict other people from being free, there is work to be done.
- Rosa Parks
We must not only speak about forgiveness and reconciliation -- we must act on these principles.
- Desmond Tutu
You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair.
- Chinese Proverb
If our lives demonstrate that we are peaceful, humble and trusted, this is recognized by others. If our lives demonstrate something else, that will be noticed too.
- Rosa Parks, civil rights activist (1913-2005)
However high be your endeavors, unless you renounce and subjugate your own will -- unless you forget yourself and all that pertains to yourself -- not one step will you advance on the road to perfection.
- St. John of the Cross, Spanish mystic, friar, and priest (1542-1591)
I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility ... When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms ... I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
- Mary Oliver, from her poem "When Death Comes"
You must wait and listen for the sound of the genuine that is within you. When you hear it, that will be your voice and the Voice of God.
- Howard Thurman, American author, civil rights leader, and theologian (1899-1981)
God does not wait for us to become perfect and in possession of only high, pure thoughts and unmixed motives before [moving] through us. God waits only for the sign of faith.
- Eugenia Price, American novelist and community activist (1916-1996)
Half the world will ever be present in any room with just a single pair of eyes to see it.
Whatever is invisible to one
is to the other an enormous golden lion, calm and sleeping in the easy chair.
- Bill Holm, from his "Wedding Poem for Schele and Phil"
Sitting at the feet of the Divine with an attentive ... heart is a posture we all long to assume, whether we recognize that longing or not.
- Sue Monk Kidd, American author and memoirist
Even as we use experimental science and mathematical logic to reveal the laws and structure of the physical universe, a series of important questions will always remain, including the sources of those laws and the reason for there being a universe in the first place.
- Kenneth Miller, from his book Finding Darwin's God
May I be careful to have my mind in order when I take upon myself the honor to speak to the sovereign Lord of the universe, remembering that upon the temper of my soul depends, in very great measure, my success.
- Susanna Wesley, mother of John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism (1669-1742)
When the jet rose six miles high, it was clear that the earth was round and that it had more sea than land. But it was difficult to understand that the [people] on the earth found causes to hate each other, to build walls across cities and to kill. From that height, it was not clear why.
- Zulfikar Ghose, from his poem "Geography Lesson"
When it comes down to being a provider of God's love, there is really only one provider, who sends us out with nothing at all and with everything we need: healing, forgiveness, restoration, resurrection. Those are the only things we really have to share with the world, which is just as well, since they are the only things the world really needs.
- Barbara Brown Taylor, from her book Bread of Angels
You must take living so seriously that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees -- and not for your children, either, but because although you fear death you don't believe it, because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
- Nazim Hikmet, Turkish poet, persecuted during the Cold War for his communist views (1901-1963)
The creation is not in any sense independent of the Creator, the result of a primal creative act long over and done with, but is the continuous, constant participation of all creatures in the being of God.
- Wendell Berry, from his essay Christianity and the Survival of Creation
Christmas gift suggestions: To your enemy, forgiveness. To an opponent, tolerance. To a friend, your heart. To a customer, service. To all, charity. To every child, a good example. To yourself, respect.
- Oren Arnold
American editor and free-lance writer (1900-1980)
I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at commensurate speed.
- Maya Angelou
from her book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes ... and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
German theologian and pastor (1906-1945)
To predispose our mind to welcome the Lord who, as we say in the Creed, one day will come to judge the living and the dead, we must learn to recognize him as present in the events of daily life. Therefore, Advent is, so to speak, an intense training that directs us decisively toward him who already came, who will come, and who comes continuously.
- Pope John Paul II
(1920-2005)
I sometimes think we expect too much of Christmas Day. We try to crowd into it the long arrears of kindliness and humanity of the whole year. As for me, I like to take my Christmas a little at a time, all through the year.
- David Grayson
American author and journalist (1870-1946)
The whole purpose of the Bible, it seems to me, is to convince people to set the written word down in order to become living words in the world for God's sake. For me, this willing conversion of ink back to blood is the full substance of faith.
- Barbara Brown Taylor, from her book, Leaving Church
When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flock, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace ... to make music in the heart.
- Howard Thurman, American author, civil rights leader, and theologian (1899-1981)
Bodies matter to God. Matter matters. Until we can proclaim that wondrous truth, ecology will be a sideline in our pastoring and preaching, our theologies and liturgies ... Wetlands and rivers, wheat fields and dough rising, people dancing in the aisles and people sleeping in the streets of our cities. Matter matters to God.
