I’ve never heard of any community that failed because it lacked material resources. Communities fail because they lack imagination and spiritual contact and soul and a sense of others and staying power and courage to move together and to live together. — Daniel Berrigan (The Raft Is Not the Shore: Conversations Toward a Buddhist-Christian Understanding—Thich Nhat Hanh & Daniel Berrigan, p. 131)
“To be most useful and alive, our opinions—particularly our political opinions—must be in curious conversation with each other. When we’re divided, politics feels like it’s exclusively about stopping the other side. But at its core, politics is about how we coexist wisely, how we create societies that support us in all our different priorities and preferences. . . . This is how our opinions serve us: not by pushing us to defend our point of view to each other at all costs at all times, but by representing it in ongoing negotiations that both honor and transform it.”—Mónica Guzmán, I Never Thought of It That Way: How To Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times
Verse of the day
In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing clearly the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
– 2 Corinthians 4:4
Voice of the day
Remember the goodness you’re working toward. Because the backlash of hate is impossible to carry if you do not remember what it is to love.
– Austin Channing Brown
Prayer of the day
Christ Jesus, we keep our eyes fixed on you, the image of goodness we are working toward.
Verse of the day
The way of peace they do not know, and there is no justice in their ways. Their roads they have made crooked; no one who walks in them knows peace.
– Isaiah 59:8
Voice of the day
The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.
– Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Violence” (1969)
Prayer of the day
Disarm us, O Lord — our minds, lips, hearts, and hands — that we may more perfectly love you. We repent from our own political violence.
All Christian action—whether it is visiting the sick, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, or working for a more just and peaceful society—is a manifestation of the human solidarity revealed to us in the house of God. It is not an anxious human effort to create a better world. It is a confident expression of the truth that in Christ, death, evil, and destruction have been overcome. It is not a fearful attempt to restore a broken order. It is a joyful assertion that in Christ all order has already been restored. It is not a nervous effort to bring divided people together, but a celebration of an already established unity. This action is not activism. An activist wants to heal, restore, redeem, and re-create, but those acting within the house of God point through their action to the healing, restoring, redeeming, and re-creating presence of God.
“We model nonviolence by actively participating in the struggle to change the system. Our struggle does not perpetuate the status quo. For us, nonviolence is about challenging the system, and then working to change the system.”—Zoughbi Zoughbi
In light of some of the vitriol I am seeing on social media this evening, I am sharing this quote:
Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.—Thomas Merton (Thoughts in Solitude, p. 129)
Perhaps we ought to be praying and seeking a way through the storm…
“Society has built up walls, barriers. These the new education must cast down, revealing the free horizon. The new education is a revolution, but without violence.—Maria Montessori
It is my growing conviction that in Jesus the mystical and the revolutionary ways are not opposites, but two sides of the same human mode of experiential transcendence. I am increasingly convinced that conversion is the individual equivalent of revolution. Therefore, every real revolutionary is challenged to be a mystic at heart, and one who walks the mystical way is called to unmask the illusory quality of human society.
Mysticism and revolution are two aspects of the same attempt to bring about radical change. Mystics cannot prevent themselves from becoming social critics, since in self-reflection they will discover the roots of a sick society. Similarly, revolutionaries cannot avoid facing their own human condition, since in the midst of their struggle for a new world they will find that they are also fighting their own reactionary fears and false ambitions.
As we were approaching Denver International Airport, I was listening to Leonard Cohen (Album — Leonard Cohen Essentials). This song came on and it spoke to me about where we are today. Of note, the day my son Alec was born (4 June 1989) the Tiananmen Square massacre was broadcast on national television. Cohen wrote it in 1992 and, sadly today I wonder if Democracy is still coming today… The song lyrics speak for themselves.
It’s coming through a hole in the air;
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It’s coming from the feel that this ain’t exactly real;
Or it’s real but it ain’t exactly there.
From the war against disorder;
from the sirens night and day.
From the fires of the homeless, from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is comming to the U.S.A.
It’s coming through a crack in the wall, on a visionary flood of alcohol.
From the staggering account of the Sermon on the Mount which I don’t pretend to understand at all.
It’s coming from the silence on the dock of the bay.
From the brave, the bold, the battered heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
It’s coming from the sorrow in the street, the holy places where the races meet.
From the homicidal bitchin’ that goes down in every kitchen to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.
It’s coming to America first;
The cradle of the best and of the worst.
It’s here they got the range and the machinery for change,
And it’s here they got the spiritual thirst.
It’s here the family’s broken
And it’s here the lonely say that the heart has got to open in a fundamental way.
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
It’s coming from the women and the men.
O baby, we’ll be making love again.
We’ll be going down so deep the river’s going to weep,
and the mountain’s going to shout Amen!
It’s coming like the tidal flood beneath the lunar sway.
Imperial, mysterious, in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Sail on, sail on …
I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean.
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene.
And I’m neither left or right
I’m just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags
that time cannot decay,
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
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