"Try to say nothing negative about anybody for three days, for forty-five days, for three months. See what happens to your life."  --Yoko Ono

"Charity is no substitute for justice withheld."  --Saint Augustine

"May we—separated peoples, estranged strangers,
unfriended families, divided communities—
turn toward each other,
and turn toward our stories,
with understanding and listening,
with argument and acceptance,
with challenge, change
and consolation.

Because if God is to be found,
God will be found
in the space
between."

—A Prayer for Reconciliation by Pádraig Ó Tuama

Born to Reconcile

"If you dare to believe that you are beloved before you are born, you may suddenly realize that your life is very, very special. You become conscious that you were sent here just for a short time, for twenty, forty, or eighty years, to discover and believe that you are a beloved child of God. The length of time doesn’t matter. You are sent into this world to believe in yourself as God’s chosen one and then to help your brothers and sisters know that they are also Beloved Sons and Daughters of God who belong together. You’re sent into this world to be a people of reconciliation. You are sent to heal, to break down the walls between you and your neighbors, locally, nationally, and globally. Before all distinctions, the separations, and the walls built on foundations of fear, there was a unity in the mind and heart of God. Out of that unity, you are sent into this world for a little while to claim that you and every other human being belongs to the same God of Love who lives from eternity to eternity."  --Henri Nouwen

"As I grow older, I discover more and more that the greatest gift I have to offer is my own joy of living, my own inner peace, my own silence and solitude, my own sense of well-being. When I ask myself, “Who helps me the most?” I must answer, “The one who is willing to share his or her life with me.'"  --Henri Nouwen

"Love pulls people back to their feet. Bodies and souls are fed. Bones and lives heal. New blades of grass grow from charred soil."  --Anne Lamott, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers

Do Well the Few Things

"The more I think about the human suffering in our world and my desire to offer a healing response, the more I realize how crucial it is not to allow myself to become paralyzed by feelings of impotence and guilt. More important than ever is to be very faithful to my vocation to do well the few things I am called to do and hold on to the joy and peace they bring me. I must resist the temptation to let the forces of darkness pull me into despair and make me one more of their many victims. I have to keep my eyes fixed on Jesus and on those who followed him and trust that I will know how to live out my mission to be a sign of hope in this world."  --Henri Nouwen

Blessed to be a Blessing

"It is remarkable how easy it is to bless others, to speak good things to and about them, to call forth their beauty and truth, when you yourself are in touch with your own blessedness. The blessed one always blesses. And people want to be blessed! This is so apparent wherever you go. No one is brought to life through curses, gossip, accusations, or blaming. There is so much taking place around us all the time. And it calls forth only darkness, destruction, and death. As the “blessed ones,” we can walk through this world and offer blessings. It doesn’t require much effort. It flows naturally from our hearts. When we hear within ourselves the voice calling us by name and blessing us, the darkness no longer distracts us. The voice that calls us the Beloved will give us words to bless others and reveal to them that they are no less blessed than we."  --Henri Nouwen

"The masses have never thirsted after truth.They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master..."  --Gustave Le Bon, from The Crowd, 1895

"And we are put on earth for a little while, that we may learn to bear the beams of love."  --William Blake

Become Like a Child

The great temptation is to use our obvious failures and disappointments in our lives to convince ourselves that we are really not worth being loved. Because what do we have to show for ourselves?

But for a person of faith the opposite is true. The many failures may open that place in us where we have nothing to brag about but everything to be loved for. It is becoming a child again, a child who is loved simply for being, simply for smiling, simply for reaching out.

This is the way to spiritual maturity: to receive love as a pure, free gift.

--Henri Nouwen

"In the darkness of the womb, the future is waiting to be born."  --Shannon Casey

"Once they saw a star that pointed to a promised land, to a land of peace. Peacemakers set out to follow that star. It is both a joyful and arduous journey. Sometimes the star shines brightly, the promise seems certain, and the pilgrims can sing, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring God's peace.’ Often the star disappears, clouded over, hidden from view, and the pilgrims grope blindly, grow discouraged, get weary, give thought to settling down, to forgetting the promise of peace. . . . An occasional oasis for the spirit is essential, a time to feast on the refreshing waters, the rich food of the spirit in order to get strength to continue the pilgrimage through darkness, star-shine or not."  —Mary Lou Kownacki, OSB

"Conversion — if it means anything —  means more than one thing. It is a process, a conversion towards the good. It is an embrace of the possibility of change and future. It is a difficult companion. It is a rewarding companion. It calls us again and again throughout a life."  --Pádraig Ó Tuama

Trust Your Vocation

"You have to start trusting your unique vocation and allow it to grow deeper and stronger in you so it can blossom in your community. . . . Look at Rembrandt and van Gogh. They trusted their vocations and did not allow anyone to lead them astray. With true Dutch stubbornness, they followed their vocations from the moment they recognized them. They didn’t bend over backward to please their friends or enemies. Both ended their lives in poverty, but both left humanity with gifts that could heal the minds and hearts of many generations of people. Think of these two men and trust that you, too, have a unique vocation that is worth claiming and living out faithfully."  --Henri Nouwen

Elizabeth Gilbert on Love, Loss, and How to Move Through Grief as Grief Moves Through You re Elizabeth Gilbert

Elizabeth Gilbert on Love, Loss, and How to Move Through Grief as Grief Moves Through You

“Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/10/17/elizabeth-gilbert-ted-podcast-love-loss/

How to move through this barely survivable experience is what author and altogether glorious human being Elizabeth Gilbert examines with uncommon insight and tenderness of heart in her conversation with TED curator Chris Anderson on the inaugural episode of the TED Interviews podcast.

Rayya Elias and Elizabeth Gilbert (Photograph by Elizabeth Gilbert)

Gilbert reflects on the death of her partner, Rayya Elias — her longtime best friend, whose sudden terminal cancer diagnosis unlatched a trapdoor, as Gilbert put it, into the realization that Rayya was the love of her life:

"Grief… happens upon you, it’s bigger than you. There is a humility that you have to step into, where you surrender to being moved through the landscape of grief by grief itself. And it has its own timeframe, it has its own itinerary with you, it has its own power over you, and it will come when it comes. And when it comes, it’s a bow-down. It’s a carve-out. And it comes when it wants to, and it carves you out — it comes in the middle of the night, comes in the middle of the day, comes in the middle of a meeting, comes in the middle of a meal. It arrives — it’s this tremendously forceful arrival and it cannot be resisted without you suffering more… The posture that you take is you hit your knees in absolute humility and you let it rock you until it is done with you. And it will be done with you, eventually. And when it is done, it will leave. But to stiffen, to resist, and to fight it is to hurt yourself.

"There’s this tremendous psychological and spiritual challenge to relax in the awesome power of it until it has gone through you. Grief is a full-body experience. It takes over your entire body — it’s not a disease of the mind. It’s something that impacts you at the physical level… I feel that it has a tremendous relationship to love: First of all, as they say, it’s the price you pay for love. But, secondly, in the moments of my life when I have fallen in love, I have just as little power over it as I do in grief. There are certain things that happen to you as a human being that you cannot control or command, that will come to you at really inconvenient times, and where you have to bow in the human humility to the fact that there’s something running through you that’s bigger than you."

Gilbert goes on to read a short, stunning reflection on love and loss she had originally published on Instagram:

"People keep asking me how I’m doing, and I’m not always sure how to answer that. It depends on the day. It depends on the minute. Right this moment, I’m OK. Yesterday, not so good. Tomorrow, we’ll see.

"Here is what I have learned about Grief, though.

"I have learned that Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.

"The only way that I can “handle” Grief, then, is the same way that I “handle” Love — by not “handling” it. By bowing down before its power, in complete humility.

"When Grief comes to visit me, it’s like being visited by a tsunami. I am given just enough warning to say, “Oh my god, this is happening RIGHT NOW,” and then I drop to the floor on my knees and let it rock me. How do you survive the tsunami of Grief? By being willing to experience it, without resistance.

"The conversation of Grief, then, is one of prayer-and-response.

"Grief says to me: “You will never love anyone the way you loved Rayya.” And I reply: “I am willing for that to be true.” Grief says: “She’s gone, and she’s never coming back.” I reply: “I am willing for that to be true.” Grief says: “You will never hear that laugh again.” I say: “I am willing.” Grief says, “You will never smell her skin again.” I get down on the floor on my fucking knees, and — and through my sheets of tears — I say, “I AM WILLING.” This is the job of the living — to be willing to bow down before EVERYTHING that is bigger than you. And nearly everything in this world is bigger than you.

