Weekly Pause & Ponder

It is absolutely essential to introduce into the study of the humanities a dimension of wisdom oriented to contemplation as well as to wise action. For this, it is no longer sufficient merely to go back over the Christian and European cultural traditions. The horizons of the world are no longer confined to Europe and America. We have to gain new perspectives, and on this our spiritual and even our physical survival may depend. 

Matthew Fox.  A Way to God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey. 
New World Publishing. P.98.

Weekly Pause & Ponder

God is the newness of everything that is and is coming to be. God is ever newness in love. Transcendence therefore, is the future beyond that draws us in the present movement toward greater wholeness and unity.

Ilia Delio.  The Emergent Christ.  www.goodreads.com

Weekly Pause & Ponder

Love means an interior and spiritual identification with one’s brother so that he is not regarded as an “object” to “which” one “does good.”…Love takes one’s neighbor as one’s self… Love demands a complete inner transformation–for without this we cannot possibly come to identify ourselves with our brother. We have to become, in some sense, the person we love. And this involves a kind of death of our own being, our own self. No matter how hard we try, we resist this death.

Matthew Fox.  A Way to God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey, New World Publishing. p.227.

Weekly Pause & Ponder

One can only imagine how greatly the political and religious culture wars of our era could be eased by this simple courtesy of the Law of Three: (1) the enemy is never the problem but the opportunity; (2) the problem will never be solved through eliminating or silencing the opposition but only through creating a new field of possibility large enough to hold the tension of the opposites and launch them in a new direction. Imagine what a different world it would be if these two simple precepts were internalized and enacted.

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three: Discovering the radical
Truth at the Heart of Christianity.  www.goodreads.com

Weekly Pause & Ponder

There has always been a longing in the human heart for a more just, free, loving and creative society. But it was never before possible to fulfill these aspirations, because we had neither the evolutionary drivers nor global crises to force us to change, nor did we have the scientific and technological powers that can free us from the limitations of scarcity, poverty, disease and ignorance. This is the time of awakening for the social potential movement. 

Barbara Marx Hubbard.  www.azquotes.com