- Barbara Lundblad, from her sermon "Matter Matters"
Hospitality does not seek power over others. Cruelty does. Cruelty deliberately causes harm, especially by crushing a person's self-respect ... The opposite of cruelty is hospitality, a sharing of power.
- Richard M. Gula, from his book To Walk Together Again
We are called to show utter commitment to the God who is revealed in Jesus and to all those to whom his invitation is addressed.
- Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.
- Romans 12:18
If I see [a] gift as mine alone to give, I might give hesitantly, even grudgingly, considering my options, then giving from a sense of ought. If I see the gift as God's who allows me to use it for a time, then the gift can flow more freely, as I join with others to be a channel for God's love and mercy.
- Roberta Porter, from her poem, "Grace in Giving"
Throughout the gospels we are repeatedly told that after some word or deed of Jesus "his disciples believed in him." The point of this statement is not that up to that point they had no faith, but rather that their faith deepened with the passage of time. To believe in God is more than simply to profess God's existence; it is to enter into communion with God and -- the two being inseparable -- with our fellow human beings as well. All this adds up to a process.
- Gustavo Gutierrez, from his book We Drink from Our Own Wells
Individualism values our unique, God-given blessedness and gifts ... Individualism [can] also exaggerate our sense of self-importance to the point that we are cut off from the knowledge that everything God creates, sustains, and redeems is sacred.
- Tanya Marcovna Barnett, from her sermon "Expanding Our Circle of Compassion"
The irony would be delicious if it were not so bitter: earnest theologians have been earnestly persuading Christians for sixteen centuries that their gospel supports violence, while massive outpourings of citizens in one officially atheist country after another [during the peaceful overturning of the Soviet regime and its allies at the end of the Cold War] recently have demonstrated the effectiveness of Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence as a means of liberation.
- Walter Wink, from his book The Powers That Be
Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
The God who made us what we are knows what we desire to be and waits with infinite patience while we become what we can. We, on the other hand, know that whatever we need to become all that we can be, this same great and loving God will supply. For all of that, we are thankful. From that gratitude grow love and commitment, faith and trust, wonder and worship.
- Joan Chittister, from her book The Liturgical Year
Any crime against humanity is a crime against God who made humans in God's own image.
- Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., from a sermon he gave at Howard University
Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners -- and I could list a hundred more professions ... A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."
- Wislawa Szymborska, from her lecture upon winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
- John W. Gardner, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson (1912-2002)
For me and my sisters poverty is freedom, and the less we have the more we can give. Poverty is love before it is renunciation. It is not that we cannot have luxuries. We choose not to have them. This freedom brings joy, and joy enables us to give in love until it hurts.
- Mother Teresa
This life, therefore, is not godliness but the process of becoming godly, not health but getting well, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not now what we shall be, but we are on the way. The process is not yet finished, but it is actively going on. This is not the goal but it is the right road. At present, everything does not gleam and sparkle, but everything is being cleansed.
- Martin Luther
The message of salvation is more than our verbal proclamation of the gospel. We must redefine evangelism to include how we live and interact with people -- what it means for us to call them into God's family to become members of God's household. This is as important as our ability to accurately quote scriptures.
- Brenda Salter McNeil, from her book A Credible Witness: Reflections on Power, Evangelism and Race
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
- Zora Neale Hurston, American writer, folklorist, and anthropologist (1891-1960)
The ultimate purpose of the work of this God may never be understood by the [human] mind. Perhaps as it was, as the Baltimore Catechism told me long ago, that God wanted to be known, loved, and served. If that is true, [God] did so by devising a universe that would make knowledge, love, and service meaningful.
- Kenneth Miller, Professor of Biology at Brown University, on why he thinks science and faith are compatible
It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God ... gloried in becoming a member of the human race.
- Thomas Merton, from A Book of Hours
Very often, people who are in conversation with servants, people who gain knowledge of the realities of life from the bottom, have information that people who see life from a position of advantage do not.
- Valerie Elverton Dixon, from her essay, "Servant Knowledge"
Repentance is the doorway to the spiritual life, the only way to begin. It is also the path itself, the only way to continue. Anything else is foolishness and self-delusion. Only repentance is both brute-honest enough, and joyous enough, to bring us all the way home.
