Parker Palmer, you are the best! Just reading this book is a good thing -- makes one more willing to believe things are not as bad as they sometimes look.
Quotes:
In a moment of satori worthy of a Zen wannabe, I realized that not only could I write a book, I already had! It was a great reminder of the first lesson in Spirituality 101: Pay attention! You may discover that what you wanted is right in front of you, a secret hidden in plain sight.
But in 2008, I find it hard to name my beliefs using traditional Christian language because that vocabulary has been taken hostage by theological terrorists and tortured beyond recognition.
“We have this treasure in earthen vessels to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us”
The capacity to embrace true paradoxes is more than an intellectual skill for holding complex thoughts. It is a life skill for holding complex experiences.
For years, I’ve wanted a bumper sticker that says “Born Baffled!” I’ve come to believe that the willingness to be baffled and stay baffled is part of my identity and one of my birthright gifts.
Witness, even as I write, American involvement in Iraq. Here is grief multiplied by a million, and the math that kicked it off was premised in the American assumption that the complexities of that region could be simplified by our military might, never mind Vietnam or all the other wars we have failed to win since 1945.
"like Jonas himself I find myself traveling toward my destiny in the belly of a paradox" -- Thomas Merton
By lifting up the promise of paradox, I do not intend to endorse the simpleminded view that all truth is relative, that there are no critical differences between true and false, right and wrong. That kind of silliness weakens the idea of paradox, whose promise comes partly from the fact that the world is full of very real opposites pulling vigorously against each other, opposites that can never be resolved into paradoxes.
Marxism and Christianity converge in the idea that “religion is the opiate of the people.” [...] Despite the fact that Marxism denies the reality and power of the Spirit, it reminds us of dimensions of Christianity that Christians have a bad habit of forgetting. [...] Marxism and Christianity also converge in their shared concern for the plight of the poor. [...] A third convergence between Marxism and Christianity is in the idea of the classless society. [...] A fourth convergence between Marxism and Christianity undergirds the other three: both assert that we are enslaved by a “false consciousness,” a false understanding of our origins and destiny. And both aim at shattering that false consciousness so that we may know the truth, and the truth can set us free.
Christianity is against alienation. Christianity revolts against the alienated life. The whole New Testament is, in fact—and can be read by a Marxist - oriented mind as—a protest against religious alienation. -- Thomas Merton
The theory of nonviolence is premised on the notion that beyond every conflict lies a resolution, a synthesis, a common good that will be lost through violence but can be brought into being by patience, dialogue, and prayer.
There is another important reason to trust our resistance to the cross: some crosses are false, not given by God. They are laid upon us by a heedless world and embraced by an unhealthy part of ourselves. Christian tradition has too many examples of masochism masquerading as the way of the cross.
“You don’t think your way into a new kind of living; you live your way into a new kind of thinking.”
We expect a theophany of which we know nothing but the place, and the place is called community. —MARTIN BUBER
For several generations, Americans have been in conscious flight from the extended family and the small town. Both forms of community slowed our progress toward a goal we cherish more deeply than we cherish life together: the goal of economic mobility.
with the breakdown of our common life came growing personal disintegration and the need for a form of therapy that did not depend on community. So a new therapeutic mode emerged—notably Freudian—whose aim was to create a self that could function without communal support, an individual who could get along without others.
In religious as well as secular life, community has disappointed and failed us. As a result, many who are open to religious experience or on a spiritual quest cannot tolerate the church in any of its organized forms.
We need to find the courage to assert and act on the hope that community remains a human possibility, because only by acting “as if ” can we create a future fit for human habitation.
personal well-being is one of those strange things that eludes those who aim directly at it and comes to those who aim elsewhere
We must learn that the ultimate therapy for the unwell self is to identify our own pain with the pain of others and band together to resist the conditions that create our common malady. That is, the ultimate therapy is to translate our private problems into public issues. [...] The finest form of personal therapy is to build community, and building community is the finest form of politics. So community is a place where therapy and politics meet, a place where the health of the individual and the health of the group are recognized as the reciprocal realities they are.
It has been noted that when the disciples were sent out with nothing at all (no money, no extra clothes, no provisions), it was not because Jesus wanted them to suffer in poverty or to be left alone in the street; it was because they were to rely on the hospitality of others. Not only were the early Christians to practice hospitality; they were to depend on it.
The quality of our contemplation dictates, to a considerable extent, whether we find life pinched and cramped and fearful or open, expansive, and free. If our inner life is one of scarcity and grasping, we will surely not live an outward witness to a just and merciful sharing of the earth’s goods. [...] I do not mean “saying our prayers,” which sometimes seems to mean special pleading that God grant me a scarce resource before someone else gets it. I mean a life that returns constantly to that silent, solitary place within us where we encounter God and life’s abundance becomes manifest.
I know a teacher who has two rules in her classroom: one, speak only when you feel you must speak; and two, speak only what you truly know or ask what you truly want to know.
Of course, it is an illusion to believe that we control life. More than that, it is self-idolatry. The power of life, though in us, is beyond us. It is a power we can never possess but can only set ourselves for or against.
Philosophers assume that we can know the nature of reality because both reality and our minds have a rational structure, and reason can know reason. Paul believed that we can know what is true because truth is personal and we are persons. Just as we can love only because we are loved, so we can know only because we are known. God’s Spirit reaches out to us constantly, in love and in truth, wanting to teach us, wanting us to learn. This is the assurance on which Paul’s teaching rests.
