Week Ten Readings

Living Faith

Epilogue: Reconciliation and Religion in the Twenty-First Century

"The religious revisioning of sacred spaces can impact the existential orientations of millions of citizens." -Rabbi Marc Gopin

"I rephrase this in the positive and say, if the millions of people of faith who desire peace and social justice actually take the time to develop relationships with people of other faiths, seek experiences in other faith communities, and acquire the skills needed for peace-making, they will overwhelm the political and cultural milieu." 

Week Nine Readings

Living Faith

A Lived Faith

"Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial." -MLK Jr.

"...politics is about people, and you can't separate people from their spiritual values." - Suu Kyi

"When hope comes as a gift, is is a gift we must choose to embrace. We must have the outrageous audacity to reject despair and choose hope. Hope allows us to go beyond our limits and project ourselves into an uncertain future where dream and desire have the force of memory. Thus one may say that the human being is defined by his or her hope."

Week Eight Readings

Living Faith

 

The Ethics of Revolution

 

Bonheffer: He embraced his freedom by upsetting the values of the Nazi regime

Malcom X: Was the "dynamite of the human society." 

Aung San Suu Kyi: A revolutionary of the spirit and in her amazing ability to always reach out with love to those who persecute her.

"If the system in place cannot produce freedom for all members of the society, then a change is called for."

"The purpose of a revolution is to abolish the present status quo and to attempt to replace it with a qualitatively different one. The aim of a revolution is a just society based on new relationships of production & an end to the domination of some countries by others, of some social classes by others, of some people by others."

"Mystic-activists have something in common with everyone else- they are human, for better of for worse. Although they may believe God calls them, they do not consider themselves perfect humans. They struggle with human fraity."

Aime Cesaire wrote in Discourse on Colonialism: "A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."

How Can I Help?

Reprise: Walking Each Other Home

“Perhaps we see our deepest yearnings reflected in others, and this encourages us to believe in our own purity and beauty.” Everywhere I look, I see beauty in everyone.

“We can, of course, help through all that we do. But at the deepest level we help through who we are.”

“We are in the world but not of the world. We are part of the formless but are in form. We exist beyond the polarities of positive and negative, dark and light, good and evil, pleasure and pain, yin and yang; but we function under their cloak as well. Even our perspective of separateness has changed. For while it may indeed be a ‘delusion of consciousness,’ even this delusion seems part of a greater order.”

Week Seven Readings

Living Faith

Aung San Suu Kyi: "A Revolution of the Spirit"

"It is never easy to convince those who have acquired power forcibly of the wisdom of peaceful change."

"The sight of such a young boy offering up his life was too much even for soldiers used to killing."

How Can I Help?

Burnout

“This is the final act of service: to acknowledge and honor the integrity of another being as they, like us, pass through the beauty and the pain of a human birth.”

“The pain of the world will sear and break our hearts because we can no longer keep them closed.” We’ve seen too much now. To some degree or other, we have surrendered into service and are willing to pay the price of compassion.

“To give and to give and to give, and to know that is my riches. There is no tomorrow here. There is only today and what God asks me to do today.” Pastor Joseph

Week Six Readings

Living Faith

An Identity Rooted in Humanity

"We must first arrive at an understanding of what it means to be human in order to understand the significance of defining one's own identity and the identity of others as human."

"Precisely what does it mean to experience oneself as a human being? He sees himself as a part of a continuing, breathing, living existence. To be a human being, then, is to be essentially alive in a living world... a naked human spirit that spills over into other human spirits as they spill over into [us]." - Howard Thurman

"When you teach  a man to hate his lips, the lips that God gave him, the shape of the nose that God gave him, the texture of the hair that God gave him, the color of the skin that God gave him, you've committed the worst crime that a race of people can commit...Our color became a chain, a psychological chain. Our blood- African blood- became a psychological chain, a prison, because we were ashamed of it..." -Malcom X

"But in order to attain equity and justice- to improve the quality of life for those oppressed or poor- the lives of the privileged will be affected."

"To forgive, I think, basically means the ability to see the person apart from the deed and to recognize that although he has done that deed, it does not mean that he is irredeemable." -Aung San Suu Kyi

How Can I Help?

The Way of Social Action

“Daily you have come and told me it is your dharma to prevent this disease with your needles. We have sent you away. Tonight you have used force. You say you act in accordance with your duty. I have acted in accordance with mine. It is over. God will decide.” This story/excerpt touched me to the depths of my soul. If only the rest of the world could behave as such I wonder what it would look like. We have something to learn from Mohan Singh.

“Our aim is to awaken together and see what follows, not to manipulate one another into this action or that.”

“What’s been dealt with in solitude becomes the basis for solidarity.” Something to ponder…

“If we are not rooted in compassion, how will our acts contribute to a compassionate world? If we cannot move beyond inner discord, how can we help find a way to social harmony? If we ourselves cannot know peace, be peaceful, how will our acts disarm hatred and violence?”

 “Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate people, you are already defeated.”

“We’re here to awaken from the illusion of separateness.” Is this to be the purpose of our lives?

“The soul force is indestructible and it goes on gaining power until it transforms everyone it touches.” Mohandas K. Gandhi