- Frederica Mathewes-Green, from her essay, "Both Door and Path"
Silence frees us from the need to control others ... A frantic stream of words flows from us in an attempt to straighten others out. We want so desperately for them to agree with us, to see things our way. We evaluate people, judge people, condemn people. We devour people with our words. Silence is one of the deepest Disciplines of the Spirit simply because it puts the stopper on that.
- Richard Foster, from his book Freedom of Simplicity
Justice: once that word is uttered, where will it all end? ... Where can that lead but to laying down our arms?
- J.M. Coetzee, from his novel, Waiting for the Barbarians
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace -- not in the infantile ... sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
- James Baldwin, from his book The Fire Next Time
Tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for [God] to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.
- Alice Walker, from her book The Color Purple
A happy marriage is the union of two forgivers.
- Ruth Bell Graham, poet, philanthropist, and wife of evangelist Billy Graham
We are all receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved. It is no one's fault if they do not so love it ... You might as well ask people to like the taste of rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill. We can be forgiven, and pitied, and loved in spite of it, with Charity; no other way. All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children, may be sure that at some times -- and perhaps at all times in respect of some one particular trait or habit -- they are receiving Charity, are loved not because they are lovable but because Love Himself [Christ] is in those who love them.
- C.S. Lewis, from his book, The Four Loves
When we think about laying down a life for another we usually think in terms of a singular event. But it is possible for us to lay down our lives over the course of a lifetime, minute by minute and day by day. And it is the work of the Spirit to empower us as we seek to lose ourselves in acts of lovingkindness and sacrificial living.
- Elaine Puckett, professor at Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia
There are limits to self-indulgence, none to restraint.
- Mahatma Gandhi
Teach us to sit still ... And let my cry come unto Thee.
- T.S. Eliot, from his poem, "Ash Wednesday"
I have not the courage to search through books for beautiful prayers ... Unable either to say them all or choose between them, I do as a child would do who cannot read -- I say just what I want to say to God, quite simply, and [God] never fails to understand.
- Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, French Carmelite nun, canonized in 1925
It’s important to know that words don’t move mountains. Work, exacting work, moves mountains.
- Danilo Dolci, Sicilian social activist, sociologist, and poet
[Some say,] "But pacifism is so impractical!" As if Christian ethics were utilitarian, as if there were a calculus for shalom! ... In any case, it is not as if the whole church has tried pacifism and found it wanting, the fact is that the whole church has not tried pacifism at all.
- Kim Fabricius, from his book, Propositions on Christian Theology: A Pilgrim Walks the Plank
Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet.
- Jamaica Kincaid, Caribbean-American novelist and professor
We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation -- if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women.
- James Baldwin, from his book The Fire Next Time
One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along.
- Michelle Blake, from her novel, The Tentmaker
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul.
- Virginia Woolf, from her essay, "Montaigne
I do not at all understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.
- Anne Lamott, from her book, Traveling Mercies
I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center
- Kurt Vonnegut, from his first novel, Player Piano
Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man ... A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised ... who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female ... Nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything [inferior] about woman's nature.
- Dorothy L. Sayers, from her book, Are Women Human?
I am not my hair.
I am not this skin.
I am not your expectations.
I am not my hair.
I am not this skin.
I am a soul that lives within.
- India Arie, from her Grammy-nominated R&B song, "I Am Not My Hair"
True self, when violated, will always resist us, sometimes at great cost, holding our lives in check until we honor its truth.
- Parker Palmer, from his book, Let Your Life Speak
This movement was not just about desegregating the buses, or even just the mistreatment of our people in Montgomery. This movement was about slaking the centuries old thirst of a long-suffering people for freedom, dignity, and human rights. It was time to drink at the well.
- Rosa Parks, from A Call to Conscience, edited by Clayborne Carson and Kris Shepard
For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was both protest and prayer. Legs are not lips, and walking is not kneeling. And yet our legs uttered songs. Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.
- Abraham Joshua Heschel, American rabbi, theologian, and philosopher
The books from which [children] learn must reflect movement and change and all of the infinite possibilities of minds at liberty.
- Virginia Hamilton, from her essay "Thoughts on Children's Books, Reading, and Ethnic America"
The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing ... not healing, not curing ... that is a friend who cares.
- Henri J.M. Nouwen, from his book Out of Solitude
People cannot contribute to the nation if they are never taught to read or write, if their bodies are stunted from hunger, if their sickness goes untended, if their life is spent in hopeless poverty just drawing a welfare check. So we want to open the gates to opportunity. But we're also going to give all our people, black and white, the help that they need to walk through those gates.