"I don’t know where Rayya is now. It’s not mine to know. I only know that I will love her forever. And that I am willing.

"Onward."

Gilbert adds in the interview:

"It’s an honor to be in grief. It’s an honor to feel that much, to have loved that much."

“Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.”  --Joan Didion

"Women are the real architects of society."  —Harriet Beecher Stowe

A Desire for Mercy - A Reflection for the Fourth Sunday in Advent 2020

In Mary we see all the beauty of Advent concentrated. She is the one in whom the waiting of Israel is most fully and most purely manifested; she is the last of the remnant of Israel for whom God shows his mercy and fulfills his promises; she is the faithful one who believed that the promise made to her by the Lord would be fulfilled; she is the lowly handmaid, the obedient servant, the quiet contemplative. She indeed is the most prepared to receive the Lord...

The Abbot of Genesee monastery said that we should desire not only the first coming of Christ in his lowly gentleness but also his second coming as the judge of our lives. I sensed that the desire for Christ's judgment is a real aspect of holiness and realized how little that desire was mine...

Now I see better how part of Christian maturation is the slow but persistent deepening of fear to the point where it becomes desire. The fear of God is not in contrast with his mercy. Therefore, words such as fear and desire, justice and mercy have to be relearned and reunderstood when we use them in our intimate relationship with the Lord

--Henri Nouwen

"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door."  —Emily Dickinson

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

e.e. cummings

"The grounds of my hope have always been that history is wilder than our imagination of it and that the unexpected shows up far more regularly than we ever dream."  —Rebecca Solnit

"Turns out, a little light can reach pretty far if you know where to look for it. "  --Molly Conway

"Joyful persons do not necessarily make jokes, laugh, or even smile. They are not people with an optimistic outlook on life who always relativize the seriousness of a moment or an event. No, joyful persons see with open eyes the hard reality of human existence and at the same time are not imprisoned by it. They have no illusion about the evil powers that roam around, “looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8), but they also know that death has no final power. They suffer with those who suffer, yet they do not hold on to suffering; they point beyond it to an everlasting peace."  --Henri Nouwen

Hum? I have to ponder this one.

Deepening Our Lives in Christ - A Reflection for the Third Sunday in Advent 2020

Besides affirming life and remembering it, celebration is filled with expectations for the future. If the past has the last word, a man would imprison himself more and more the older he became. If the present were the ultimate moment of satisfaction, he would cling to it with hedonistic eagerness, trying to squeeze the last drop of life out of it. But the present holds promises and reaches out to the horizons of life, and this makes it possible for us to embrace our future as well as our past in the moment of celebration...The period before Christmas has that remarkable quality of joy that seems to touch not only Christians but all who live in our society...

But Advent is not only a period of joy. It is also a time when those who are lonely feel lonelier than during other periods of the year. During this time many people try to commit suicide or are hospitalized with severe depression. Those who have hope feel much joy and desire to give. Those who have no hope feel more depressed than ever and are often thrown back on their lonely selves in despair.

Surrounded by a loving, supportive community, Advent and Christmas seem pure joy. But let me not forget my lonely moments because it does not take much to make that loneliness reappear...When Jesus was loneliest, he gave most. That realization should help to deepen my commitment to service and let my desire to give become independent of my actual experience of joy. Only a deepening of my life in Christ will make that possible.

--Henri Nouwen

"Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values become your destiny. The future depends on what you do today."  --Mohandas K. Gandhi

"I think that we have hardly thought through the immense implications of the mystery of the incarnation. Where is God? God is where we are weak, vulnerable, small, and dependent. God is where the poor are, the hungry, the handicapped, the mentally ill, the elderly, the powerless. How can we come to know God when our focus is elsewhere, on success, influence, and power? I increasingly believe that our faithfulness will depend on our willingness to go where there is brokenness, loneliness, and human need. . . . Each one of us is very seriously searching to live and grow in this belief, and by friendship we can support each other. I realize that the only way for us to stay well in the midst of the many “worlds” is to stay close to the small, vulnerable child that lives in our hearts and in every other human being. Often we do not know that the Christ child is within us. When we discover him we can truly rejoice."  ==Henri Nouwen

The Hidden Way

"It is hard to believe that God would reveal his divine presence to us in the self-emptying, humble way of the man from Nazareth. So much in me seeks influence, power, success, and popularity. But the way of Jesus is the way of hiddenness, powerlessness, and littleness. It does not seem a very appealing way. Yet when I enter into true, deep communion with Jesus, I will find that it is this small way that leads to real peace and joy."  --Henri Nouwen

"Every thought, action, decision, or feeling creates an eddy in the interlocking, inter-balancing energy fields of life. In this interconnected universe, every improvement we make in our private world improves the world at large for everyone."  --David Hawkins

"Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience. I don’t believe you can stand for freedom for one group of people and deny it to others. "  --Coretta Scott King

"Some day after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love. And then, for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire."  --Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

"I am increasingly impressed by the Christian possibility of celebrating not only moments of joy but also moments of pain, thus affirming God’s real presence in the thick of our lives. A true Christian always affirms life, because God is the God of life, a life stronger than death and destruction. In him we find no reason to despair. There is always reason to hope, even when our eyes are filled with tears."  --Henri Nouwen

Our Lives Multiply by Giving Them Away

The fruitfulness of our little life, once we recognize it and live it as the life of the Beloved, is beyond anything we can imagine. One of the greatest acts of faith is to believe that the few years we live on this earth are like a little seed planted in very rich soil. For this seed to bear fruit, it must die. We often see or feel only the dying, but the harvest will be abundant even when we ourselves are the harvesters.

How different would our life be were we truly able to trust that it multiplied in being given away! How different would our life be if we could believe that every little act of faithfulness, every gesture of love, every word of forgiveness, every little bit of joy and peace will multiply and multiply as long as there are people to receive it . . . and that—even then—there will be leftovers!

--Henri Nouwen

Something Hardly Noticeable - A Reflection for the First Sunday in Advent 2020

These words from last night's liturgy have stayed with me during the day. Our salvation comes from something small, tender, and vulnerable, something hardly noticeable. God, who is the Creator of the Universe, comes to us in smallness, weakness, and hiddenness.

I find this a hopeful message. Somehow, I keep expecting loud and impressive events to convince me and others of God's saving power; but over and over again I am reminded that spectacles, power plays, and big events are the ways of the world. Our temptation is to be distracted by them and made blind to the "shoot that shall sprout from the stump."

When I have no eyes for the small signs of God's presence - the smile of a baby, the carefree play of children, the words of encouragement and gestures of love offered by friends - I will always remain tempted to despair.

The small child of Bethlehem, the unknown young man of Nazareth, the rejected preacher, the naked man on the cross, he asks for my full attention. The work of our salvation takes place in the midst of a world that continues to shout, scream, and overwhelm us with its claims and promises. But the promise is hidden in the shoot that sprouts from the stump, a shoot that hardly anyone notices.

--Henri Nouwen

The Still, Small Voice - A Reflection for the Second Sunday in Advent 2020

 I am not saying there is an easy solution to our ambivalent relationship with God.  Solitude is not a solution.  It is a direction.  The direction is pointed to by the prophet Elijah, who did not find Yahweh in the mighty wind, the earthquake, the fire, but in the still small voice; this direction too is indicated by Jesus, who chose solitude as the place to be with his Father.  Every time we enter into solitude we withdraw from our windy, earthquaking, fiery lives and open ourselves to the great encounter.  

The first thing we often discover in solitude is our own restlessness, our drivenness, and compulsiveness, our urge to act quickly, to make an impact, and to have influence; and often we find it very hard to withstand the temptation to return as quickly as possible to the world of "relevance."  But when we persevere with the help of a gentle discipline, we slowly come to hear the still, small voice and to feel the gentle breeze, and so come to know the Lord of our heart, soul, and mind, the Lord who makes us see who we really are.

--Henri Nouwen

A Time for Deepening

The period before Christmas has that remarkable quality of joy that seems to touch not only Christians but all who live in our society....

But Advent is not only a period of joy. It is also a time when those who are lonely feel lonelier than during other periods of the year. During this time many people try to commit suicide or are hospitalized with severe depression. Those who have hope feel much joy and desire to give. Those who have no hope feel more depressed than ever and are often thrown back on their lonely selves in despair.

