Weekly Pause & Ponder

I feel profoundly grateful for being on this planet right now because now is when what we do matters most. It’s our generation who I think must bring the change that the generation before us only talked about, and it’s up to us to provide the generation after us with a landing place they can use to realize their own aspirations. When I experience the energy of people in many places who have a sense of future possibility and who turn that possibility into reality, it inspires me and gives me confidence.

Lecture by Otto Scharmer, Huffpost blog: www.huffingtonpost.com/otto-scharmer/

Weekly Pause & Ponder

Let’s choose today to quench our thirst for the “good life” we think others lead by acknowledging the good that already exists in our lives. We can then offer the universe the gift of our grateful hearts.

Sara Ban Breathnach, Thanksgiving quotes – www.wow4u.com/qthankfulness/

Weekly Pause & Ponder

If you want to lead the world to the freedom you learned here, equality for everyone must mean more to you than domination by anyone. Justice must mean more to you than money.  People must mean more to you than fame….Choose reality over image, choose people over personal profits and projects, and choose your own heroes wisely….If you want to be a real leader, you want to give a new kind of leadership, you cannot live to get the approval of a system, you must live to save the soul of it. “The purpose of life,” the essayist Leo Rosten writes, “is not to be happy. The purpose of life is to matter, to have it make a difference that you lived at all.”

Stanford University Baccalaureate Address, by Joan Chittister, June 2012.

Weekly Pause & Ponder

Deep within us, amid our differentiations as individuals and nations and species, is the desire for oneness. This holy longing is found not only in the human soul but in the soul of the universe, at the heart of everything that has being. We are not an exception to the universe. We are an expression of the universe. Our longings are a unique manifestation of the universe’s longings. In listening to the depths of life, within our lives and within every life, we will hear the longings of the One that are deeper than the fears that divide us.

“Listening to the Heartbeat of God” by Philip Newell, Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation.

Weekly Pause & Ponder

God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist.  All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, but I don’t think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God.

John Shelby Spong Quotes, AZ Quotes