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  • Benedict XVI: ‘Truth Cannot Be Defended With Violence’

    “Today the concept of truth is viewed with suspicion, because truth is identified with violence. Over history there have, unfortunately, been episodes when people sought to defend the truth with violence. But they are two contrasting realities. Truth cannot be imposed with means other than itself! Truth can only come with its own light. Yet, we need truth. … Without truth we are blind in the world, we have no path to follow. The great gift of Christ was that He enabled us to see the face of God”.– Pope Benedict XVI (24 February 2012)
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  • Thomas Merton: ‘In Her They Prosper’

    “S/he is like a tree planted near streams of water, that yields its fruit in season; Its leaves never wither; whatever s/he does prospers.”–Psalm 1:3

    “She (Wisdom) is in all things like the air receiving the sunlight. In her they prosper.  In her they glorify God.  In her they rejoice to reflect  [God].  In her they are united with [God].”–Thomas Merton

    A Merton Reader, ed. by Thomas P. McDonnell. (New York: Image Books, 1989, p 510)

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  • Bob Sabath: What it Takes to Avoid Success

    Sojourners co-founder Bob Sabath has written a wonderful reflection titled “Poorer, Poorer. Slower, Slower. Smaller, Smaller.” I commend this to all faithful dreamers and those who once were and are now floundering a bit.

    Below is an excerpt from Bob’s reflection and then a poem by Rilke that Bob uses with his meditation. As an extra bonus, Bob’s son Peter set the Rilke poem to music.

    …You had to be a bit crazy to be in the early community. And yes, we were poor. And we were small.

    We tried to slow down. I tacked to my office door Thomas Merton’s warning to social activists about the violence of overwork:

    “To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects … is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism … kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

    To stay alive, we needed prophet, pastor, and monk. (more…)

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  • No Keystone XL: 800,000 Love Notes Go To Senate

    Thanks to all who sent notes to the Senate in the 24-hour blitz to stop the Keystone XL pipeline from rising, zombie-like, from the dead. More than 800,000 messages went to the Senate over 24 hours, which is really impressive. Here’s a last image that you should take a moment to savor, showing our messages walking into the Senate on Valentine’s Day. This put a big smile on my face:

    “The last 24 hours were the most concentrated blitz of environmental organizing since the start of the digital age,” explained McKibben. “Over 800,000 Americans made it clear that Keystone XL is the environmental litmus test for Senators and every other politician in the country. It’s the one issue where people have come out in large numbers to put their bodies on the line, and online too: the largest civil disobedience action on any issue in 30 years, and now the most concentrated burst of environmental advocacy perhaps since the battles over flooding the Grand Canyon ….”

    Senate Republicans tried to saddle the transportation bill with an amendment that would reverse President Obama’s decision to block the controversial pipeline project. The Senate will begin wrasslin’ the transportation bill today.

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  • Brothers K on Love

    “At some thoughts one stands perplexed, above all at the sight of human sin, and wonders whether to combat it by force or by humble love.

    Always decide ‘I will combat it by humble love.’ If you resolve on that once and for all, you can conquer the whole world.  Loving humility is a terrible force: it is the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.”

    – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

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  • Thomas Merton: ‘Love is a Revelation’

    Merton and D.T. Suzuki, 94, in New York, 1964.

    Love is the revelation of our deepest personal meaning, value and identity. But this revelation remains impossible as long as we are the prisoners of our own egoism. I cannot find myself in myself, but only in another. —Thomas Merton

    Thomas Merton: Love and Living, Naomi Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart, editors (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979, p. 31)

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  • Best Valentine’s Day Gift For Your Planet? Defeating Keystone XL Pipeline.

    Right now, the Senate is considering legislation to resurrect Keystone XL, overriding President Obama’s rejection of the pipeline, and greenlighting construction of this disasterous project. The grassroots movement against Big Oil interests have put together a massive response to show them that approving Keystone is unacceptable.

    Goal: 500,000 messages to the Senate in 24 hours to demand they stop the pipeline.
    Why: The Keystone XL pipeline is made to carry a climate-killing brand of uber-oil that will dump 3x more CO2 into the atmosphere than we’re already dealing with.
    How: Instead of “boots on the ground” this time, we are calling for an avalanche of e-notes to the Senate reminding them who they work for.

