The Kingdom of God is, then, not the Kingdom of those who merely preach a doctrine or follow certain religious practices: it is the Kingdom of those who love. To build the Kingdom of God is to build a society that is based entirely on freedom and love. It is to build a society which is founded on respect for the individual person, since only persons are capable of love. — Disputed Questions, p. 142, Kindle version
“The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”—Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island
“You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.” — Mahatma Gandhi
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Verse of the day
Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
– John 8:31-32
Voice of the day
Truth is divine action entering our lives and creating the human action of liberation.
– James Cone
Prayer of the day
Let your living truth take root in us, that by continuing in your word we may be set free and become agents of liberation in a world longing for justice and grace.
“If violence is met by violence, the world will fall into a spiral of violence”—Hélder Câmara
“We have the capacity to feed ourselves several times over, but we are daily haunted by the spectacle of the gaunt dregs of humanity shuffling along in endless queues, with bowls to collect what the charity of the world has provided, too little too late. When will we learn, when will the people of the world get up and say, Enough is enough. God created us for fellowship. God created us so that we should form the human family, existing together because we were made for one another. We are not made for an exclusive self-sufficiency but for interdependence, and we break the law of our being at our peril.”—Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize Lecture 1984
The union that binds the members of Christ together is not the union of proud confidence in the power of an organization. The Church is united by the humility as well as by the charity of her members. Hers is the union that comes from the consciousness of individual fallibility and poverty, from the humility which recognizes its own limitations and accepts them, the meekness that cannot take upon itself to condemn, but can only forgive because it is conscious that it has itself been forgiven by Christ. The union of Christians is a union of friendship and mercy, a bearing of one anothers’ burdens in the sharing of divine forgiveness. — Disputed Questions, pp. 139-140 Kindle version
Verse of the day
I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth; do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.
– Isaiah 43:19
Voice of the day
The most damaging phrase in the language is, “It’s always been done that way.”
– Grace Hopper
Prayer of the day
God, help us to notice your forward-moving spirit and give us the courage to join in your new and transformative work.
“One of the curses of history is that we cannot go back and change the course leading to disasters, no matter how much we might wish to. The past has its own terrible inevitability. But it is never too late to change the future.”—Heather Cox Richardson
Yet we cannot forget the frightful barbarities perpetrated by the Western Crusaders in Constantinople, desecrating Greek Churches, sacking monasteries and committing all sorts of other crimes, confident that these were acts proper to a holy war! Such incomprehension of the law and love of Christ seems almost unbelievable. Yet the study of history shows us these things and others like them repeated over and over again. By such actions the Kingdom of God is not built, it is destroyed. — Disputed Questions, p. 139 (Kindle version)
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