“One amongst His Teachings is this, that love and good faith must so dominate the human heart that men will regard the stranger as a familiar friend, the malefactor as one of their own, the alien even as a loved one, the enemy as a companion dear and close.”
Derived from Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams (Pages 34-35), Sharon Daloz
Reflecting on the political cynicism of American society and the ironic detachment that characterizes many in his generation, twenty-four-year-old Jedediah Purdy writes: “We doubt the possibility of being at home in the world, yet we desire that home above all else.”
Fr. Memo: “Spirituality is a place. It is a place of connection. It is a place of who we are and who we are to become. From a theological perspective, that ‘place’ is where the spirit is.”
Ronald Rolheiser:
“Whatever the expression, everyone is ultimately talking about the same thing – an unquenchable fire, a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, a hunger, a loneliness, a gnawing nostalgia, a wildness that cannot be tamed, a congenital all-embracing ache that lies at the center of human experience and is the ultimate force that drives everything else. This dis-ease is universal. Desire gives no exemptions.”
“What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality. Spirituality is what we do with the madness of life. It is what we do with the fire that burns within us. What shapes our actions is our spirituality. Spirituality concerns what we do with desire.”
From Qur’an 4:135 (Islamic sacred text)
“O ye who believe! Stand out firmly for justice, as witnesses to God, even as against yourselves, or your parents, or your kin, and whether it be (against) rich or poor: for God can best protect both. Follow not your personal inclination, lest you not be just, and if you distort (justice) or decline to do justice, verily God is well-acquainted with all that you do.”
From Matthew 25:35-40 (Christian scripture)
“For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you made me welcome; naked and you clothed me; sick and you visited me; in prison and you came to see me. . . . I tell you solemnly, in so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me.”
From Dhammapada 1:5 (Collected sayings of the Buddha/Buddhist Scripture)
“In this world, hate never dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible.”
From Tao-te-ching 13:4 (Classical Chinese text)
“Love the whole world as if it were yourself; then you will truly care for all things.”
By Fr. Ted Wiesner
“…In a similar way we enter into solidarity with the poor when distinction between we and they no longer applies. The distinction breaks down and we are the poor, one among them.
By Sara Ahmed
“Solidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground.”
Sara Ahmed is a British-Australian writer and feminist scholar.
By Fred Hampton
“We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism. We’re gonna fight racism with solidarity.”
Fred Hampton was deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party and founder of the multicultural Rainbow Coalition in Chicago. He was assassinated in 1969.