"The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another's pain as one's own, and to act to take that pain away. There is nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness."  --John Connolly

"Jesus’ message is shocking not because he extends the boundaries to include outsiders. His message shocks because it doesn’t recognize boundaries at all."  --Greg Carey

We are on a Journey

Where are we going? After a very short visit to earth the time comes for each of us to pass from this world to the next. We have been sent into the world as God’s beloved children, and in our passages and our losses we learn to love each other as spouse, parent, brother, or sister. We support one another through the passages of life, and together we grow in love. Finally, we ourselves are called to exodus, and we leave the world for full communion with God. It is possible for us, like Jesus, to send our spirit of love to our friends when we leave them. Our spirit, the love we leave behind, is deeply in God’s Spirit. It is our greatest gift to those we love.

We, like Jesus, are on a journey, living to make our lives abundantly fruitful through our leaving. When we leave, we will say the words that Jesus said: “It is good for you that I leave, because unless I pass away, I cannot send you my spirit to help you and inspire you.”

--Henri Nouwen

Making Our Deaths Fruitful

What I appreciate as I read Scripture is that Jesus saw death, and his own death in particular, as more than a way of getting from one place to another. He saw his death as potentially fruitful in itself, and of enormous benefit to his disciples. Death was not an ending for him but a passage to something much greater.

When Jesus was anticipating his own death he kept repeating the same theme to his disciples: “My death is good for you, because my death will bear many fruits beyond my death. When I die I will not leave you alone, but I will send you my Spirit, the Paraclete, the Counselor. And my Spirit will reveal to you who I am, what I am teaching you. My Spirit will lead you into the truth and will allow you to have a relationship with me that was not possible before my death. My Spirit will help you to form community and grow in strength.” Jesus sees that the real fruits of his life will mature after his death. That is why he adds, “It is good for you that I go.”

If that is true, then the real question for me as I consider my own death is not: how much can I still accomplish before I die, or will I be a burden to others? No, the real question is: how can I live so that my death will be fruitful for others? In other words, how can my death be a gift for my loved ones so that they can reap the fruits of my life after I have died? This question can be answered only if I am first willing to admit Jesus’ vision of death, as a valid possibility for me.

--Henri Nouwen

"One of the reasons we're destroying the planet is that it has lost its sacred dimension for us. The planet as given to us by science is a physical reality essentially meaningless in itself. It's a resource for our physical activity."  --Thomas Berry

What Gives Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” Its Power?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/what-gives-robert-frosts-road-not-taken-its-power-180956200/

Robert Frost by Clara Sipprell, gelatin silver print, 1955. (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; bequest of Phyllis Fenner)

By David C. Ward SMITHSONIANMAG.COM AUGUST 10, 2015

[W]hen you read through the description of the roads after Frost has set out the problem in the opening stanza about having to make a choice, one realizes that neither road is “less travelled by.” ...

And then it becomes clear that neither road has been travelled much at all. In fact, do the roads even exist at all? It appears they don’t.

Frost’s gently presented point is not just that we are self-reliant or independent, but truly alone in the world. No one has cut a path through the woods. We are following no one. We have to choose, and most terrifyingly, the choice may not actually matter. One way is as good as the other and while we can console ourselves with wishful thinking – “I kept the first for another day!” – the poet knows that there’s no turning back to start over: “Yet knowing how way leads on to way/I doubted if I should ever come back.”  ...

It’s the last stanza, though, that makes Frost into a genius, both poetically but also in his insight into human character, story telling and literature. The stanza is retrospective as the traveler/poet looks back on his decision – “ages and ages hence” – and comments how we create a life through the poetic fictions that we create about it to give it, and ourselves, meaning ...

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference."

Notice the stuttering, repetitive “I” that Frost uses both to maintain the rhyme scheme (“I/by”) but also to suggest the traveler/poet’s uncertainty about who made the choice. The narrative drive is reestablished with the penultimate line “I took the one less traveled by,” to conclude with a satisfying resolution that ties everything in a neat biographical lesson “And that has made all the difference.” But it has made no difference at all. The difference, the life, is created in the telling, something that Frost does, of course, masterfully.