- Lyndon B. Johnson, from his speech, "We Shall Overcome," given to Congress on March 15, 1965, after racial violence broke out in Selma, Alabama
Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down.
- Archbishop Oscar Romero, an advocate for the poor and marginalized, was assassinated thirty years ago today while giving Mass in El Salvador.
Over and above all movements for social justice is God's movement, [which is] the creative origin of any movement toward human liberation and solidarity.
- Charles Marsh, from Welcoming Justice, co-written by Marsh and John Perkins
Palm Sunday ... reminds us that at the moment of what seems to be the height of Jesus' public acceptance also begins the process of His public betrayal, His public failure, His public abandonment. Only in the mind of God is Jesus any longer a success, it seems ... Here in the Passion narrative we trace the struggle, one scene at a time, between the Word of God and the ways of the world.
- Joan Chittister, from her book The Liturgical Year
Romantic love is blind to everything except what is lovable and lovely, but Christ's love sees us with terrible clarity and sees us whole. Christ's love so wishes our joy that it is ruthless against everything in us that diminishes our joy. The worst sentence Love can pass is that we behold the suffering that Love has endured for our sake, and that is also our acquittal. The justice and mercy of the judge are ultimately one.
- Frederick Buechner, American theologian and writer
Relational care, rather than ... the miraculous suspension of the laws of cause and effect, is the sign and medium of God's power within the world ... God's love and ours in its image, is unlimited and omnipotent in that it is experienced as all-conquering love by those who love and are loved absolutely, even if its effect is not one of victorious deliverance. God's power is invested in the power of interpersonal and social relation to mediate its blessing.
- Melissa Raphael, on finding God in the midst of suffering, from her book The Female Face of God in Auschwitz
The death of a beloved is an event that rings and rings through a life: bearing it is not a problem to be solved, but a long, slow piece of music to listen to. And mourning, like music, is best listened to with others.
- Sarah Miles, from her book Jesus Freak
Christ emptied himself for love of us ... Do not try to apprehend or comprehend, but prostrate yourself before the most incomprehensible mystery of the tremendous love that God has shown.
- Catherine de Hueck Doherty, founder of the philanthropic religious community Madonna House
Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest you.
- Mother Teresa
Taxes create the kind of community that I want to live in.
- Rev. Jennifer Hope Kottler, from her commentary, "You Get What You Pay For," in the April issue of Sojourners
My hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A [person] who takes away another [person's] freedom is a prisoner of hatred ... is locked behind bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else's freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.
- Nelson Mandela, from his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom
If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it.
- Thomas Merton, from his book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
When despair for the world grows in me ... I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
- Wendell Berry, from his poem "The Peace of Wild Things"
If you really want to be powerful, if you really want to be influential, then just serve.
- Rev. Willie Barrow, civil rights activist who earned the nickname "Little Warrior
Master of beauty, craftsman of the snowflake ... endower of Earth so gorgeous & different from the boring Moon, thank you for such as it is my gift ... Unknowable, as I am unknown to my guinea pigs: How can I 'love' you? I only as far as gratitude & awe confidently & absolutely go.
- John Berryman, from his poem "Address to the Lord"
I want to be remembered as someone who used herself and anything she could touch to work for justice and freedom ... I want to be remembered as one who tried.
- Dorothy Height, who died on Tuesday, was considered a founding matriarch of the American civil rights movement.
While the heavens continue to tell the glory of God, the firmament today also proclaims sonic nefarious human handiwork -- smog, acid rain, an immense hole in the ozone layer.
- William Sloane Coffin, from his sermon "A Passion for the Possible: A Message to U.S. Churches"
If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, [and] have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.
- bell hooks, American writer and professor
Today ecology is in vogue and many people are talking about our endangered planet. I want to urge us to deepen our conversation by linking the earth's crisis with the crisis in the human family. If it is important to save the habitats of birds and other species, then it is at least equally important to save black lives in the ghettoes and prisons of America.
- James H. Cone, from his essay "Whose Earth Is It Anyway?"
Christian prayer is always a response to a presence already felt. The awareness of a desire to pray again is already prayer. As the desert fathers so often said, "If you want to pray, you are already praying."
- Edward J. Farrell
from Gathering the Fragments
The blues are like spirituals, almost sacred. When we sing blues, we’re singing out our hearts, we’re singing out our feelings. Maybe we’re hurt and just can’t answer back, then we sing or maybe even hum the blues. When I sing ... what I’m doing is letting my soul out.