When a person is surrounded by a loving, supportive community, Advent and Christmas seem pure joy. But let me not forget my lonely moments because it does not take much to make that loneliness reappear. . . . When Jesus was loneliest, he gave most. That realization should help to deepen my commitment to service and let my desire to give become independent of my actual experience of joy. Only a deepening of my life in Christ will make that possible.

--Henri Nouwen

I cannot tell you 

how the light comes, 

but that it does. 

That it will. 

- Jan Richardson, “How The Light Comes”

“We rarely find people who achieve great things without first going astray.”  --Meister Eckhart

"We know that there is no help for us but from one another, that no hand will save us if we do not reach out our hand. And the hand that you reach out is empty, as mine is. You have nothing. You possess nothing. You own nothing. You are free. All you have is what you are, and what you give."  --Ursula K. Le Guin

Advent Attitude

In the beginner’s mind there is no thought ‘I have attained something.’ All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can really learn something. The beginner’s mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless.”

I like these words. Also very important for Advent. Open, free, flexible, receptive. That is the attitude that makes us ready. I realize that in Zen you are not expecting anything or anyone. Still, it seems that all the things Shunryu Suzuki tells his students are important for Christians to hear and realize. Isn’t a beginner’s mind, a mind without the thought “I have attained something,” a mind opened for grace? Isn’t that the mind of children who marvel at all they see? Isn’t that the mind not filled with worries for tomorrow but alert and awake in the present moment?

--Henri Nouwen

Hope

"When we live with hope we do not get tangled up with concerns for how our wishes will be fulfilled. So, too, our prayers are not directed toward the gift but toward the One who gives it. Ultimately, it is not a question of having a wish come true but of expressing an unlimited faith in the giver of all good things. . . . Hope is based on the premise that the other gives only what is good. Hope includes an openness by which you wait for the promise to come through, even though you never know when, where, or how this might happen.  --Henri Nouwen

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally."  --Flannery O'Connor

"People create social conditions and people can change them."  --Dr. Osonye Tess Onwueme

"Our society is so inured to violence that it finds it hard to believe in anything else. And that phrase believe in provides the clue. People trust violence. Violence 'saves.' It is 'redemptive.' But when we make survival the highest goal and death the greatest evil, we hand ourselves over to the gods of the Domination System. We trust violence because we are afraid. And we will not relinquish our fears until we are able to imagine a better alternative."  —Walter Wink

"Nonviolence is first and foremost a kind of energy that resides within an individual human being. We do not need different individuals in power so much as we need a different kind of power in individuals."  —Michael Nagler, The Search for a Nonviolent Future

"Our spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, expecting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination or prediction. This, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control."  --Henri Nouwen

"You are responsible for the world that you live in. It is not government’s responsibility. It is not your school’s or your social club’s or your church’s or your neighbor’s or your fellow citizen’s. It is yours, utterly and singularly yours."  --August Wilson

"We must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood [and sisterhood]."  —Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Working in conflict mediation for years, I heard it often: two groups in conflict would be brought together, and someone would say something like, “Well, we all know why we’re here” — and immediately the fracture would deepen, because some people were there because of something that happened last week, whereas others were there because of something systemic. 

Or somebody, in an attempt to create common ground, would say “All our lives have been impacted by this conflict.” As a mediator, I could see some people checking out of the process, because the “our” wasn’t brave enough in that sentence. Many rooms are filled with hurting people, yes, but hurting people whose hurt has been disproportionate to each other. Acknowledging that won’t break us, it might even make us. 

--Pádraig Ó Tuama

"Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master, --David Foster Wallace

“You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness … has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.”  --David Foster Wallace

 Nothing is sweet or easy about community. Community is a fellowship of people who do not hide their joys and sorrows but make them visible to each other as a gesture of hope.

In community we say: “Life is full of gains and losses, joys and sorrows, ups and downs—but we do not have to live it alone. We want to drink our cup together and thus celebrate the truth that the wounds of our individual lives, which seem intolerable when lived alone, become sources of healing when we live them as part of a fellowship of mutual care.”

Community is like a large mosaic. Each little piece seems so insignificant. One piece is bright red, another cold blue or dull green, another warm purple, another sharp yellow, another shining gold. Some look precious, others ordinary. Some look valuable, others worthless. Some look gaudy, others delicate. We can do little with them as individual stones except compare them and judge their beauty and value. When, however, all these little stones are brought together in one big mosaic, portraying the face of Christ, who would ever question the importance of any one of them? If one of them, even the least spectacular one, is missing, the face is incomplete. Together in the one mosaic, each little stone is indispensable and makes a unique contribution to the glory of God. That’s community, a fellowship of little people who together make God visible in the world.

--Henri Nouwen

"Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."  --Paulo Freire

"Christian community is the place where we keep the flame of hope alive among us and take it seriously so that it can grow and become stronger in us. In this way we can live with courage, trusting that there is a spiritual power in us when we are together that allows us to live in this world without surrendering to the powerful forces constantly seducing us toward despair. That is how we dare to say that God is a God of love even when we see hatred all around us. That is why we can claim that God is a God of life even when we see death and destruction and agony all around us. We say it together. We affirm it in each other. Waiting together, nurturing what has already begun, expecting its fulfillment—that is the meaning of marriage, friendship, community, and the Christian life."  --Henri Nouwen

"It is not enough for us to possess human nature, we have to act as humans, we have to exercise all the deepest capacities of our nature. More than this, we have to act as persons—freely! As soon as we come into existence we begin to obey the Law of Love."  —Thomas Merton

“It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.”  --Mark Strand

The End

THE END

by Mark Strand

Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,

Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like

When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,

Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,

When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down

No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.

When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky

Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus

And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,

Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing

When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.

"The concept of setting aside one day for giving thanks doesn’t fit. We [the Ho-Chunk Nation] think of every day as Thanksgiving."  --Anne Thundercloud of the Ho-Chunk Nation

"Nonviolent struggle is a technique for conducting conflicts by social, psychological, economic, and political methods of protest, noncooperation, and disruptive intervention. It is a technique built on the social, economic, and political application of basic human stubbornness—the determination and ability to dissent, to refuse to cooperate, to defy, and to disrupt. In other words, people may refuse to do things they are asked to do, and may do what they are forbidden to do. All governments rely on cooperation and obedience for their very existence. When people choose to withhold or withdraw that cooperation, governments are left without any pillars to support their weight."  --Gene Sharp

"It is not "forgive and forget" as if nothing wrong had ever happened, but "forgive and go forward," building on the mistakes of the past and the energy generated by reconciliation to create a new future."  -- Alan Paton

Silence and Speaking Belong Together

"To know ourselves truly and acknowledge fully our own unique journey, we need to be known and acknowledged by others for who we are. We cannot live a spiritual life in secrecy. We cannot find our way to true freedom in isolation. Silence without speaking is as dangerous as solitude without community. They belong together."  --Henri Nouwen

 If you know something hurtful and not true, don't say it.

If you know something hurtful and true, don't say it.

If you know something helpful but not true, don't say it.

If you know something helpful and true, find the right time to say it.

- anonymous (sometimes attributed to Buddha) 

"When unity is evolved out of diversity, then there is a real and abiding national progress."  --Manhar-ul-Haque

Holy Silence

At first silence might only frighten us. In silence we start hearing voices of darkness: our jealousy and anger, our resentment and desire for revenge, our lust and greed, and our pain over losses, abuses, and rejections. These voices are often noisy and boisterous. They may even deafen us. Our most spontaneous reaction is to run away from them and return to our entertainment.

But if we have the discipline to stay put and not let these dark voices intimidate us, they will gradually lose their strength and recede into the background, creating space for the softer, gentler voices of the light.

These voices speak of peace, kindness, gentleness, goodness, joy, hope, forgiveness, and most of all, love. They might at first seem small and insignificant, and we may have a hard time trusting them. However, they are very persistent and they will be stronger if we keep listening. They come from a very deep place and from very far. They have been speaking to us since before we were born, and they reveal to us that there is no darkness in the One who sent us into the world, only light. They are part of God’s voice calling us from all eternity: “My beloved child, my favorite one, my joy.”

