“Like love, nonviolence is an active state. We are called to constantly train, refine, and prepare ourselves for conflict which, as the saying goes, ‘is inevitable and completely natural.’”—Michael Nagler
Verse of the day
For you always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me.
– Matthew 26:11
Voice of the day
Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life.
– Nelson Mandela
Prayer of the day
Lord, help us to reject the temptation of using your words to justify inaction. May we see the overcoming of poverty as an attainable act of justice.
“Nonviolent civil disobedience is a very powerful weapon. It’s probably one of the most powerful weapons that we have in the arsenal of nonviolent action because you’re literally putting your body on the line. You’re saying you’re willing to disobey a custom, a tradition or what you consider to be an unjust law. You’re willing to pay the price. You’re willing to suffer. You’re willing to go to jail if necessary and serve your time. I think there’s something very redemptive about it.”—John Lewis
“In general, both King and the Gospel itself would state that violence is finally wrong because it feeds on hatred and not on love. It increases fear and not faith. It creates bitterness and victimhood in the survivors and brutality and arrogance in the destroyers. Different ‘types’ of violence are just two sides of the same dance with evil. Righteous violence finally leaves people in self-justifying monologues instead of the unceasing love dialogue that is the very Trinitarian nature of God, and therefore of the entire universe.”—Richard Rohr
“I will set my face to the wind and scatter my handfuls of seeds. It is no big thing to scatter seeds, but I must have the courage to keep facing the wind.”—Arabic Proverb
“In this increasingly interconnected world, we must understand that what happens to poor people is never divorced from the actions of the powerful.”—Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power
Verse of the day
And ‘to love God with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself’—this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
– Mark 12:33
Voice of the day
Weep before you speak / think before you eat / How you love a country’s food more than its people?
– KB, “Long Live the Champion”
Prayer of the day
Lord, too often our desire to show that we’re loving our neighbor gets in the way of us actually loving our neighbor. May we reject a love that is self-centered and public-facing.
PRIDE IS SELF-LOVE, and in one sense a Christian is enjoined to be proud; i.e., another way of saying Love your neighbor as yourself is to say Love yourself as your neighbor. That doesn’t mean your pulse is supposed to quicken every time you look in the mirror any more than it’s supposed to quicken every time your neighbor passes the window. It means simply that the ability to work for your own good despite all the less than admirable things you know about yourself is closely related to the ability to work for your neighbor’s good despite all the less than admirable things you know about him. It also means that just as in this sense love of self and love of neighbor go hand in hand, so do dislike of self and dislike of neighbor. For example (a) the more I dislike my neighbor, the more I’m apt to dislike myself for disliking him and him for making me dislike myself and so on, and (b) I am continually tempted to take out on my neighbor the dislike I feel for myself, just the way if I crack my head on a low door I’m very apt to kick the first cat, child, or chair unlucky enough to catch my bloodshot eye.
Self-love or pride is a sin when, instead of leading you to share with others the self you love, it leads you to keep your self in perpetual safe-deposit. You not only don’t accrue any interest that way but become less and less interesting every day.
-Originally published in The Clown in the Belfry
“When you go out into the woods, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. The minute you get near humans, though, you lose all that. You are constantly saying ‘You are too this, or I’m too this.’ That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.”—Ram Dass
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”—James Baldwin, As Much Truth As One Can Bear
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