“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime;
therefore, we must be saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful makes complete sense
in any context of history;
therefore, we must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, no matter how virtuous,
can be accomplished alone;
therefore, we are saved by love.”
~ Reinhold Niebuhr
“We are made for happiness and there is nothing wrong in reaching out for it. Unfortunately, most of us are so deprived of happiness that as soon as it comes along, we reach out for it with all our strength and try to hang on to it for dear life. That is the mistake. The best way to receive it is to give it away. If you give everything back to God, you will always be empty, and when you are empty, there is more room for God.” ~ Thomas Keating
When we are dissatisfied with things as they are, or suffer and know pain, we begin to imagine what the world would be like if things were different–if there were no hunger or thirst and all tears were wiped away (Rev. 7:14). Creative imagination reaches toward God, and glimpses a new heaven and new earth. The new reality has nothing to do with the present order. In fact, the one who responds to call seeks to put something more beautiful in the place of what she sees. This is where the friction and fight begin.
Martin Luther King was not killed because he had a dream. Dreamers are easily dismissed. He was killed because he sought to introduce into the political arena what he saw with his heart and mind. The same was true of Gandhi and of our Lord.
As Jesus made clear his solidarity with the poor and his vocation to engage them in a liberating process, he came into confrontation with entrenched political and religious powers. As suspicion of him turned to resistance and then to hatred and fury, he began to prepare his disciples for what he would have to suffer. Peter immediately took Jesus aside to protest his continuing on what was surely a collision course….
Those who say yes to the perilous vocation of implementing vision at each stage will find new resistances emerging in themselves as well as in the society. Opposition to the new is very natural and should not cause any of us to be taken by surprise. The best way to understand it in one’s contemporaries is to have named and owned it in one’s self. That process is also some protection against the self-righteousness that plagues too many reformers as well as the pious.
~ Elizabeth O’Connor
“Jesus the Christ entered the world amid strife and terror, and spent his infancy hidden in Egypt as a refugee…. As I read the birth stories about Jesus I cannot help but conclude that though the world may be tilted toward the rich and powerful, God is tilted toward the underdog.
“He has brought down rulers from their thrones but lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but sent the rich away empty,” said Mary in her Magnificat. I wonder what Mary thought about her militant hymn during her harrowing years in Egypt. For a Jew, Egypt evoked bright memories of a powerful God who had flattened a pharaoh’s army and brought liberation; now Mary fled there, desperate, a stranger in a strange land hiding from her own government.
Could her baby, hunted, helpless, on the run, possibly fulfill the lavish hopes of his people?” ~ Philip Yancey
“Jesus was born in a particular place at a particular time…. He was born in Bethlehem, “one of the little clans of Judah” (Micah 5:2), where at his birth he was surrounded by shepherds and their flocks. His parents had come to a stable after vainly knocking at numerous doors in the town, as the Gospels tell us…. There, on the fringe of society, the Word became history, contingency, solidarity, and weakness; but we can say, too, that by this becoming, history itself, our history, became Word….
To the eyes of Christians the incarnation is the irruption of God into human history: an incarnation into littleness and service in the midst of overbearing power exercised by the mighty of this world; an irruption that smells of the stable.
The Son of God was born into a little people, a nation of little importance by comparison with the great powers of the time. Furthermore, he took flesh among the poor in a marginal area–namely, Galilee; he lived with the poor and emerged from among them to inaugurate a kingdom of love and justice. That is why many have trouble recognizing him.” ~ Gustavo Gutierrez
“No priest, no theologian stood at the cradle in Bethlehem. And yet all Christian theology has its origins in the wonder of all wonders that God became man. Alongside of the brilliance of the holy night there burns the fire of the unfathomable mystery of Christian theology.”
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