--Henri Nouwen

"Change to me has nothing to do with a momentary event. Change has to do with consistency."  --Aldis Hodge

“However confused the scene of our life appears, however torn we may be who now do face that scene, it can be faced, and we can go on to be whole.”  --Muriel Rukeyser

“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future. Here is all the developing greatness of the dream of the world, the pure flash of momentary imagination, the vision of life lived outside of triumph or defeat, in continual triumph and defeat, in the present, alive. All the crafts of subtlety, all the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.”   --Muriel Rukeyser

"When one breaks the law to resist the probability of nuclear war, one is not just breaking the law . . . one is upholding the one law from which all decent and just law derives: ‘Love your neighbor as you love yourself.’"  —Philip Berrigan

Fools for Christ

Sometimes we have to dare to be fools for Christ. That means that sometimes we have to be willing to give food to people who don’t really need or deserve it. And sometimes we have to be willing to work with some people who might even exploit us. Maybe this is as close as we can come to an experience of self-empyting. It is the experience of being useless in the presence of the Lord.

Understand me well, I am not trying to praise impracticality, nor am I trying to suggest that you should not stop doing the things you are doing when they prove to be counterproductive, but I am saying if you come in touch with the experience of being used or the experience of being useless, you might in fact be close to a true Christian experience, or closer than you sought.

--Henri Nouwen

“Life Goes On”

Dur­ing these tur­bu­lent times we must remind our­selves repeat­ed­ly that life goes on.

This we are apt to forget.

The wis­dom of life tran­scends our wisdoms;

the pur­pose of life out­lasts our purposes;

the process of life cush­ions our processes.

The mass attack of dis­il­lu­sion and despair,

dis­tilled out of the col­lapse of hope,

has so invad­ed our thoughts that what we know to be true and valid seems unre­al and ephemeral.

There seems to be lit­tle ener­gy left for aught but futility.

This is the great deception.

By it whole peo­ples have gone down to oblivion 

with­out the will to affirm the great and per­ma­nent strength of the clean and the commonplace.

Let us not be deceived.

It is just as impor­tant as ever to attend to the lit­tle graces

by which the dig­ni­ty of our lives is main­tained and sustained.

Birds still sing;

the stars con­tin­ue to cast their gen­tle gleam over the des­o­la­tion of the battlefields,

and the heart is still inspired by the kind word and the gra­cious deed.

There is no need to fear evil.

There is every need to under­stand what it does,

how it oper­ates in the world,

what it draws upon to sus­tain itself.

We must not shrink from the knowl­edge of the evil­ness of evil.

Over and over we must know that the real tar­get of evil is not destruc­tion of the body,

the reduc­tion to rub­ble of cities;

the real tar­get of evil is to cor­rupt the spir­it of man 

and to give his soul the con­ta­gion of inner disintegration.

When this happens,

there is noth­ing left,

the very citadel of man is cap­tured and laid waste.

There­fore the evil in the world around us must not be allowed to move from with­out to within.

This would be to be over­come by evil.

To drink in the beau­ty that is with­in reach,

to clothe one’s life with sim­ple deeds of kindness,

to keep alive a sen­si­tive­ness to the move­ment of the spir­it of God

in the quiet­ness of the human heart and in the work­ings of the human mind—

this is as always the ulti­mate answer to the great deception.

--Excerpt­ed from Med­i­ta­tions of the Heart by Howard Thur­man, pub­lished by Bea­con Press.

"To heal our society, our psyches must heal as well. The military, social, and environmental dangers that threaten us do not come from sources outside the human heart; they are reflections of it, mirroring the fears, greeds, and hostility that separate us from ourselves and each other."  —Joanna Macy 

Waste Some Time with God

"In our utilitarian culture, where we suffer from a collective compulsion to do something practical, helpful, or useful, and where we feel compelled to make a contribution that can give us a sense of worth, contemplative prayer is a form of radical criticism. It is not useful or practical. It is simply to waste time for and with God. It cuts a hole in our busyness and reminds us and others that it is God and not we who creates and sustains the world."  --Henri Nouwen

"Central to the advancement of human civilization is the spirit of open enquiry. We must learn not only to tolerate our differences. We must welcome them as the richness and diversity which can lead to true intelligence."  —Albert Einstein 

"Now we can no longer just give answers and explanations, we have to become the answer, and our own transformation is the only credible explanation. It seems we must tame and integrate the demon of violence within ourselves before we have anything to say to anybody else."  --Richard Rohr

"That which we persist in doing becomes easier for us to do; not that the nature of the thing itself is changed, but that our power to do is increased. "  --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Why Pray?

Why should I spend an hour in prayer when I do nothing during that time but think about people I am angry with, people who are angry with me, books I should read, and books I should write, and thousands of other silly things that happen to grab my mind for a moment?

The answer is: because God is greater than my mind and my heart and what is really happening in the house of prayer is not measurable in terms of human success and failure.

"Hope lies in dreams, in imagination, and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality."  --Jonas Salk

"I am deeply convinced that we can only work for the liberation of the people if we love them deeply. And we can only love them deeply when we recognize their gift to us. I am deeply convinced of the importance of social change and of the necessity to work hard to bring about a just and peaceful society. But I also feel that this task can only be done in a spirit of gratitude and joy. That is why I am more and more convinced of the importance to live in the Spirit of the Risen Christ. Christ is the God who entered into solidarity with our struggles and became truly a God-with-us. It was this solidarity that led him to the cross by which he overcame death and evil. Believing in the Risen Lord means believing that in and through Christ the evil one has been overcome and that death no longer is the final word. Working for social change, to me, means to make visible in time and place that which has already been accomplished in principle by God himself. This makes it possible to struggle for a better world not out of frustration, resentment, anger, or self-righteousness, but out of care, love, forgiveness, and gratitude."  

--Henri Nouwen

Acting in God’s Name

The first questions are not “How much do we do?” or “How many people do we help out?” but “Are we interiorly at peace?” . . . Jesus’ actions flowed from his interior communion with God. His presence was healing, and it changed the world. In a sense he didn’t do anything! “Everyone who touched him was healed” (Mark 6:56). . . .

When we love God with all our heart, mind, strength, and soul, we cannot do other than love our neighbor, and our very selves. It is in being fully rooted in the heart of God that we are creatively connected with our neighbor as well as with our deepest self. In the heart of God we can see that the other human beings who live on this earth with us are also God’s sons and daughters, and belong to the same family we do. There, too, I can recognize and claim my own belovedness, and celebrate with my neighbors.

Our society thinks economically: “How much love do I give to God, how much to my neighbor, and how much to myself?” But God says, “Give all your love to me, and I will give to you, your neighbor, and yourself.”

We are not talking here about moral obligations or ethical imperatives. We are talking about the mystical life. It is the intimate communion with God that reveals to us how to live in the world and act in God’s Name.

--Henri Nouwen

"I was raised to believe that my faith should never be a sword to strike down another community. It should always be a shield to protect."  --Stacey Abrams

 "A condition of friendship is the abdication of power over another, indeed the abdication even of the wish for power over one another. And one is drawn to it not by need but by choice. If love is about the bliss of primal unfreedom, friendship is about the complicated enjoyment of human autonomy. As soon as a friend attempts to control a friend, the friendship ceases to exist. But until a lover seeks to possess his beloved, the love has hardly begun. Where love is all about the juggling of the power to hurt, friendship is about creating a space where power ceases to exist. There is a cost to this, of course. Friends will never provide what lovers provide: the ultimate resort, that safe space of repose, that relaxation of the bedsheets. But they provide something more reliable, and certainly less painful. They provide an acknowledgement not of the child within but of the adult without; they allow for an honesty which doesn’t threaten pain and criticism which doesn’t imply rejection. They promise not the bliss of the womb but the bracing adventure of the world. They do not solve loneliness, yet they mitigate it."  --Andrew Sullivan

 "This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."  --Walt Whitman

Rune of Hospitality

I saw a stranger today.

I put food for him

in the eating-place

And drink

in the drinking-place

And music

in the listening-place.

In the Holy name

of the Trinity

He blessed myself

and my family.

And the lark said in her warble

Often, often, often

Goes Christ

in the stranger’s guise.

O, oft and oft and oft,

Goes Christ

in the stranger’s guise.

