I will revisit these words and listen for the Advent terms!
Hope
By Seamus Heaney
Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted or endured.
The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up
and hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.
Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.
Source: The Cure at Troy
posted at inward/outward on 11-11-2011
Friday, November 11, 2011
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
N. Gordon Cosby quoted at inward/outward
If you feel you can't tolerate the mess, the only advice I can give to you is this: choose what for you is a better mess, if you can find it. But wherever you go, you go to the next mess. You may take a couple of years to find out how messy it is, but you will find it to be a mess. God has tolerated many messes for many eons.
If you feel you can't tolerate the mess, the only advice I can give to you is this: choose what for you is a better mess, if you can find it. But wherever you go, you go to the next mess. You may take a couple of years to find out how messy it is, but you will find it to be a mess. God has tolerated many messes for many eons.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Henri Nouwen on Loving the Church
Loving the Church often seems close to impossible. Still, we must keep reminding ourselves that all people in the Church - whether powerful or powerless, conservative or progressive, tolerant or fanatic - belong to that long line of witnesses moving through this valley of tears, singing songs of praise and thanksgiving, listening to the voice of their Lord, and eating together from the bread that keeps multiplying as it is shared. When we remember that, we may be able to say, "I love the Church, and I am glad to belong to it."
Loving the Church is our sacred duty. Without a true love for the Church, we cannot live in it in joy and peace. And without a true love for the Church, we cannot call people to it.
Loving the Church often seems close to impossible. Still, we must keep reminding ourselves that all people in the Church - whether powerful or powerless, conservative or progressive, tolerant or fanatic - belong to that long line of witnesses moving through this valley of tears, singing songs of praise and thanksgiving, listening to the voice of their Lord, and eating together from the bread that keeps multiplying as it is shared. When we remember that, we may be able to say, "I love the Church, and I am glad to belong to it."
Loving the Church is our sacred duty. Without a true love for the Church, we cannot live in it in joy and peace. And without a true love for the Church, we cannot call people to it.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
from inward/outward
Eugenio Zolli
The books of Sacred Scripture contain much more than what is written in them. Our soul also has depths unknown to us. On the sacred pages and in our soul, there are melodies we do not hear. In the spaces of the world there are melodies which no one catches because no one listens.
Source: Before the Dawn
The books of Sacred Scripture contain much more than what is written in them. Our soul also has depths unknown to us. On the sacred pages and in our soul, there are melodies we do not hear. In the spaces of the world there are melodies which no one catches because no one listens.
Source: Before the Dawn
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
From Richard Rohr
CONTEMPLATION
Could meditation/contemplation be the very thing that has the power to both democratize, reform, and and mature Christianity? It alone does not demand major education, does not need a hierarchy of decision makers, does not need to argue about gender issues in leadership or liturgy, does not need preachers and bishops, and does not need membership requirements that include and exclude. Contemplation’s non-verbal character makes all our arguments about “the right words” and the perfectly correct understanding of those words largely useless. We clergy are almost put out of business.
Deep prayer on the inside heals the outside and the in-between simply by reconnecting everything at its core and at our Center. And let us be honest–Jesus talked a lot more about praying and healing than any of the issues that continue to preoccupy most of our churches.
Adapted from A Lever and A Place to Stand:
The Contemplative Stance, The Active Prayer, pp. 58-59
Could meditation/contemplation be the very thing that has the power to both democratize, reform, and and mature Christianity? It alone does not demand major education, does not need a hierarchy of decision makers, does not need to argue about gender issues in leadership or liturgy, does not need preachers and bishops, and does not need membership requirements that include and exclude. Contemplation’s non-verbal character makes all our arguments about “the right words” and the perfectly correct understanding of those words largely useless. We clergy are almost put out of business.
Deep prayer on the inside heals the outside and the in-between simply by reconnecting everything at its core and at our Center. And let us be honest–Jesus talked a lot more about praying and healing than any of the issues that continue to preoccupy most of our churches.
Adapted from A Lever and A Place to Stand:
The Contemplative Stance, The Active Prayer, pp. 58-59
Saturday, June 4, 2011
A Prayer by Bishop Woodie White:
And now, may the Lord torment you, may the Lord keep before you the faces of the hungry and the lonely and the rejected and the despised, and may the Lord give you courage and strength and compassion to make ours a better world, to make your community a better community, to make your church a better church. And may you do your very best to make it so. And after you have done your best, may the Lord grant you peace.
And now, may the Lord torment you, may the Lord keep before you the faces of the hungry and the lonely and the rejected and the despised, and may the Lord give you courage and strength and compassion to make ours a better world, to make your community a better community, to make your church a better church. And may you do your very best to make it so. And after you have done your best, may the Lord grant you peace.
Friday, March 25, 2011
From Inward/outward
I pass this on from one of my favorite devotional sites
By Nancy Compton Williams
I must learn
the calligraphy
of egret stance,
poised on a word
that lies beneath
the weaving current,
steady, still.
Source: Christianity and Literature
By Nancy Compton Williams
I must learn
the calligraphy
of egret stance,
poised on a word
that lies beneath
the weaving current,
steady, still.
Source: Christianity and Literature
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Original Unity
"The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear Brothers [and Sisters], we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are."
- Thomas Merton
Copied from Verse and Voice/ Sojourners
- Thomas Merton
Copied from Verse and Voice/ Sojourners
Friday, February 18, 2011
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Copied from inward./outward
New Dimensions of Love
By Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization. There is still a voice crying out in terms that echo across the generations, saying: Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you, that you may be the children of your Father which is in Heaven. This love might well be the salvation of our civilization.
Source: I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World (Speech given to the First Annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change in Dec 1956)
By Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization. There is still a voice crying out in terms that echo across the generations, saying: Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you, that you may be the children of your Father which is in Heaven. This love might well be the salvation of our civilization.
Source: I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World (Speech given to the First Annual Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change in Dec 1956)
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