A powerful blog from my dear friend, colleague, and seminary classmate. Thank you, Shirley!
“God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away …
A Moral Crisis – Faith Calls Us to Be Voices for the Voiceless
“We live in a world that is arming itself with nuclear weapons. At the same time, we have the sustainable development goals underfunded. We have underfunding of climate change adaptation and mitigation. If an alien ship orbiting the earth looked at this data, they would say, ‘These people are cuckoo; they’re nonsense.'”—President Carlos Alvarado Quesada on Disrupting Peace
“[Mary] teaches us how to root down deeply into her love and care, and then from this place of groundedness we increase our capacity to care for others and offer them hospitality.”
—Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, Birthing the Holy: Wisdom from Mary to Nurture Creativity and Renewal
What spiritual practices or guides help you root into love and care?
To register for the self-study companion retreat to the book with extra resources and guidance click here. Use code BH20 to take 20% off through December 31st.
“For us, warriors are not what you think of as warriors. The warrior is not someone who fights, because no one has the right to take another life. The warrior, for us, is one who sacrifices himself for the good of others. His task is to take care of the elderly, the defenseless, those who cannot provide for themselves, and above all, the children, the future of humanity!”
~ Sitting Bull Tatanka lyotake
These words of Thomas Merton speak the hard truth to power.
Even where totalitarianism has not yet completely wiped out all liberty, men are still subject to the corrupting effect of materialism. The world has always been selfish: but the modern world has lost all ability to control its egoism. And yet, having acquired the power to satisfy its material needs and its desires for pleasures and comfort, it has discovered that these satisfactions are not enough. They do not bring peace, they do not bring happiness. They do not bring security either to the individual or to society. We live at the precise moment when the exorbitant optimism of the materialist world has plunged into spiritual ruin. We find ourselves living in a society of men who have discovered their own nonentity where they least expected to—in the midst of power and technological achievement. The result is an agony of ambivalence in which each man is forced to project upon his neighbors a burden of self-hatred which is too great to be tolerated by his own soul. — The Living Bread, p. 16
In a nation where politicians and oligarchs strip away rights and programs to assist the vulnerable this truth needs to be heard. As the Scrooges of this world (my apologies to old Ebenezer for using his name to describe the 1%) literally and figuratively kill the 99% in their quest for money and power, all their greed will amount to absolutely nothing. In the end, they will die just like everyone else and their money and so-called power will simply rot or be stolen.
We need to remind each other that the cup of sorrow is also the cup of joy, that precisely what causes us sadness can become the fertile ground for gladness. Indeed, we need to be angels for each other, to give each other strength and consolation. Because only when we fully realize that the cup of life is not only a cup of sorrow but also a cup of joy will we be able to drink it.
Phase (excerpt)
The moon is a poem
sometimes full in my mouth
summer’s first strawberry
sometimes a communion
wafer dissolving on the tongue
—Christine Valters Paintner, PhD, Dreaming of Stones: Poems
What natural phenomenon fills your spirit to overflowing so that you feel as if you too are communing with nature and the Divine?
Verse of the day
The mountains melt like wax before the Lord, before the Lord of all the earth.
– Psalm 97:5
Voice of the day
Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me.
– Isabel Allende
Prayer of the day
When the mountain of fear seems insurmountable, give us the strength to keep going, because through you it can be overcome.
I just began reading Thomas Merton’s 1956 book The Living Bread. While the primary subject is the Roman Catholic understanding of the Eucharist, I am finding it also speaks of the body of Christ and humankind in a way that this Presbyterian can easily affirm. The following quotes come from the Prologue.
Totalitarian states ruthlessly manipulate human beings, degrading and destroying them at will, sacrificing bodies and minds on the altar of political opportunism without the slightest respect for the value of the human person. Indeed, one might almost say that the modern dictatorships have displayed everywhere a deliberate and calculated hatred for human nature as such. The techniques of degradation used in concentration camps and in staged trials are too familiar to be detailed here. They all have one purpose: to defile the human person beyond recognition in order to manufacture evidence for a lie….
Techniques of degradation systematically foment distrust, resentment, separation and hatred. They keep men spiritually isolated from one another, while jamming them together physically on a superficial level—the plane of the mass meeting. They tend to corrode all man’s personal relationships by fear and suspicion so that the neighbor, the co-worker, is not a friend and support but always a rival, a menace, a persecutor, a potential stool pigeon who, if we are not careful, will have us sent to prison. (The Living Bread, p. 16)
As I watch the continuing descent into madness in this nation and around the world, Merton’s words speak loudly to me. From the unwarranted, illegal, and immoral actions of the government against immigrants to the attacks that are being committed in the Caribbean to the atrocities committed in Palestine and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, I see the degradation of basic humanity, what Scottish Poet Robert Burns called Man’s inhumanity towards man. (Source: Man Was Made to Mourn)
I also see destruction and division being sown in the rise of christian nationalism and the political, ideological, and theological fighting in the church. The idolatry that is christian nationalism is not what Jesus revealed in his calling of the twelve disciples to follow him. It is not what he spoke about in The Sermon on the Mount (specifically in the Beatitudes). In this setting, Merton calls us to remember that Christianity is a religion of life, not of death. (p. 14)
Creating division and sowing seeds of hatred, fear, and mistrust only harms human beings both individually and collectively. There is a better way for humankind to live. In this Advent season as we prepare to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, my prayer is that the tide will turn and the peace that passes all understanding will transform this world.
Then the words of Jesus might be fulfilled. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind… and also love your neighbor as yourself. (my paraphrase of Matthew 22:36-40)
May it be so…
“It is our duty—as men and women* of conscience—to behave as though limits to our ability do not exist. We are co-creators of the Universe.”—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Pastor Michael Moore's Blog 