--Traditional

"Public must be convinced three times: That there is a problem; to oppose current conditions and policies; to want, no longer fear, alternatives."  --Bill Moyer

"A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess."  --A. Philip Randolph

"Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on. "  --Thurgood Marshall

Cup of Sorrow, Cup of Joy

"When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become. The sorrow overwhelms us, makes us throw ourselves on the ground, facedown, and sweat drops of blood. Then we need to be reminded that our cup of sorrow is also our cup of joy and that one day we will be able to taste the joy as fully as we now taste the sorrow."  --Henri Nouwen

"The unity we desire doesn’t erase those on the margins or those who are different but instead holds every member as essential, like we strive for in the church."  --Revs. Laurel and Colin Matthewson

"To choose hope is to step firmly into the howling wind, baring one’s chest to the elements, knowing that, in time, the storm will pass."  -- Desmond Tutu, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

"We’re not here to be safe, those texts tell us, but to risk everything. We didn’t come here for the purpose which contemporary Western society seems to want us to believe we’re here for: to aspire to accumulating sufficient wealth so that we can ‘retire’ at the age of 60 or thereabouts, to a nice house in a nice safe neighborhood, to stop work and play golf or go on round-the-world cruises, to stop being useful and wait to die. It’s not that we shouldn’t hope for safety and pleasure in our lives—but these things shouldn’t be our primary motivation. We’re here to risk everything to fulfil our calling, to walk wholeheartedly along the path which leads us there, even if that path sometimes is dangerous, or hard."  —Sharon Blackie

The Blessing Hidden in Grief

"What to do with our losses? . . . We must mourn our losses. We cannot talk or act them away, but we can shed tears over them and allow ourselves to grieve deeply. To grieve is to allow our losses to tear apart feelings of security and safety and lead us to the painful truth of our brokenness. Our grief makes us experience the abyss of our own life in which nothing is settled, clear, or obvious, but everything is constantly shifting and changing. . . . But in the midst of all this pain, there is a strange, shocking, yet very surprising voice. It is the voice of the One who says: “Blessed are those who mourn; they shall be comforted.” That’s the unexpected news: there is a blessing hidden in our grief. Not those who comfort are blessed, but those who mourn! Somehow, in the midst of our tears, a gift is hidden. Somehow, in the midst of our mourning, the first steps of the dance take place. Somehow, the cries that well up from our losses belong to our songs of gratitude."  --Henri Nouwen

"Part of understanding the notion of Justice is to recognize the disproportions among which we live. . . . It takes an awful lot of living with the powerless to really understand what it is like to be powerless, to have your voice, thoughts, ideas and concerns count for very little. We, who have been given much, whose voices can be heard, have a great duty and responsibility to make our voices heard with absolute integrity for those who are powerless."  —John O'Donohue

"When you change your perception of an event or a person, at that moment the perceived also changes. Subject and object are joined by perception. This account of a world resting on consciousness seems far flung only if we hold onto the notion of a separate self."  --Polly Young-Eisendrath, Ph.D

"If you are willing to look at another person's behavior toward you as a reflection of the state of their relationship with themselves rather than a statement about your value as a person, then you will, over a period of time, cease to react at all."  --Yogi Bhajan

The Fellowship of the Weak

"Fear, shame, and guilt often make us stay in our isolation and prevent us from realizing that our handicap, whatever it is, can always become the way to an intimate and healing fellowship in which we come to know one another as humans. After all, everyone shares the handicap of mortality. Our individual, physical, emotional, and spiritual failures are but symptoms of this disease. Only when we use these symptoms of mortality to form a fellowship of the weak can hope emerge. It is in the confession of our brokenness that the real strength of new and everlasting life can be affirmed and made visible."  --Henri Nouwen

"Diversity creates harmony, and harmony creates beauty, balance, bounty, and peace in nature and society, in agriculture and culture, in science and in politics."  --Vandana Shiva

Claiming the Light

"People who have come to know the joy of God do not deny the darkness, but they choose not to live in it. They claim that the light that shines in the darkness can be trusted more than the darkness itself and that a little bit of light can dispel a lot of darkness. They point each other to flashes of light here and there, and remind each other that they reveal the hidden but real presence of God. They discover that there are people who heal each other’s wounds, forgive each other’s offenses, share their possessions, foster the spirit of community, celebrate the gifts they have received, and live in constant anticipation of the full manifestation of God’s glory."  --Henri Nouwen

"When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide."  —John Lewis

Saintly Counselors

 

"In the past, the saints had very much moved to the background of my consciousness. During the last few months, they re-entered my awareness as powerful guides on the way to God.

"I read the lives of many saints and great spiritual men and women, and it seems that they have become real members of my spiritual family, always present to offer suggestions, ideas, advice, consolation, courage, and strength. It is very hard to keep your heart and mind directed toward God when there are no examples to help you in your struggle. Without saints you easily settle for less-inspiring people and quickly follow the ways of others who for a while seem exciting but who are not able to offer lasting support. I am happy to have been able to restore my relationship with many great saintly men and women in history who, by their lives and works, can be real counselors to me."  --Henri Nouwen

"Standing still is never an option so long as inequities remain embedded in the very fabric of the culture."  --Tim Wise Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity

"The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all."  --Ted Hughes

"Nonviolence—both in terms of social action and inner transformation—is the external manifestation of a contemplative state of consciousness that is itself the outer garment of an even deeper truth: reality moves in harmony with love. As a spiritual path, nonviolence is not merely a cultural necessity or social form of protest, but the whole configuration in which life can be seen as it truly is, in its deepest dimensions."  

--Beverly Lanzetta

"We are bound in a delicate network of interdependence because, as we say in our African idiom, a person is a person through other persons. To dehumanize another inexorably means that one is dehumanized as well."  --Desmond Tutu

"In our world today, God's vision means our neighbor is not the one proximate to us, but the one whose life is at risk."  -- Sandy Ovalle

"Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person—ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it. It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have."  --James A. Baldwin

"Blaming immigrants, illegal workers, welfare mothers, or other poor or less powerful groups diverts our attention from the people who own the power and wealth. We hurt ourselves and make it impossible to solve our economic problems when we don't understand the nature of racism. And the rich keep getting richer."  --Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism

“I can conceive of no better service… than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.”  --Walt Whitman

"If the Church is to remain faithful to its Lord, it must make a decisive break with the structure of this society by launching a vehement attack on the evils of racism in all forms."  -- James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power

"We see rising homelessness and we turn the other way. We see unarmed Black folks being killed by police, and we see society blaming the victim. We hear about high suicide rates amongst LGBT youth, and we do little or nothing about it. We read reports on the climate crisis but leave it to the next generation to deal with. We watch our communities and the earth being assaulted every day and we just gather around and watch. None of my business. Nothing to see here."  --Kazu Haga, Healing Resistance

"The beauty and preciousness of life is intimately linked with its fragility and mortality. We can experience that every day—when we take a flower in our hands, when we see a butterfly dance in the air, when we caress a little baby. Fragility and giftedness are both there, and our joy is connected with both."  --Henri Nouwen

"... few people actually receive big calls, in visions of flaming chariots and burning bushes. Most of the calls we receive and ignore are ... the daily calls to pay attention to our intuitions, to be authentic, to live by our own codes of honor.

"Our lives are measured out ... not in the grand sweeps but in the small gestures. The great breakthroughs in our lives generally happen only as a result of the accumulation of innumerable small steps and minor achievements. We're called to reach out to someone, to pick up an odd book on the library shelf, to sign up for a class even though we're convinced we don't have the time or money, to go to our desks each day, to turn left instead of right.

"These are the fire drills for our bigger calls."  --Gregg Levoy

"To listen is to lean in softly 

With a willingness to be changed

By what we hear."  --Mark Nepo

"Through it all, the mountain just sits, experiencing change in each moment, constantly changing, yet always just being itself. It remains still as the seasons flow into one another and as the weather changes moment by moment and day by day, calmness abiding all change… --Jon Kabat-Zinn

"I sought my soul, But my soul I could not see.

I sought my God, But my God eluded me.

