Trish > Books: religion‎ (113)

”evil can be opposed without being mirrored…oppressors can be resisted without being emulated…enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed.”

“I struggled with how oversimplifications of difficult and complex human problems and actions were a convenient shortcut for me…Decades later, that cheapening of human experience would haunt me. But not yet.”

“Now the time has come to understand that we are the same human being on this planet..Humanity is all one big family.”

"I look forward with joy to the day when children will learn the principles of nonviolence and peaceful conflict resolution--in other words secular ethics--at school."

“Mindfulness, education, respect, tolerance, and nonviolence.”

“The real meaning of our life, whether with or without religion, is to be happy.”

1. Nonviolence
2. Tolerance
3. Accept every religion in its uniqueness
4. A religious person collaborates in preserving the earth
5. Patience
6. Death and rebirth

“Salvation is being on the right road, not having reached a destination.” —MLK, Jr.

“…to be aware of who we are, what we are, what we are doing, what we are thinking, seems to be a very easy thing to do—and yet it is the most important thing; to remember—the starting point of the salvation of oneself.” —Thich Nhat Hanh in The Raft is Not the Shore

‘Perhaps we shall be the teachers when it is done. Out of the depths of pain we have thought to be our sole heritage for this world—O we know about love’

“As long as black folks normalize loss and abandonment, acting as though is an easy feat to overcome the psychological wounds this pain inflicts, we will not lay the groundwork for emotional well being that makes love possible.”

“Solidarity with the poor is the only path that can lead out nation back to a vision of community that can effectively challenge and eliminate violence and exploitation.”

“Those who suffer the weight of this greed-based predatory capitalism are the addicted. Robbed of the capacity to function as citizens of any community (unable to work, to commune with others, even to eat), they become the dehumanized victims of an ongoing protracted genocide. Unlike the drugs used in the past, like marijuana and heroin, drugs like cocaine and crack/cocaine disturbed the mental health of the addicted and created in them cravings so great that no moral or ethical logic could intervene to stop immoral behavior.”

“Nowadays much new age spirituality attempts to undermine traditional biblical condemnation of the greedy rich by insisting that those who prosper are the chosen, the spiritual elect. But there is a great difference between celebrating prosperity and the pursuit of unlimited wealth.”

“Yes…weep now, darling, weep. Let us both weep. That is the first thing: to let ourselves feel again…Then, tomorrow, we shall make something strong of this sorrow…”

“…people wanna be better than they are…and I hurt terribly today, and that hurt is desperation and desperation is—energy and energy can move things.”

“Once made, these vows of chastity never end, rather, they endure…when a priest is not a father to his community, when a nun is not a mother to all those with whom she works, he or she becomes sad…This sadness comes from failing to live a truly consecrated life, which, on the contrary, always makes us fruitful, fertile…the beauty of consecration is joy, always joy.”

“The Church recognizes the indispensable contribution that women make to society, their sensitivity, their intuition, and other distinctive skills that women, more than men, tend to possess. For example, the special attention that women bestow on others, an attention often—but not exclusively—expressed in maternity. I happily acknowledge how many women share pastoral responsibilities with priests, how they guide people, families, and groups and thoughtfully contribute to theological studies.

But we need to create even more opportunities for women in the Church We need feminine genius in every aspect of society. So women must be guaranteed roles in the workplace and wherever important decisions are made, both within the Church and in social structures.”

“We’ve just forgotten that we belong to each other.”

“Is God inclusive or exclusive?…In the end, though, the measure of our compassion with what Martin Luther King calls ‘the last, the least, and the lost’ lies less in our service to those on the margins, and more in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them.”

“We are charged not with obliterating our diversity and difference but instead with heightening our connection to each other.”

“The rastaman thinks, draw me a map of what you see
then I will draw a map of what you never see
and guess me whose map will be the bigger than whose?
Guess me whose map will tell the larger truth?”
—from Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion

Every bed was made illegal by the brush
of chest against chest, and by our sweat.
--from A Short History of Beds We Have Slept in Together

"...how they have forced us to live in a world lacking in mermaids--mermaids who understood that they simply were, and did not need permission to exist or to be beautiful. The law concerning mermaids only caused mermaids to pass a law concerning man: that they would never again cross our boundaries of sand; never lift their torsos up from the surf; never again wave at sailors, salt dripping from their curls; would never again enter our dry and stifling world."
--from The Law Concerning Mermaids

Unsettled

So consider an unsettled island
Inside—the unflattened and unsugared

fields; inside—a tegareg
sprawl of roots and canopies,

inside—the tall sentries of blondwood
and yoke-wood and sweet-wood,

of dog-wood, of bullet trees so hard
they will one day splinter cutlasses,

will one day swing low the carcasses
of slaves; inside—a crawling

brawl of vines, unseemly
flowers that blossom from their spines;

inside—the leh-guh orchids and labrishing
hibiscuses that throw raucous

syllables at crows whose heads are red as annattos; inside—malarial mosquitoes

that rise from stagnant ponds;
inside—a green humidity thick as mud;

inside—the stinging spurge, the nightshades,
the Madame Fates;

inside—spiders, gnats and bees,
wasps and lice and fleas; inside—

the dengue, the hookworm, the heat
and botheration; unchecked macka

sharp as crucifixion. This is no paradise—
not yet—not this unfriendly, untamed island—

this unsanitised, unstructured island—
this unmannered, unmeasured island;

this island: unwritten, unsettled, unmapped.
—from Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion