“In their dwelling, they love the earth;
In their heart, they love what is deep;
In personal relationships, they love kindness;
In their words, they love truth.
In the world, they love peace.”
—Lao Tzu
“Don’t wait for someone to apologize and hold a grudge against them until they do. You know why? Because the person that feels the wrath of your anger, frustration, and hatred is you. Those hostile feelings, emotions, and thoughts pulsate through your bloodstream like venomous poison, and you become the host keeping that poison alive. Rather than waiting for an apology, or expecting one to come, realize it may never happen and that’s okay. Because your life and your happiness don’t depend on someone else saying sorry. Your life and your happiness depend on you and no one else.”—Antasha Durbin
“Nonviolence is the bridge between spiritual development and social change.”—Michael Nagler
Verse of the day
For I will restore health to you, and your wounds I will heal, says the Lord, because they have called you an outcast: “It is Zion; no one cares for her!”
– Jeremiah 30:17
Voice of the day
It doesn’t mean everything is going to get better, it just means we’re living through it. Healing is about being present and living in this life.
– Laura Anderson, “How to Find Healing From Religious Trauma”
Prayer of the day
Lord, as your people are living through it, in our showing up, may we be healed of our wounds.
“Those who engage in violence and suppression will not win the hearts and mind of the world, but rather that victory will be claimed by those who advocate for accountability and justice through nonviolent resistance.”—Jonathan Kuttab
Food for thought as the political and civil discourse in this country and around the world continues to descend into madness… this is as much for myself as it is for anyone else to contemplate and do some self-examination…
The tactic of nonviolence is a tactic of love that seeks the salvation and redemption of the opponent, not his castigation, humiliation, and defeat. A pretended nonviolence that seeks to defeat and humiliate the adversary by spiritual instead of physical attack is little more than a confession of weakness. True nonviolence is totally different from this, and much more difficult. It strives to operate without hatred, without hostility, and without resentment. — Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 81 (Kindle version)
A powerful reflection!
When people first learn that my mother survived the Holocaust, they frequently ask me if she was Jewish.[1] It’s understandable. The Nazi Final Solution targeted Jews. Six million of them died in the camps.
It comes as a surprise to them when I explain that my mother was a fifteen-year-old Roman Catholic school girl. She is one of the thousands of the non-Jews who were sentenced to one of those dreadful camps. The Nazis killed up to half a million of them in addition to their Jewish victims.[2]
— Read on jakeowensby.com/2023/08/25/love-and-freedom/
This is a challenging and graphic read but it shares a deep truth about moral injury and how war changes lives… I am thankful that The Presbyterian Outlook published it.
Ben Weakley spent 14 years in the U.S. Army, including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. He reflects on the cost of killing and the work of healing.
— Read on pres-outlook.org/2023/08/we-bear-the-mark/
It is through our broken, vulnerable, mortal ways of being that the healing power of the eternal God becomes visible to us.
We are called each day to present to the Lord the whole of our lives—our joys as well as sorrows, our successes as well as failures, our hopes as well as fears. We are called to do so with our limited means, our stuttering words and halting expressions. In this way we will come to know in mind and heart the unceasing prayer of God’s Spirit in us. Our many prayers are in fact confessions of our inability to pray. But they are confessions that enable us to perceive the merciful presence of God.
Almost all religions and cultures that I know of have believed in one way or another that sin and evil are to be punished and retribution is to be demanded of the sinner in this world—and usually the next world, too. Such retributive justice is a dualistic system of reward and punishment, good folks and bad folks, and makes perfect sense to the ego. I call it the economy of merit or “meritocracy.” This system seems to be the best that prisons, courtrooms, wars, and even most of the church (which should know better) appear equipped to do…
Mere counting and ledger-keeping are not the way of the Gospel. Our best self wants to restore relationships, and not blame or punish. This is the “economy of grace.” (The trouble is that we defined God as “punisher-in-chief” instead of Healer, Forgiver, and Reconciler and so the retribution model was legitimized all the way down!)
Source: Daily Meditations, August 22, 2023
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