I sought my brother, And found all three."  --Anonymous

"Could our minds and our hearts be big enough just to hang out in that space where we’re not entirely certain about who’s right and who’s wrong? Could we have no agenda when we walk into a room with another person, not know what to say, not make that person wrong or right? Could we see, hear, feel other people as they really are? It is powerful to practice this way, because we’ll find ourselves continually rushing around to try to feel secure again—to make ourselves or them either right or wrong. But true communication can happen only in that open space."  --Pema Chodron

"We must develop our capacities and commitments to learn from each other and to affirm the human dignity we each are entitled to as God's creation."  --Rev. Dr. Shively T. J. Smith

"Everyone forms opinions and beliefs, but most act on them only up to a certain point, beyond which fears, desires, doubts, prudence, laziness and distractions of all kinds take over. Gandhi belonged to the small class of people, who are able to act according to their beliefs almost without condition or reservation."  --Jonathan Schell 

"I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs. "  --Frederick Douglass

"What Gandhi sought was the spiritual liberation of humanity. He wanted . . . the kingdom of God extended throughout humanity so that oppression, injustice, and violence would cease and love and truth would reign. ‘When the practice of law (truth and love) become universal, God will reign on earth as God does in heaven.’ Earth and heaven are in us. We know the earth, and we are strangers to the heaven within us."  --—John Dear

"It takes more courage to dig deep in the dark corners of your own soul and the back alleys of your society than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield."  --William Butler Yeats

"Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the origin of this universe."  -- Joy Harjo, Muscogee (Creek) Nation, "Remember" 

Deciding to be Grateful

"Gratitude is the most fruitful way of deepening your consciousness that you are not an “accident,” but a divine choice. It is important to realize how often we have had chances to be grateful and have not used them. When someone is kind to us, when an event turns out well, when a problem is solved, a relationship restored, a wound healed, there are very concrete reasons to offer thanks: be it with words, with flowers, with a letter, a card, a phone call, or just a gesture of affection. . . . Every time we decide to be grateful it will be easier to see new things to be grateful for. Gratitude begets gratitude, just as love begets love."  --Henri Nouwen

Detach from the Past

"I am increasingly convinced that it is possible to live the wounds of the past not as gaping abysses that cannot be fulfilled and, therefore, keep threatening us as gateways to new life. The “gateless gate” of Zen and the “healing wounds of Christ” both encourage us to detach ourselves from the past and trust in the glory to which we are called."  --Henri Nouwen

"It is easy to sit back and let unpleasant things happen when we don't have the heart to try to correct them. But such a laissez-faire attitude is a counterfeit non-violence. King called it ‘stagnant passivity.’ True nonviolence takes inner energy, desire and a willingness to risk."  --Dr. Gerard Vanderhaar

"If we believe, simply, that it gets better, there is no incentive to do the work to ensure that it does."  -- Mychal Denzel Smith, Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

"We must turn to each other and not on each other and choose higher ground."  -- Jesse Jackson

"What we need is not another doctrine, but an awakening that can restore our spiritual strength. What made Mahatma Gandhi's struggle a great success was not a doctrine—not even the doctrine of nonviolence—but Gandhi himself, his way of being. A lot is written today about the doctrine of nonviolence and people everywhere are trying to apply it. But they cannot rediscover the vitality that Gandhi had, because the ‘Gandhians’ do not possess Gandhi's spiritual strength. They have faith in his doctrine but cannot set into motion a movement of great solidarity because none of them possess the spiritual force of a Gandhi and therefore cannot produce sufficient compassion and sacrifice."  --Thich Nhat Hahn

"When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others."  --Anne Morrow Lindbergh 

"You can only appreciate freedom when you find yourself in a position to fight for someone else's freedom and not worry about your own."  -- Ruby Dee

"Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don't yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it's actually going to be possible."  --Angela Davis 

"The truth is that happiness is not something we get from life. Happiness comes from what we give back to it. Happiness comes from discovering what the world needs that we can give it."  --Joan Chittister

“When suddenly you seem to lose all you thought you had gained, do not despair. You must expect setbacks and regressions. Don't say to yourself "All is lost. I have to start all over again." This is not true. What you have gained you have gained....When you return to the road, you return to the place where you left it, not to where you started.”  --Henri Nouwen

“The most deadly poison of our time is indifference.”  -- St. Maximilian Kolbe

He took a Jew’s place in line at Auschwitz. May I also be as selfless as him.

"A single act of love makes the soul return to life."  -- St. Maximilian Kolbe

“Our actions entrench the power of the light on this planet. Every positive thought we pass between us makes room for more light. And if we do more than think, then our actions clear the path for even more light. That is why forgiveness and compassion must become more important principles in public life.”  --John Lewis

"To make life a little better for people less fortunate than you, that's what I think a meaningful life is. Our lives are not just for oneself but for one's community."  --Ruth Bader Ginsburg

"We tend to view compassion as something we project outward—that is, as a presence or gift we offer to another person or on behalf of a suffering world. This keeps compassion as an act of superiority, something the healthy offer the sick. We rarely offer the gift of compassionate presence to our own person."  --John Paul Lederach

"All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle."  --St. Francis of Assisi

"To live in the world without belonging to the world summarizes the essence of the spiritual life. The spiritual life keeps us aware that our true house is not the house of fear, in which the powers of hatred and violence rule, but the house of love, where God resides."  --Henri Nouwen

"I know there is a God—and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready."   --Abraham Lincoln

"Everyone has work to do. I don't know anyone who doesn't have some unfinished business with themselves. Finishing that business is the healing we took birth for."  --Stephen Levine

"Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light."  --Helen Keller

"The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression."  --Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“The family is a haven in a heartless world.”  --Christopher Lasch

"There is not some separation between Jesus and justice; to be Christian is to be concerned with what’s going on in the world."  -- Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II

"Laws are the terms by which independent and isolated men united to form a society, once they tired of living in a perpetual state of war where the enjoyment of liberty was rendered useless by the uncertainty of its preservation. They sacrificed a portion of this liberty so that they could enjoy the remainder in security and peace."  --Cesare Beccaria

"Money and Corruption Are ruining the land Crooked politicians Betray the working man, Pocketing the profits And treating us like sheep, And we're tired of hearing promises That we know they'll never keep"  --Ray Davies

“Sometimes exhaustion is not a result of too much time spent on something, but of knowing that in its place, no time is spent on something else.”  ― Joyce Rachelle

"When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago."  --Friedrich Nietzsche

"Full many a storm on this gray head has beat; / And now, on my high station do I stand, / Like the tired watchman in his rocked tower, / Who looked for the hour of his release. / I'm sick of worldly broils, and fain would rest / With those who war no more. "  --Joanna Baillie's Ethwald

“It’s so overwhelming when you notice how the clock ticks; so many tiny pieces holding each other together just so it keeps going. We are like clocks, too! Always ticking to the tocks. When the pieces of our soul are torn away or broken – we can’t be sent to the mending shop, however. So how do we get better? Workable? Thoughts can be tiring, at times. Or maybe it’s the same time – who knows? The clock is broken. Meh.”  --Sijdah Hussain, Red Sugar, No More

“Ever felt tired? Like existentially tired? Where you lose the sense of identity, structures, language, reason, being and time. Where you can’t see a destination and you can’t find a return, where even when you return its not a return to yourself rather it is a turn to a realisation that you have lost yourself somewhere between ‘the you’ and ‘the self’ and this dichotomy of what you call ‘you’ cannot make you feel home anymore. You run and you keep running, not towards anything but away from everything; from people, from rules, from gods, from words, from love and from being you, for forever. So do you ever feel tired?”  --Huseyn Raza

“Somewhere along the way

I got tired

Tired of them

Tired of me

And tired of everything I have to carry on my shoulders.

Maybe it’s all I need right now

A place where I know no one

And no one knows my name

Somewhere so far away from

Their old faces,

All of their empty souls

And dusty places; 

Where I can reinvent myself all over again

They I’ve always wanted and loved to be ..”

― Samiha Totanji

“In whatever battle we're facing, we too often lose hope. And once we've lost hope we've not only lost the battle, we've lost everything else as well.”  ― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Current Position: Tired from the human race.”  --Deyth Banger

“Here I am I am tired I am tired of running of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs”  ― William Faulkner, Light in August

"I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can't be right. I need a change, or something."  [Bilbo]  --J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

“The earth grieves, and I grieve, and I am weary of the fight”  --Sherryl Jordan, Winter of Fire

“It takes so much energy to keep things at bay.”  --Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“I don’t care about self I want out / of my story.”  --Maggie Nelson, Something Bright, Then Holes

“It wasn't merely fatigue. Although it continued to worry me how tired I was all the time. I had a strange sense of missing something, of being in the wrong place - no matter where I was.”   --Josh Lanyon, The Dark Tide

“I became good at pretending. I became so good that after a while the lines blurred between my truth and fiction. And sometimes, when I did a really good job of pretending, I even fooled myself.”  — Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea

“If you could be anyone, would you choose to be yourself?”  — Naomi Shihab Nye, Habibi

“For the moment I am really very, very tired of everything - more than tired.”  — Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters

“Yet now despair itself is mild,

Even as the winds and waters are;

I could lie down like a tired child,

And weep away the life of care

Which I have borne and yet must bear,

Till death like sleep might steal on me,

And I might feel in the warm air

My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea

Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples

 "Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time."  --Ruth Bader Ginsburg