"We must believe in the power and strength of our words. Our words can change the world."  --Malala Yousafzai

Be Surprised by Joy

"Learn the discipline of being surprised not by suffering but by joy. As we grow old . . . there is suffering ahead of us, immense suffering, a suffering that will continue to tempt us to think that we have chosen the wrong road. . . . But don’t be surprised by pain. Be surprised by joy, be surprised by the little flower that shows its beauty in the midst of a barren desert, and be surprised by the immense healing power that keeps bursting forth like springs of fresh water from the depth of our pain."  --Henri Nouwen

"Everyone can be great because everyone can serve. You don't need a college degree to serve. You don't even have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. . . . You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love."  --Bacha Khan

"Until our very minds and hearts are freed from violence, freed from the need to scapegoat anybody or create victims anywhere, we will not reach any kind of ‘New Creation.’"  --Alain Richard

"Tchaikovsky notes [in his letters] his cyclical lapses into depression, undergirded by a dogged dedication to looking for beauty and meaning amid the spiritual wreckage. This intimate tango of sadness and radiance is ultimately what gives his music its timeless edge in penetrating the soul ... Even though Tchaikovsky frequently lamented his “wearing, maddening depression,” perhaps most remarkable yet quintessentially human about his disposition was the ability to assure his loved ones of the very things he was unable to internalize himself — for who among us hasn’t found that it is far easier to offer light to our dearest humans in situations that leave our own inner worlds shrouded in impenetrable darkness?"  --Maria Popova

"I learned that courage was not the absence of fear but the triumph over it. It always seems impossible until it is done."  --Nelson Mandela

"Dialogue starts with the willingness to challenge our own thinking; to recognize that any certainty we have is at best a hypothesis about the world."  --Peter Senge

"True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost."  --Arthur Ashe

"Education and justice are democracy's only life insurance."  --Nannie Helen Burroughs

"I'm a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people's lives."  --Ntozake Shange

"Self-deception is so pervasive it touches—and determines—every experience in every aspect of life. It blinds us to the true cause of problems, and once blind, all the ‘solutions’ we think of will actually make matters worse."  --The Arbinger Institute

"I want a change, and a radical change. I want a change from an acquisitive society to a functional society, from a society of go-getters to a society of go-givers."  --Peter Maurin, "Catholic Radicalism" (1949)

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party—and they're sure trying to do so—it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”  --Barry Goldwater

"Whether or not we directly experience the violence of our society, it impinges on us all. It colors our common life. It erects a defensive armor around the heart that impedes us from opening to the pain of our world. It blocks us from knowing that this pain is inside us too."  --Joanna Macy

"We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation."  --Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy (2014)

"A man or woman without hope in the future cannot live creatively in the present. The paradox of expectation indeed is that those who believe in tomorrow can better live today, that those who expect joy to come out of sadness can discover the beginnings of a new life in the center of the old..."  --Henri Nouwen

"Building Beloved Community isn't just about loving the people who are easy to love. Friends, family, community, those with similar value systems, similar cultural or political perspectives. No love is ALWAYS easy, but if we're not struggling to hold love for those that are different than us, those that we don't hang out with, don't work with, don't see eye-to-eye with, then we're not doing the work of building Beloved Community."  --Kazu Haga

"Radical empathy, on the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another's experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel." --Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020)

"In times of stress, the best thing we can do for our children (and for each other) is to listen with our ears and hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers."  Fred Rogers, You Are Special (1995)

"Let us be the ancestors our descendants will thank."  --Winona LaDuke

"There are sufficient resources in the world for the needs of everybody, but not enough for the greed of even a significant minority. "  --Millard Fuller, The Theology of the Hammer (1994)

"It is very important to learn to talk to people you disagree with."  --Dolores Huerta

Take up Your Cross

Your pain is deep, and it won’t just go away. It is also uniquely yours, because it is linked to some of your earliest life experiences.

Your call is to bring that pain home. As long as your wounded part remains foreign to your adult self, your pain will injure you as well as others. Yes, you have to incorporate your pain into your self and let it bear fruit in your heart and the hearts of others.

This is what Jesus means when he asks you to take up your cross. He encourages you to recognize and embrace your unique suffering and to trust that your way to salvation lies therein. Taking up your cross means, first of all, befriending your wounds and letting them reveal to you your own truth.

There is great pain and suffering in the world. But the pain hardest to bear is your own. Once you have taken up that cross, you will be able to see clearly the crosses that others have to bear, and you will be able to reveal to them their own ways to joy, peace, and freedom.

--Henri Nouwen

"Honesty is primarily an attitude of inclusivity, of accepting and acknowledging what's there. It's about being real, and true to who you are, and how you are. The transparent openness to yourself, along with the warmth of self-empathy, creates the conditions for the sweetness of connection to occur. And as you may have already experienced, hard episodes in life, when shared, can become a binding factor in relationship."  --Pati Bielak-Smith

"The essence of love is that what is ours should belong to someone else. Feeling the joy of someone else as joy within ourselves — that is loving."  --Emanuel Swedenborg, in Divine Love and Wisdom (1763)

 "To reinvent your own country you need a great audacity of hope."  --Jürgen Moltmann

"Courage has nothing to do with our determination to be great. It has to do with what we decide in that moment when we are called upon to be more."  --Rita Dove, in Women of Courage (1999)