Voices

Some quotes and thoughts that have been collecting in my email inbox the last while...

The job of the peacemaker is to stop war, to purify the world, to get it saved from poverty and riches, to heal the sick, to comfort the sad, to wake up those who have not yet found God, to create joy and beauty wherever you go, to find God in everything and in everyone.
- Muriel Lester
(1884-1968)

Christianity ... is always in need of re-simplifying, going back to its origins, ridding itself of the excessive superstructure it has acquired through history. - José Comblin, Catholic theologian in Brazil Forgiveness is the key that unlocks the door of resentment and the handcuffs of hate. It is a power that breaks the chains of bitterness and the shackles of selfishness.
- Corrie Ten Boom

Holy Spirit, we love to pray when we are filled with an awareness of your presence, sometimes excited and joyful, sometimes silent and hopeful. During those other times when we are barely able to believe, thank you for hearing the unspoken prayers of our hearts and minds. Breathe on us, breath of God. Amen.
(Moravian Prayer for the Day, August 15, 2008)

Conversion pulls us out of our hiding places and takes us, "where we would rather not go" in following Christ.
-Segundo Galilea
Pastoral worker in Santiago, Chile

God sets out upon the humiliating path of reconciliation and thereby pronounces the world free. God wills to be guilty of our sin, and takes over the punishment and suffering sin has brought upon us. God answers for godlessness, love for hatred, the saint for the sinner. Now there is no godlessness, no hatred, no sin which God has not carried, suffered, and atoned. Now there is no reality, no world that is not reconciled and in peace with God. God did this in the beloved son Jesus Christ.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Meditations on the Cross

Social sin is the crystallization ... of individuals’ sins into permanent structures that keeps sin in being and makes its force to be felt by the majority of people.
- Oscar Romero
Salvadoran archbishop, assassinated in 1980

Prayer is not a pious instrument by which we move God to baptize our enterprises; it is entering the strength of him who moves history and binds the powers that be.
- Melba Maggay
Filipina theologian

The cross is a symbol reminding the world that God is at God’s strongest when God seems to be at God’s weakest.
- Choan-Seng Song
Taiwanese theologian

We can move in the direction of justice, but if our personal relationships don’t become more human, we haven’t moved in the direction of the reign of God and, in the long run, we will discover that our point of arrival is just another form of tyranny.
- Arturo Paoli

There can be no evangelization without incarnation.
- Alvaro Barreiro
Brazilian Catholic theologian