"Real human grief means allowing the illusion of immortality to die in us. When those whom we love with an “endless love” die, something also has to die within us. If we do not allow this to happen, we will lose touch with reality, our lives will become increasingly artificial, and we will lose our human capacity for compassion."  --Henri Nouwen

“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”  --C.S. Lewis

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."  --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Go where there is silence and say something."  --Amy Goodman

"Is aging a way to the darkness or a way to the light? It is not given to anyone to make a final judgment, since the answer can only be brought forth from the center of our being. No one can decide for anyone else how his or her aging shall or should be. It belongs to the greatness of men and women that the meaning of their existence escapes the power of calculations and predictions. Ultimately, it can only be discovered and affirmed in the freedom of the heart. There we are able to decide between segregation and unity, between desolation and hope, between loss of self and a new, re-creating vision. Everyone will age and die, but this knowledge has no inherent direction. It can be destructive as well as creative, oppressive as well as liberating."  --Henri Nouwen

"But in times of crisis, the wise build bridges while the foolish build barriers."  --King T’Challa in Black Panther (2018)

"Do not be silent; there is no limit to the power that may be released through you."  --Howard Thurman, Deep Is the Hunger

"I know that the fact that I am always searching for God, always struggling to discover the fullness of Love, always yearning for the complete truth, tells me that I have already been given a taste of God, of Love, and of Truth. I can only look for something that I have, to some degree, already found. How can I search for beauty and truth unless that beauty and truth are already known to me in the depth of my heart? It seems that all of us human beings have deep inner memories of the paradise that we have lost. Maybe the word innocence is better than the word paradise. We were innocent before we started feeling guilty; we were in the light before we entered into the darkness; we were at home before we started to search for a home. Deep in the recesses of our minds and hearts there lies hidden the treasure we seek. We know its preciousness, and we know that it holds the gift we most desire: a life stronger than death."  --Henri Nouwen     

"You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth."  --Cornel West

"A German officer visited Picasso in his studio during WWII. There he saw Guernica and shocked at the modernist 'chaos' of the painting asked him, 'Did you do this?' Picasso calmly replied, 'No, you did this!'"  —Slavoj Zizek

"Do everything possible so that liberty is victorious over oppression, justice over injustice, love over hate."  -- Ignacio Ellacuria

"Each and every time you shift your limited perspective to a perspective of wholeness, you are raising the collective consciousness. Every time you heal or transform a stale limited belief, you are adding to the light of the collective consciousness. Every time."  —Peggy Black

"We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice. We are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself."  -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"You have more power within your being than you can ever imagine. Practice being at peace, and you will experience peace, no matter the external conditions ... Right now, the world needs your peace. We are rarely so urgent in our requests, but now is the time to be the change you wish to see in the world."   --Ann Albers

"No matter how dark the moment, love and hope are always possible."  --George Chakiris

"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments."  —Michael Parenti

"Some people say they are afraid of death. Others say they are not. But most people are quite afraid of dying. The slow deterioration of mind and body, the pains of a growing cancer, the ravaging effects of AIDS, becoming a burden for your friends, losing control of your movements, being talked about or spoken to with half-truths, forgetting recent events and the names of visitors—all of that and much more is what we really fear. It’s not surprising that we sometimes say: “I hope it doesn’t last long. I hope I will die through a sudden heart attack and not after a long, painful illness."

"But, whatever we think or hope, the way we will die is unpredictable and our worries about it quite fruitless. Still we need to be prepared. Preparing ourselves for our deaths is the most important task of life, at least when we believe that death is not the total dissolution of our identity but the way to its fullest revelation."  --Henri Nouwen

"May your hands be an extension of your heart and may you do the work of love with them."  -- Aja Monet

"War is manufactured by political leaders, who then must make a tremendous effort—by enticement, by propaganda, by coercion—to mobilize a normally reluctant population to go to war."  --Howard Zinn

 "There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being."  --James Joyce

"As long as national security is our primary concern and national survival more important than preserving life on this planet, we continue to live in the house of fear. Ultimately, we must choose between security—individual, social, or national— and freedom.

"Freedom is the true human goal. Life is only true if it is free. An obsessive concern for security freezes us; it leads us to rigidity, fixation, and eventually death. The more preoccupied we are with security the more visible the force of death becomes, whether in the form of a pistol beside our bed, a rifle in our house, or a Trident submarine in our port. . . .

"We must find a way to go beyond our national security obsession and reach out and foster life for all people, whatever their nationality, race, or religion."  --Henri Nouwen

"If now isn’t a good time for the truth, I don’t see when we’ll get to it."  --Nikki Giovanni

"Life itself likewise always turns towards one an infinitely meaningless, discouraging, dispiriting blank side on which there is nothing, any more than on a blank canvas. But however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn’t let himself be fobbed off like that. He steps in and does something, and hangs on to that ..."  --Vincent van Gogh

"Walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide."  --John Lewis

"We see these natural tragedies, which are the Earth’s response to our maltreatment. […] It is we who have ruined the work of God."  --Pope Francis

"Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with [people] of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world."  -- Dom Hélder Câmara

"Walk carefully, well loved one,

walk mindfully, well loved one,

walk fearlessly, well loved one.

Return with us,

return to us,

be always coming home."

—Ursula K. LeGuin

"We don’t have the right to demand perfection from each other. But we do have the right to expect progress. To demand evolution. So, let’s make some new mistakes."  --Naomi Klein

"There will be no Peace if there is no Justice.

There will be no Justice if there is no Equity.

There will be no Equity if there is no Progress.

There will be no Progress if there is no Democracy.

There will be no Democracy if there is no Respect

For the Identity and Dignity of the Peoples and Cultures"

—Rigoberta Menchu

"This country was created from stolen land and stolen labor. And from a moral perspective, but also from a practical one, everybody knows that when you steal, you're always looking over your shoulder because you know that somebody may steal it back."  --Alicia Garza

"But we do not merely protest; we make renewed demand for freedom in that vast kingdom of the human spirit where freedom has ever had the right to dwell: the expressing of thought to unstuffed ears; the dreaming of dreams by untwisted souls."  -- W.E.B. DuBois

"The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see."  —Adrienne Rich

"I was in darkness, but I took three steps and found myself in paradise. The first step was a good thought, the second, a good word; and the third, a good deed."  —Friedrich Nietzsche

The Illusion of Immortality

"Much violence in our society is based on the illusion of immortality, which is the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not a gift to be shared. When the elderly no longer can bring us in contact with our own aging, we quickly start playing dangerous power games to uphold the illusion of being ageless and immortal. Then, not only will the wisdom of the elderly remain hidden from us, but the elderly themselves will lose their own deepest understanding of life. For who can remain a teacher when there are no students willing to learn?"  --Henri Nouwen

"This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down."  —Hannah Arendt

"Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since ... The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?"  --Rebecca Solnit

“Does what goes on inside show on the outside? Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney.”  Vincent Van Gogh

"After months of inward darkness, I suddenly had the everlasting conviction that any human being, even though practically devoid of natural faculties, can penetrate to the kingdom of truth reserved for genius, if only he longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all his attention upon its attainment. He thus becomes a genius too, even though for lack of talent his genius cannot be visible from outside…

"Under the name of truth I also included beauty, virtue, and every kind of goodness, so that for me it was a question of a conception of the relationship between grace and desire. The conviction that had come to me was that when one hungers for bread one does not receive stones."  

