Evernote Openbook: Quotes

Thousands of Candles - Buddha

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:16:30 GMT

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

Buddha

Better than a Thousand Hollow Words - Buddha

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:40:25 GMT

Better than a thousand hollow words

Is one word that brings peace.

Better than a thousand hollow verses

Is one verse that brings peace.

It is better to conquer yourself

Than to win a thousand battles.

Then the victory is yours.

Buddha in the Dhammapada

The Unclaimed Self - Helen Cepero

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 22:35:29 GMT

When we name our fears and let go, we do not then find courage, but our unclaimed self and God's embrace and love for the very things that caused us such terror in the first place.

Helen Cepero, Journaling as a Spiritual Practice, 55

If all the insects on earth disappeared - Jonas Sulk

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:37:47 GMT

'If all the insects on earth disappeared, within 50 years all life on earth would disappear. If all humans disappeared within 50 years all species would flourish as never before.'

Jonas Sulk, discoverer of the Polio Vaccine.

The Great Chain of Being - RIchard Rohr

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:45:43 GMT

St. Bonaventure (1221– 1274) took Francis’ intuitive genius and spelled it out into an entire philosophy.

God is “within all things but not enclosed; outside all things but not excluded; above all things but not aloof; below all things, but not debased.” Bonaventure was the first to speak of God as one “whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

Therefore “the origin, magnitude, multitude, beauty, fullness, activity and order of all created things” are the very “footprints” and “fingerprints” (vestigia) of God, according to this Doctor of the Church. Now that is quite a lovely and a very safe universe to live in. Welcome home!

Richard Rohr, Adapted from Hope Against Darkness (p. 136)

The Feast of Corpus Christi - Richard Rohr

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:28:04 GMT

You’ve got to comprehend any Great Mystery in one focused moment. Great Truth must be put on small stages to be able to process and grasp its momentous significance. This is the sacramental principle. Believe it, struggle with it, comprehend it here, and then move beyond it and recognize what’s true here is true everywhere! The concrete is the doorway to the universal. That is probably why Catholics made a great deal of the Eucharistic presence of Jesus in the bread and wine. It was the distilled and focused truth that was to teach us how to see Christ in everything. The pathway to the universal mysteries is almost always through the concrete and specific moment. Poets tend to understand this very well.

The momentous doctrine of the Body of Christ was taught in two different ways by St. Paul. He used it both for the community itself (building on Jesus who said “wherever two or three gather, I am there”) and also for the bread and wine of the Eucharist. In the first thousand years, the community was called the Corpus Verum—the True Body of Christ—and the Eucharist was called the Mystical Body of Christ (Corpus Mysticum), but no one doubted they were both the Presence! In the second thousand years the usage was almost entirely reversed, and we called the people the “mystical body of Christ” and the bread and wine the “real presence” or “Corpus Verum.” I wonder what that reversal of mentality reveals about our understanding of the Gospel?

Richard Rohr, From The Cosmic Christ (CD #2)

Misreading the Old Testament

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:04:16 GMT

In the Old Testament story, wars, statehood, and kingship are left behind as the story develops beyond David, the division of the kingdoms, and through the double exile to the prophets. Beginning with Jeremiah, the model for being the people of God is diaspora. That judgement of God on kingship and statehood-as-usual is never reversed. Ezra and Nehemiah reinstate a social structure without statehood and kingship, so that even back home in Eretz Yisrael, the form of Jewish peoplehood is no longer that of an independent nation. The Jewish story also makes much of Joseph, Daniel, and Mordecai, who are models of social leadership without statehood. each contributes to the health of a pagan political system, and each dramatically wins recognition from the pagan system that the God of the Jews must be the true God. Yet none of these faithful ones takes over that system and makes it a righteous state. To read the Old Testament as a fundamentally violent book, so that we can make the Jews fundamentally violent by associating them with the Old Testament and with refusal to move beyond the Old Testament when invited to do so by Jesus, is to be wrong about the Old Testament.

John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution, 138

Make Peace - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:03:50 GMT

The followers of Christ have been called to peace. And they must not only have peace but also make it. To that end they renounce all violence and tumult. . . . His disciples keep the peace by choosing to endure suffering rather than inflict it on others. They maintain fellowship where others would break it off. They renounce hatred and wrong. In so doing they overcome evil with good, and establish the peace of God in the midst of a world of war and hate.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

On Following the Way of Christ - Petr Chelcicky

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:04:30 GMT

No one may stray from the way of Christ and follow the emperor with his sword, for this way is not changed just because Caesar has become a Christian.

