S / H

The earth is littered with the ruins of empires that thought they were eternal.

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greatest conqueror ever faced.

When Mahatma Gandhi was coming over to England for the roundtable conference in 1932, a group of people stood there waiting. One pointed out saying, “You see around that cliff? That was where Julius Caesar came when he invaded Britain years ago.” And then another pointed in another direction and said, “That was the way William the Conqueror came in.” Then somebody else looked over and said, “There is another conqueror coming in. In just a few minutes the third and greatest conqueror will come into Great Britain.” And strangely enough, this little man came in with no armies, no guards around him, no military might, no beautiful clothes, just loin cloth, but this man proved to be the greatest conqueror that the British Empire ever faced. He was able to achieve, through love and nonviolence, the independence of his people and break the backbone of the British Empire.

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truth versus intent.

The Origin of Totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt is a helpful guide for interpreting the language of our day. She noted how decent Germans of 1930s would "fact check" the Nazis' bizarre claims about Jews like they were meant to be factual. This fact checking was a failure to understand that the Nazi Jew hating was not a statement of fact but a declaration of intent. So when someone would blame the Jews for Germany's defeat in WW1, naive people would counter by saying there's no evidence of that but what the Nazis were doing was not describing what was true, but rather what needed to be true to justify what they planned to do next. I’m curious if many of us are falling victim to the same game.

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Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.

Carl Jung

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I work as hard as I can to distance myself from the canon of popular culture so that I can speak in my own language and not the one they gave me.

Chris Hedges

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subtle nuances of meaning.

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

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Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.

Thomas Merton

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an enemy with a smiling face.

We no longer talk to each other, we entertain each other. We don’t exchange ideas, we exchange images. We don’t argue over solutions; we argue over good looks, celebrities, athletes, and reality shows. Most of our daily media intake is meaningless. It consists of information that gives us something to talk about but can never lead to any type of meaningful action. Aldous Huxley taught, in the age of advanced technology, “...spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate.” Written 84 years ago, while living in the south of France, Huxley’s published satire about—get this—an “infantilized, drug-dependent, consumer society”—sounds like ours, huh? He wrote that over 80 years ago! In his satire, the 1984-esque “Big Brother” does not watch us, we watch him. There is no need for George Orwell’s wardens or gates or ‘Ministries of Truth.’ When a population becomes distracted, when life has been redefined as never-ending ‘seasons’, ‘feeds’, and ‘timelines’ of entertainment, when public conversation becomes nothing more than child-talk, when the people are nothing more than an audience—then a nation is at grave risk to itself, not from some foreign enemy. Following Christ in this day and age has to mean more. I believe I am not mistaken in thinking that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion, but it seems—in this age of entertainment and busyness—Christianity has been made easy and comfortable by elevating a ‘worshipping’ of Jesus rather than a disciple-like ‘following’ of HIm.

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Living in the land of the free has not made us free; we are nation of addicts and complainers.

Eugene Peterson

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to emphasize or not to emphasize.

Jesus taught us ‘in practice’ how to use the word of God—what to emphasize and what not to emphasize. It’s pretty clear in Jesus' usage that not all scriptures are created equal. He consistently ignored or even denied Jewish texts that were exclusionary, punitive, and triumphalist in favor of passages that emphasized inclusion, mercy, and honesty. Check it out for yourself. He knew what passages were paving a way towards God and which passages were not much more than cultural, self-serving, paranoid, tribal, and legalistic additions. Jesus’ highly selective, yet spiritual, reading was why he was accused by Pharisees of "teaching with authority and not like our scribes" (Mt. 7). Jesus would answer these "teachers of the law" explaining how they had entirely missed the point: "You understand neither the scriptures nor the power of God" (Mk. 12). The pharisaical approach of literalism is the shallowest approach in the search for meaning and understanding. For thousands of years the sacred texts have opened up endless possibilities for life and love in communities all over the world. Our Jewish ancestors called the deeper approach “midrash,” which is seeking to extrapolate stories and parables to find the truest message(s). The shallow approach is obvious when scriptures are used to justify slavery, apartheid, exclusion, western capitalism, nationalism, consumerism, and almost any other "-ism" that serves our collective ego. You can see it in the Trump movement. Really, you can see in all of us. The unrelentingness of views is the certain evidence that we have not fully accessed the Infinite Source of God's love and grace. I hope what Ken Wilber so brilliantly says is true:

"Religion starts elitist, but ends egalitarian. Always!"

In time, the boundary-breaking Spirit of God loosens the chains of our ego. The word ‘religion’ or re-ligio, means re-align or re-unite. But what? Religion is a path to reunite what our egos (and survival instincts) have severed, namely an all-encompassing wholeness in our hearts for all creation. A true spiritual journey allows us to get to the end of ourselves so that our margins for those we love expands.

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I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.

Harriet Tubman

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appearing to exist.

In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you open the window, you are ‘subscribed’, engulfed, and watching. You are the text, there is no one else, no author; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free; you are the text, 140 characters momentarily posted just before being superseded by the infinite scroll of a gazer. The internet does not exist. Maybe it did exist only a short time ago, but now it only remains as a blur, a cloud, a friend, a deadline, a redirect, or a 404. If it ever existed, we couldn’t see it. Because it has no shape. It has no face, just this name that describes everything and nothing at the same time. Yet we are still trying to climb onboard, to get inside, to be part of the network, to get in on the language game, to show up on searches, to appear to exist. But we will never get inside of something that isn’t there.

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The problem is, we have forgotten that we belong to each other. There is no us and them.

Mother Teresa

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love makes us be what we are.

Our existence is in loving—"without love I am nothing"—Paul says 1 Corinthians 13:2. To love and be loved is of the essence of Christianity and is constitutive to the being of the believer. Love. We are bound together by what makes us be what we are. Richard Rohr says of this verse:

“Paul is not describing human friendship (philia), nor the affection of parents for children (storge), or even passionate desire (eros); he is describing what it is like to live inside of an Infinite Source—where all the boundaries change, feelings are hardly helpful at all, and all the gaps are filled in from the other side. So you see why I say that any Valentine's notion of love is totally inadequate and can even send you down an impossible and disappointing road if you try to conjure up such romantic dedication within yourself. We have to take breathing lessons and develop larger lungs to live inside of such a new and open horizon. It does not come naturally until we draw upon it many times, and then it becomes the only natural, the deep natural, the true natural.”

Love—we must journey to recover it from a place of power to weakness, from control to vulnerability, from meritocracy to the ocean of grace. In Paul's letters, he consistently idealizes not power but powerlessness, not strength but weakness, not success but the cross. This is the transformational journey of love. That’s why the Gospel is so powerful, it actually creates necessary dilemmas for the soul to stretch and grow. Yet, we limit the Gospel of Christ to not much more than resolving organizational problems in our institutions. Paul clearly knows that God loves us so we can change. The only people who change, who are transformed, are people who feel safe, who feel their dignity, and who feel loved. When you feel loved, when you feel safe, and when you know your dignity, you just keep growing! That's what loving people do for one another—offer safe relationships in which we can change. This kind of love is far from sentimental; it has real power. Without a transformed view of love, religion ends up defending propriety instead of human pain, the status quo instead of the suffering masses, triumphalism instead of truth, privilege instead of charity and compassion. There was a reason why Christianity was once "turning the whole world upside down" (Acts 17:6).