--Simone Weil

"Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains by confronting the greatest dangers with the greatest prudence ... Art is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action."  --René Daumal

"Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of [another] ... There are just some kind of men who — who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results."  -- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

"Unfortunately, as a society, we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds. Without structure, censorship, or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation."  —Jill Bolte Taylor

“In the Catholic tradition, there is a form of grace, the sanctifying one, that is the stuff of your soul. It is not defined by moments of mercy or opportunity; it is not good things happening to you. Rather, it is the good thing that is in you, regardless of what happens.”  --Imani Perry

"Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work."  -- Adrienne Rich

"The problem is to work toward awakening. That is the most important. Then everything will follow. If you are not awake, you cannot do anything. The problem is not the one force opposing another force to gain ground on this earth. The problem is awakening—opposing forgetfulness—which is the fruit of many sins, many crimes. People who kill people, who commit crimes, do so not necessarily because they are cruel or evil by nature, but because they forget. They are not conscious of what is going on around them and even inside themselves. Violence destroys consciousness."  —Thich Nhat Hahn

"Wherever you are, whatever platform you have, whatever sphere of influence you enjoy, the time is now for all of us to do something. The time is now to use our bodies to protect the bodies of those who are unsafe. The time is now to use our influence, to take a stand, to become active, to go to places to demand justice, and to disruptively remove ourselves from places. The time is now to raise our voices to be heard and to call on our nation to recognize the effects of racism in our criminal justice system and to reimagine public safety in this country."  -- Rev. Terrance M. McKinley 

"If it is true that solitude diverts us from our fear and anger and makes us empty for a relationship with God, then it is also true that our emptiness provides a very large and sacred space where we can welcome all the people of the world. There is a powerful connection between our emptiness and our ability to welcome. When we give up what sets us apart from others— not just property but also opinions, prejudices, judgments, and mental preoccupations—then we have room within to welcome friends as well as enemies."  --Henri Nouwen

"I don't have to agree with everything you say, but I should attempt at least to understand it, for the opposite of mutual understanding is, quite simply, war."  —Ken Wilber

"Those you have deeply loved become part of you. The longer you live, there will always be more people to be loved by you and to become part of your inner community. The wider your inner community becomes, the more easily you will recognize your own brothers and sisters in the strangers around you. . . . The wider the community of your heart, the wider the community around you."  --Henri Nouwen

"The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees."  -- Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

"Learn to look behind your judgments to the need at the root of them. Learn from your limitations without losing self-respect. Learn to mourn your actions without blame, without guilt."  —Marshall B. Rosenberg

A Prayer

Dear Lord,

Today I thought of the words of Vincent van Gogh: “It is true there is an ebb and flow, but the sea remains the sea.” You are the sea. Although I experience many ups and downs in my emotions and often feel great shifts and changes in my inner life, you remain the same. Your sameness is not the sameness of a rock, but the sameness of a faithful lover. Out of your love I came to life, by your love I am sustained, and to your love I am always called back. There are days of sadness and days of joy; there are feelings of guilt and feelings of gratitude; there are moments of failure and moments of success; but all of them are embraced by your unwavering love. . . . O Lord, sea of love and goodness, let me not fear too much the storms and winds of my daily life, and let me know there is ebb and flow but the sea remains the sea.

Amen.

--Henri Nouwen

"The soul of our country needs to be awakened. . . . When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders."  —Veterans Fast for Life

"Why do we keep hiding our deepest feelings from each other? We suffer much, but we also have great gifts of healing for each other. The mystery is that by hiding our pain we also hide our ability to heal. . . . We are called to confess to each other and forgive each other, and thus to discover the abundant mercy of God. But at the same time, we are so terribly afraid of being hurt more than we already are. This fear keeps us prisoners, even when the prison has no walls! I see better every day how radical Jesus’ message of love really is."  --Henri Nouwen

"'I tell my students, “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.'"  -- Toni Morrison

"Hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises . . . to expect miracles—not when and where we expect them, but to expect to be astonished, to expect that we don't know. And this is grounds to act."  —Rebecca Solnit

Knowing Jesus, reading his words, and praying create an increasing clarity about evil and good, sin and grace, Satan and God. This clarity calls me to choose the way to the light fearlessly and straightforwardly. The more I come to know Jesus, the more I also realize how many such choices have to be made and how often. They involve so much more than my public acts. They touch the deepest recesses of the heart, where my most private thoughts and fantasies are hidden.

Reflecting on my life, I saw how opaque it has been. I often did one thing while saying another, said one thing while thinking another, thought one thing while feeling another. I found many examples in which I had even lied to myself. . . .

How to go from this opaqueness to transparency? A transparent life is a life without moral ambiguities in which heart, mind, and gut are united in choosing for the light. I am discovering the importance of naming the darkness in me. By no longer calling the darkness anything else but darkness, the temptation to keep using it for my own selfish purposes gradually becomes less. . . .

A hard task is given to me—to call the darkness darkness, evil evil, and the demon demon. By remaining vague I can avoid commitment and drift along in the mainstream of our society. But Jesus does not allow me to stay there. He requires a clear choice for truth, light, and life. When I recognize my countless inner compromises, I may feel guilty and ashamed at first. But when this leads to repentance and a contrite heart, I will soon discover the immense love of God, who came to lead me out of the darkness into the light and who wants to make me into a transparent witness of his love.  --Henri Nouwen

"She asked why I was so black. I asked why she was so white. She said she was born that way. Same here, I replied."  --Lawrence Hill

"You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it, and responsible for changing it."  -- Grace Lee Boggs

"In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others."  -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Beauty of Letter Writing

As I was writing letters today, I realized that writing letters is a much more intimate way of communicating than making phone calls. It may sound strange, but I often feel closer to friends I write than to friends I speak with by phone.

When I write I think deeply about my friends, I pray for them, I tell them my emotions and feelings. I reflect on our relationship, and I dwell with them in a very personal way. Over the past few months I have come to enjoy letter writing more and more. In the beginning it seemed like a heavy burden, but now it is a relaxing time of the day. It feels like interrupting work for a conversation with a friend.

The beauty of letter writing is that it deepens friendships and makes them more real. I have also discovered that letter writing makes me pray more concretely for my friends. Early in the morning I spend a little time praying for each person to whom I have written and promised my prayers.

Today I feel surrounded by the friends I am writing to and praying for. Our love for each other is very concrete and life giving. Thank God for letters, for those who send them, and for those who receive them. 

--Henri Nouwen

"We must first of all love ourselves. But as we grow we must love others. We must love them as our own fulfillment. Then we must come to love them in order to fulfill them, to develop their capacity to love, and finally we must love others as ourselves in and for God."  —Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

"Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals to us what is alive in us. The deepest satisfaction of writing is precisely that it opens up new spaces within us of which we were not aware before we started to write. To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know. Thus, writing requires a real act of trust. We have to say to ourselves: “I do not yet know what I carry in my heart, but I trust that it will emerge as I write.” Writing is like giving away the few loaves and fishes one has, trusting that they will multiply in the giving. Once we dare to “give away” on paper the few thoughts that come to us, we start discovering how much is hidden underneath these thoughts and gradually come in touch with our own riches."  --Henri Nouwen

[Reactions to victims pardoning offenders shows] how deeply uncomfortable we all are with forgiveness, with mercy, with grace. It demonstrate[s] how (depending on what we need it to be in any given moment) we see such grace as either a giant eraser coming down from the sky and whipping clean every consequence or as the Path of Fools, destined to uphold and establish forever every cruelty, every injustice, every barbarism. The truth, however, is much grander: forgiveness and grace are the tools by which God will repair the broken cosmos, the means through which the Creator will at last restore His creation. And our ability to participate in this grand restoration is an act of the Divine economy, a blessing not a burden. And, ultimately, not something that needs us. God could do it alone. He simply prefers to do it with us."  --Katherine Kelaidis

"Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society."  -- John Lewis

"Just imagine if all the energy that goes into fighting other people and reinforcing the belief in separateness was instead directed at showing respect for people. What if the five R's of restorative justice—respect, relationship, responsibility, repair, and reintegration—were guiding principles of our activism?"  —G. Scott Brown

 "I know how great a temptation it is in times of anguish and agony to look away from our painful center and expect peace and a sense of inner wholeness to come from some external source. But I am increasingly convinced that, at times of anguish and agony, we have to choose a contained life where we can be in the presence of people who hold us safe and bring us in touch with the unconditional affective love of God. Do not get involved in experiences of living that will lead to dissipation. What is so important is to have a deep sense of inner safety, of being held by a love that is in no way using you, manipulating you, or “needing” you."  --Henri Nouwen

 "A country which prefers guns to flowers will live the beauty of the flowers only in its graveyards."  —Mehmet Murat Ildan

Spiritual Freedom

"Freedom belongs to the core of the spiritual life; not just the freedom that releases us from forces that want to oppress us, but the freedom also to forgive others, to serve them, and to form a new bond of fellowship with them. In short, the freedom to love and to work for a free world."  --Henri Nouwen

"Religion without humanity is very poor human stuff."  —Sojourner Truth

"Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination."    --Wendell Berry

"Peace is not merely the absence of visible conflict. Only a just peace based on the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting."  -- Barack Obama

"In the flush of love's light / we dare be brave / And suddenly we see / that love costs all we are / and will ever be. / Yet it is only love / which sets us free."  -- Maya Angelou