Petr Chelcicky, quoted by Peter Brock in The Political and Social Doctrines of the Unity of Czech Brethren, 46

Faith and Authority - Petr Chelcicky

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:02:41 GMT

These two divisions, the temporal order of force and Christ's way of love, are far removed from each other. . . . An action done because of the compulsion of Authority is quite different from one done through love and from the good will arising out of the words of truth. Thus civil authority is as far removed from Christ's truth inscribed in His gospel as is Christian faith from the necessity of them. . . . For the fullness of authority lies in the accumulation of wealth and vast gatherings of armed men, castles, and walled towns, while the fullness and completion of faith lies in God's wisdom and the strength of the Holy Spirit. Faith supported solely by spiritual power stands firm without the power of authority, which only brings fear and can only attain what it wishes under the threat of compulsion.

Petr Chelcicky, quoted by Peter Brock in The Political and Social Doctrines of the Unity of Czech Brethren, 45-46

Faith and Experience – J. H. Yoder

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:03:05 GMT

Before Constantine, Christians knew as a fact of experience that there was a church, and they had to take it on faith that God governs history. After Constantine, Christians knew for a fact that God governs history (Constantine was one of their number, after all), but they had to take it on faith that there was a church. That is the shift in the meaning of salvation history for which Constantine is the symbol. That is the philosophical meaning of the Middle Ages, in which the eschatology of the New Testament has been turned upside down.

John Howard Yoder, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace, and Revolution, p. 63

Aristides - On the Christians

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:02:02 GMT

It is the Christians, O Emperor, who have sought and found the truth, for they acknowledge God. They do not keep for themselves the goods entrusted to them. They do not covet what belongs to others. They show love to their neighbors. They do not do to another what they would not wish to have done to themselves. They speak gently to those who oppress them, and in this way they make themselves friends. It has become their passion to do good to their enemies. They live in the awareness of their smallness. Every one of them who has anything gives ungrudgingly to the one who has nothing. If they see a traveling stranger, they bring him under their roof. They rejoice over him as over a real brother…If they hear that one of them is imprisoned or oppressed for the sake of Christ, they take care of all his needs. If possible they set him free. If anyone among them is poor or comes into want while they themselves have nothing to spare, they fast two or three days for him. In this way they can supply any poor man with the food he needs. This, O Emperor, is the rule of life of the Christians, and this is their manner of life.

Aristides

Canonicity and Oral Tradition - Eduard Neilsen

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:02:18 GMT

[What prompted Israel to] the formation of a written canon and a "supplementary" oral tradition in one and the same period? One has the feeling that when once society has been somewhat consolidated through the incipient formation of a written canon, there is again room for oral tradition, and in this case its task will be to adjust an authoritative basis for the life of the community – which is now fixed in writing – to living conditions that have changed in the meantime. In this way history has evidently repeated itself many times; the Church and Islam are both outstanding examples of this. When one comes to think of it, it is a strange phenomenon that a writing or a collection of writings at some period in the history of a movement, a community, a confession, or a church, is canonized and that in future it maintains the character of a binding authority. Judaism, which has formed a school in this field, may perhaps have remembered forerunners of the canon from the earlier history of Israel. But whether the absolute validity which is attached to writing in theology – and which is practically manifested by the care of the Massoretes for the text – can be explained by Israel's own history, is perhaps rather doubtful.

Eduard Nielsen, Oral Tradition, p. 61

Listening - Henri Nouwen

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:03:28 GMT

"To listen is very hard, because it asks of us so much interior stability that we no longer need to prove ourselves by speeches, arguments, statements, or declarations. True listeners no longer have an inner need to make their presence known. They are free to receive, to welcome, to accept.

"Listening is much more than allowing another to talk while waiting for a chance to respond. Listening is paying full attention to others and welcoming them into our very beings. The beauty of listening is that those who are listened to start feeling accepted, start taking their words more seriously and discovering their true selves. Listening is a form of spiritual hospitality by which you invite strangers to become friends, to get to know their inner selves more fully, and even to dare to be silent with you."

Henri J. Nouwen, "Listening as Spiritual Hospitality." In Bread for the Journey

Withholding Love - Samir Selmanovic

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:05:12 GMT

“IF we believe that the ultimate method of spreading the Good News is through loving people, why do non-Christians so rarely feel loved by Christians? My thesis is that love accepts what others have to offer and we think non-Christians don’t have much of anything to add to what is really valuable to us, namely the gospel. Although we accept their virtues with admiration and their brokenness with compassion, we do not seriously expect them to add to what matters most to us — our knowledge of and our relationship with God. We withhold from the the possibility of being our teachers. Without an attitude of learning, we have not entered a scared “I/Thou” relationship. And that’s why they hold back. The world is withholding from us what we are withholding from the world.”

Samir Selmanovic, “The Sweet Problem of Inclusiveness,” in An Emergent Manifesto of Hope