    What’s the best Valentine’s Day card a planet could hope for? Defeating the Keystone XL pipeline … in the State Department, in the Senate, and any place else it pokes up its little head.

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  • Women and Their Stories: Alicia Keyes and Bonnie Raitt Sing Etta James

    Here’s my vote for the best moment of the 2012 Grammys (with all due respect to Jennifer Hudson’s tribute to Whitney Houston and to the amazing voice of Adele).

    I want a Sunday kind of love
    A love to last past Saturday night
    And I’d like to know
    It’s more than love at first sight
    And I want a Sunday kind of love
    Oh yeah, yeah

    I want a, a love that’s on the square
    Can’t seem to find somebody
    Someone to care
    And I’m on a lonely road
    That leads to nowhere
    I need a Sunday kind of love

    I do my Sunday dreaming, oh yeah
    And all my Sunday scheming
    Every minute, every hour, every day
    Oh, I’m hoping to discover
    A certain kind of lover
    Who will show me the way

    And my arms need someone
    Someone to enfold
    To keep me warm when Mondays and Tuesdays grow cold
    Love for all my life to have and to hold
    Oh and I want a Sunday kind of love
    Oh yeah, yeah, yeah

    I don’t want a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday
    Or Thursday, Friday or Saturday
    Oh nothing but Sunday, oh yeah
    I want a Sunday Sunday
    I want a Sunday kind of love, oh yeah
    Sunday, Sunday, Sunday kind of love

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  • Matt Taibbi: ‘Banker Are Lucky God Himself Didn’t Come Down At Bonus Time’

    The financial services industry went from having a 19 percent share of America’s corporate profits decades ago to having a 41 percent share in recent years. That doesn’t mean bankers ever represented anywhere near 41 percent of America’s labor value. It just means they’ve managed to make themselves horrifically overpaid relative to their counterparts in the rest of the economy.

    A banker’s job is to be a prudent and dependable steward of other peoples’ money – being worthy of our trust in that area is the entire justification for their traditionally high compensation.

    Yet these people have failed so spectacularly at that job in the last fifteen years that they’re lucky that God himself didn’t come down to earth at bonus time this year, angrily boot their asses out of those new condos, and command those Zagat-reading girlfriends of theirs to start getting acquainted with the McDonalds value meal lineup. They should be glad they’re still getting anything at all, not whining to New York magazine.–Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone (FEBRUARY 8, 2012)

    Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-wall-street-should-stop-whining-20120208#ixzz1lup6DfZ6

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  • Happy New Year to the Trees!

    “When you come to the land and you plant any tree, you shall treat its fruit as forbidden; for three years it will be forbidden and not eaten. In the fourth year, all of its fruit shall be sanctified to praise the L-RD. In the fifth year, you may eat its fruit.”–Leviticus 19:23-25

    “There are four new years… the first of Shevat is the new year for trees according to the ruling of Beit Shammai; Beit Hillel, however, places it on the fifteenth of that month.”–Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:1

    On the Jewish holiday of Tu B’Shevat we are invited to celebrate a New Year for the Trees, rejoicing in the fruit of the tree and the fruit of the vine, celebrating the splendid, abundant gifts of the natural world which give our senses delight and our bodies life. It’s a chance to celebrate the wholeness of nature’s body –trees, water, fruits, soil, sun, and us — and delight with God in what God has made. Many communities celebrate by gathering with children to plant trees and celebrate a special “fruit seder.”

    …Thousands of years ago Rabbis, in their deepest wisdom, knew that trees are literally our life support system. In a religion focused for much of its history on survival, Jews recognized early on that when societies stopped planting and caring for trees those trees disappeared, and along with them went their soil, their food and their water.  When that happened those societies disappeared.  Perhaps that’s why we have, and continue to need a holiday with the sole purpose of remembering and appreciating trees.

    Tu B’Shevat celebrates a victory over disappearance, and contains vital wisdom to remind us what’s needed not only to survive today, but to thrive.–Andy Lipkis, Jewish Journal

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