“There is no such thing as single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”—Audre Lorde
A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes – and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas
Verse of the day
Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the Lord has comforted his people and will have compassion on his suffering ones.
– Isaiah 49:13
Voice of the day
There is no better compass than compassion.
– Amanda Gorman, “Call Us What We Carry” (2021)
Prayer of the day
Guide us with the compass of compassion, that we may reflect your comfort and love.
If we… accept God’s revelation of [God’s self] in the Infant of Bethlehem, we must realize also that this acceptance has grave consequences for our lives. It means accepting One for whom there is no room in the “inner” of an excited and distraught world….. We see this in the disturbing symbol of that census which brings “the whole world” into the books of a Roman imperial power. If we accept this Infant as our God, then we accept our own obligation to grow with Him in a world of arrogant power and travel with Him as He ascends to Jerusalem and to the Cross, which is the denial of power. —- Thomas Merton (Love and Living as found in Advent and Christmas with Thomas Merton, p. 39)
When God chooses Mary as the means when God himself wants to come into the world in the manger of Bethlehem, this is not an idyllic family affair. It is instead the beginning of a complete reversal, a new ordering of all things on this earth….
What is going on here, where Mary becomes the mother of God, where God comes into the world in the lowliness of the manger? World judgment and world redemption—that is what’s happening here. And it is the Christ child in the manger himself who holds world judgment and world redemption. He pushes back the high and mighty; he overturns the thrones of the powerful; he humbles the haughty; his arm exercises power over all the high and mighty; he lifts what is lowly, and makes it great and glorious in his mercy. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christmas Sermons as found in God Is In the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas, p. 42
What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. — Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, then we will know peace.”—Jimi Hendrix
An old master went from India to China to see the emperor, who was already a Buddhist. The emperor said to the Zen master: “I have built temples, put up pagodas, and started monasteries. What is my reward?” And the master replied: “You don’t get any. There’s no reward for you.” The emperor was all shook up, thought about it, and after a while realized what was meant. If you need something else as a reward, your giving is a fiction. — The Springs of Contemplation
What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. — Leonard Cohen (Poems and Songs: Cohen (Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series))
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak we write . . . That is how civilizations heal.”—Toni Morrison
Pastor Michael Moore's Blog 