“You can’t talk someone into believing their dignity. You do what you can to make a person feel unashamed of themselves and you hope in time they’ll believe in their beauty all on their own.”—Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh
“Nonviolence to me is a source of power. And the power is actually in each person. One thing we have in common as individuals, as human beings, is the power to show love. The basis of nonviolence is love.”—Dr. Bernard Lafayette, The Third Harmony: Nonviolence and the New Story of Human Nature(film)
I suspect that we too often have lost contact with the source of our own existence and have become strangers in our own house. We tend to run around trying to solve the problems of our world while anxiously avoiding confrontation with that reality wherein our problems find their deepest roots: our own selves. In many ways we are like the busy executive who walks up to a precious flower and says: “What for God’s sake are you doing here? Can’t you get busy somehow?” and then finds the flower’s response incomprehensible: “I am sorry, but I am just here to be beautiful.”
How can we also come to this wisdom of the flower that being is more important than doing? How can we come to a creative contact with the grounding of our own life?
The contemplative is someone who sees things for what they really are, who sees the real connections, who knows—as Thomas Merton used to say—“what the scoop is.” To attain such a vision, a spiritual discipline is necessary. Evagrius [Ponticus] calls discipline the praktike, removing the blindfolds that prevent us from seeing clearly. Merton, himself very familiar with Evagrius, expressed the same idea. He told the monks of Gethsemani Abbey that the contemplative life is a life in which we constantly move from opaqueness to transparency, from the place where things are dark, impenetrable, and closed to the place where these same things are translucent, open, and offer vision far beyond themselves.
“I was amazed at how much energy I had wasted on fear. Time after time, I found myself fearing I would not be able to do something. Then I would do it. . . . Our fears take us to the edge of our being to a place where we are fully alive.”—Sarah York, Pilgrim Heart
Verse of the day
All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.
– Acts 2:44-45
Voice of the day
Shouting “self-care” at people who actually need “community care” is how we fail people.
– Nakita Valerio
Prayer of the day
Teach us discernment in these days, Lord, of when those around us need community care or self-care.
“We need to understand what other people think. While we don’t have to agree with them, we need to understand them to be different. . . . This is the alternative to nuclear war.”—Senator J. William Fulbright
Something very deep and mysterious, very holy and sacred, is taking place in our lives right where we are, and the more attentive we become the more we will begin to see and hear it. The more our spiritual sensitivities come to the surface of our daily lives, the more we will discover—uncover—a new presence in our lives
“We, the people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth.”
—Maya Angelou
“The culture of non-violence might
finally penetrate the thick cover of dark clouds
besieging us in a prison of anxiety, violence and absurdity,
in order to restore communication
with a sun
that does not despair of calling us every single morning . . .”—Walid Slaybi
Pastor Michael Moore's Blog 