- Alberta Hunter,
American blues singer
"Listen!" ... I could spend the rest of my life pondering on the implications of that one word. It plunges me at once into a personal relationship. It takes me away from the danger of talking about God and not communing with [God].
- Esther de Waal, A Life-Giving Way
Many of those who are humiliated are not humble. Some react to humiliation with anger, others with patience, and others with freedom. The first are culpable, the next harmless, the last just.
- St. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs
Peace is the beauty of life. It is sunshine. It is the smile of a child, the love of a mother, the joy of a father, the togetherness of a family. It is the advancement of [humans], the victory of a just cause, the triumph of truth. Peace is all of these and more and more.
- Menachem Begin
Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see.
- Martin Luther
Bit by bit … she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
- Toni Morrison, in Beloved
If God’s incomprehensibility does not grip us in a word, if it does not draw us into our super-luminous darkness, if it does not call us out of the little house of our homely, close-hugged truths … we have misunderstood the words of Christianity.
Many of those who are humiliated are not humble. Some react to humiliation with anger, others with patience, and others with freedom. The first are culpable, the next harmless, the last just.
- Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs
We live in hope because we believe, like St. Paul, that love never dies. Human beings in the historical process have created enclaves of love by their active practice of solidarity throughout the world, and with a view to the full-orbed liberation of peoples and all humanity.
- Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, from his Nobel Lecture
The quest for democracy in Burma is the struggle of a people to live whole, meaningful lives as free and equal members of the world community. It is part of the unceasing human endeavor to prove that the spirit of [humans] can transcend the flaws of [their] own nature.
- Aung San Suu Kyi
I weep a lot. I thank God I laugh a lot, too. The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry.
- Maya Angelou
Because they spurn riches as ashes that are dead because of avarice, none of them has anything according to his own will. Whatever each has through the gift of God, let her possess with God. She says that nothing is hers by her own strength, but all is from God who gives all good things to the good. And what are these? Truth and justice, which interweave with all good things.
- Hildegard of Bingen, Book of Life’s Merits
We often see poverty as an economic and social issue, but we must have a deeper understanding. In the ultimate analysis, poverty is death. It is unjust and early death. It is the destruction of persons, of people, and nations.
- Gustavo Gutierrez, address at Brown University graduation ceremony, 2000
As a fish swims the length and breadth of the sea and rests in its depths, as a bird flies through the air, so the Soul feels her mind completely unrestrained in the height, width, and depth of Love.
- Beatrice of Nazareth, Mystic (1200-1268)
Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation whenever a cat kills a sparrow can hear that story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not experience any shock at all.
- Dorothy L. Sayers
“All men desire peace, but very few desire those things that make for peace.”
- Thomas A. Kempis
"To work in the world lovingly means that we are defining what we will be for, rather than reacting to what we are against."
- Christina Baldwin
“Today it is fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them.”
- Mother Teresa
"To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men."
- Abraham Lincoln
“When you pray, move your feet.”
- African Proverb
“Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.”
- Saint Augustine
"My [child], resolve to do the will of others rather than your own. Always choose to possess less rather than more. Always take the lowest place, and regard yourself as less than others."
- Thomas A. Kempis, from The Imitation of Christ
"We all know well that we can do things for others and in the process, crush them, making them feel that they are incapable of doing things by themselves. To love someone is to reveal to them their capacities for life, the light that is shining in them."
- Jean Vanier
"Peace is not an absence of war. It is a virtue, state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice." - Baruch de Spinoza
"Beg our Lord to grant you perfect love for your neighbor… If someone else is well spoken of, be more pleased than if it were yourself… Force your will, as far as possible, to comply in all things with others’ wishes although sometimes you may lose your own rights by doing so. Forget your self-interests for theirs, however much nature may rebel." - Teresa of Avila
"To be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others."
Nelson Mandela
"In the beginning there is struggle and a lot of work for those who come near to God. But after that, there is indescribable joy. It is just like building a fire: at first it’s smoky and your eyes water, but later you get the desired result. Thus we ought to light the divine fire in ourselves with tears and effort.”
Amma Syncletica
"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul."
