All Will Be Well in the End

All will be well in the end —
if all is not well, then it's not the end!

~ Megan McKenna
a Catholic writer, and a peace and justice activist
http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/practices/features.php?id=15978

Punishments for Laziness

Failure is not the only punishment for laziness;
there is also the success of others.

~ Jules Renard

The Deepest Yearning of Our Hearts

“Speak to us about the deepest yearning of our hearts, about our many wishes, about hope; not about the many strategies for (mere) survival, but about trust; not about new methods of satisfying our emotional needs, but about love.

Speak to us about a vision larger than our changing perspectives and about a voice deeper than the clamorings of our mass media. Yes, speak to us about something or someone greater than ourselves. Speak to us about.....God.”

~ Excerpt from Life of the Beloved,
by Henri J.M. Nouwen (page 22).

Truth-Telling, Kindness, Forgiveness, and Anger

“Contrary to popular opinion, Christians are not nice polite people who never get angry with one another. Those are not the virtues of God’s people. Our virtues are truth-telling, kindness, forgiveness and yes, even anger—as long as it is the anger that is part of true love—through which we move closer to one another and to the God who has shown us how it is done.”

~ Barbara Brown Taylor

Seeing the Creature Made in the Divine Image

“God can look right through whatever evil we have done in our lives and get to the creature made in the divine image. I suspect that only God and well-loved infants can see this way. Peter denied Jesus, and Saul persecuted the early Christians, but God could see the apostles they would become. Maybe that’s why we worship—to respond to this grace. We praise God not to celebrate our own faith but to give thanks for the faith that God has in us and in others.”

~ Kathleen Norris

To be a Christian is to live dangerously

“To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely,—to step out in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, and to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away. This is the kind of vision and courage required to enable the renewal of prophetic, democratic, Christian idenity in the age of American Empire.”

~ Cornel West
Democracy Matters

The Organized/Economic Church

Organized Christianity seems, in general, to have made peace with “the economy” by divorcing itself from economic issues, and this, I think, has proved to be a disaster, both religious and economic. The reason for this, on the side of religion, is suggested by the adjective “organized.” It is clearly possible that, in the condition of the world as the world now is, organization can force upon an institution a character that is alien or even antithetical to it.

The organized church comes immediately under a compulsion to think of itself, and identify itself to the world, not as an institution synonymous with its truth and its membership, but as a hodgepodge of funds, properties, projects, and offices, all urgently requiring economic support. The organized church makes peace with a destructive economy and divorces itself from economic issues because it is economically compelled to do so.

Like any other public institution so organized, the organized church is dependent on “the economy”; it cannot survive apart from those economic practices that its truth forbids and that its vocation is to correct. If it comes to a choice between the extermination of the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field and the extermination of the building fund, the organized church will elect—indeed, has already elected—to save the building fund.

The irony is compounded and made harder to bear by the fact that the building fund can be preserved by crude applications of money, but the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field can be preserved only by true religion, by the practice of a proper love and respect for them as the creatures of God. No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to “spiritual” subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history’s most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.

~ Wendell Berry, “God and Country” in What are People For?

The Theology Already There

“We are at the beginning of a period in which many things will have to be tried. A few will work; many will not. But the place where the courage to attempt something different—something by way of participation in the worldly suffering of God—begins is thinking critically about the theology that has accompanied Christendom and asking for another theology. Not just a new strategy, or greater commitment to social programs, or more exciting liturgies, or more sincere spirituality—no, for a different theology.

And I am comforted by the thought that we do not have to invent such a theology….The theology that we need is already there—from the Old Testament onwards! It is really just a matter of letting go of some of our conditioned beliefs and assumptions and allowing what is there to speak to us as we are, where we are, and when we are.”

~ Douglas John Hall, The Cross in our Context

The Human Soul

“If we want to support each other’s inner lives, we must remember a simple truth: the human soul does not want to be fixed, it wants simply to be seen and heard.

If we want to see and hear a person’s soul, there is another truth we must remember: the soul is like a wild animal—-tough, resilient, and yet shy. When we go crashing through the woods shouting for it to come out so we can help it, the soul will stay in hiding. But if we are willing to sit quietly and wait for a while, the soul may show itself.”

~Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach

Belonging and Election

Belonging is that complex, entangling, and freeing experience of simultaneous choosing and being chosen that lovers, committed members of marginalized groups, members of religious communities, and others know. Belonging is the way human beings find a home for themselves in a universe not centered in or on them…. [B]elonging brings with it not greater privilege, but wider and deeper joy, obligations to others, and suffering…. the acknowledgement that one is a participant rather than a ruler.

Finally, the teaching of election reconstructed as belonging could help to counter the tendency toward spiritualism (the devaluing of the embodied life); for each of us belongs only in and through the stubbornly concrete and particular experience that is ours.

“Election” by Mary Potter Engel in The New Handbook of Christian Theology.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

© Mary Oliver. Online Source