John Muir
"My belief is in the blood and flesh as being wiser than the intellect. The body-conscious is where life bubbles up in us. It is how we know we are alive, alive to the depths of our souls, and in touch somewhere with the vivid reaches of the cosmos." - D.H. Lawrence
“The power of a fully lived life or a truly learned mind is not a power to be sought or contrived. It comes as we let go of what we possess and find ourselves possessed by a truth greater than our own.” - Parker Palmer
"If I pray to God that all people might be inspired because of me, I would find myself repentant at the door of every house. I would rather pray that my heart be pure toward them than that I changed something in theirs." - Amma Sarah
"Unless we do change our whole way of thought about work, I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel-cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon envy and avarice." - Dorothy L. Sayers
As soon as the generals and the politicos
Can predict the motion of your mind,
Lose it. Leave it as a sign
To mark the false trail, the way
You didn't go. Be like the fox
Who makes more tracks than necessary,
Some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
- Wendell Berry
"Upon this basic truth all the principles and actions of the Society of Friends are founded. Each [person] is seen as having intrinsic value, and Christ is equally concerned for the other as for me. We all become part of the divine family, and as such we are all responsible for one another, carrying our share of the shame when wrong is done and of the burden of suffering." - Margaret Backhouse
"My life is not simply a meaningless conglomeration of serendipitous events and unremarkable happenstance. Rather, it is a series of divine appointments with the goal of shaping my character." - Kelly James Clark
"Anybody can observe the Sabbath but making it holy surely takes the rest of the week." - Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
“Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.” - Rowan Williams
"Anyhow:from my standpoint the only thing--if you're some sort of artist--is to work a little harder than you can at being who you are:while if you're an unartist(i.e. aren't)nothing but big&quick recognition matters." (sic) - e.e. cummings September 7, 1959, from a letter to his daughter.
“Saints cannot exist without a community, as they require, like all of us, nurturance by a people who, while often unfaithful, preserve the habits necessary to learn the story of God.” - Stanley Hauerwas from “The Gesture of a Truthful Story” in Critical Reflections on Stanley Hauerwas’ Theology of Disability
"Anyone who loves words will tend to let themselves be satisfied by them, and as a result stop short of true satisfaction. For true satisfaction...comes when I am silent and listen.... When God’s voice is drowned out by incessant clamor, whether inner or outer, in whatever shape or form, then continuous dialogue with God becomes impossible." - Esther de Waal from A Life-Giving Way
"Christianity doesn't deny the reality of suffering and evil... Our hope... is not based on the idea that we are going to be free of pain and suffering. Rather, it is based on the conviction that we will triumph over suffering." - Brennan Manning
"Peace starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us. When our community is in a state of peace, it can share that peace with neighboring communities, and so on. When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace." - Dalai Lama
"The good news of the resurrection of Jesus is not that we shall die and go home to be with him, but that he has risen and comes home with us, bringing all his hungry, naked, thirsty, sick prisoner [brothers and sisters] with him." - Clarence Jordan
"To walk alone is possible, but the good walker knows that the trip is life and it requires companions." - Dom Helder Camara
“It's a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no telling where you might be swept off to." - Bilbo, from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring
"To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on." - Anne Lamott from, Bird by Bird
"Beg our Lord to grant you perfect love for your neighbor… If someone else is well spoken of, be more pleased than if it were yourself; this is easy enough, for if you were really humble, it would vex you to be praised… Force your will, as far as possible, to comply in all things with others’ wishes although sometimes you may lose your own rights by doing so. Forget your self-interests for theirs, however much nature may rebel." - Teresa of Avila
"It may be that what you could be haunts you. It is real. It is a weight you have to carry around. Each failure to become, to be, is a weight. Each state you could inhabit is a burden as heavy as any physical weight, but more so, because it weighs on your soul. It is the ghost of your possibilities hanging around your neck, an invisible albatross, potentials unknowingly murdered." - Ben Okri
“When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.” - Flannery O'Connor, from Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
“Christ wears ‘two shoes’ in the world: Scripture and nature. Both are necessary to understand the Lord, and at no stage can creation be seen as a separation of things from God.” - John Scotus Eriugena
“Sabbath observance invites us to stop. It invites us to rest. It asks us to notice that while we rest, the world continues without our help. It invites us to delight in the world’s beauty and abundance.” - Wendell Berry
“How happy is the little stone / That rambles in the road alone, / And doesn't care about careers, / And exigencies never fears; / Whose coat of elemental brown / A passing universe put on; / And independent as the sun, / Associates or glows alone, / Fulfilling absolute decree / In casual simplicity." - Emily Dickenson
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