More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It is the full realization that the one who takes, blesses, breaks, and gives is the one who from the beginning of time has desired to enter into communion with us.
You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you? —Thomas Merton
we, too, are God’s beloved sons and daughters. Between Jesus and us there is no essential difference. We are as much God’s children as Jesus is a child of God. Through Jesus we are made “joint heirs”—
“I have loved you with an everlasting love. I have written your name in the palm of my hand from all eternity. I have molded you in the depths of the earth and knitted you in your mother’s womb. I love you. I embrace you. You are mine and I am yours and you belong to me.”
to deserve being loved our society requires us to be successful, popular, or powerful. But God does not require our success, popularity, or power in order to love us.
The most beautiful fruit of claiming your belovedness is a joy that allows us to share God’s unconditional love with others. Strange as it may sound, we can become like God for others.
see the world as God sees it.
we are called to live not from the place where we think of ourselves as nothing—useless or sinful—but from the place of our rebirth, the place where we can claim our new identity as the chosen children of God.
we need God and can’t make God love us.
prayer was no longer a passive religious event taking place in a sanctuary but an active, even dangerous and subversive act that challenged the very structures of the world.
There were Christians imprisoning Christians, Christians torturing Christians, and Christians murdering Christians, and an immense darkness covered the incarnate Word.4 The body of Christ was fractured, and it was harming its varied parts. I know Christ weeps when his body fails to love.
“What the U.S. government and, indirectly, the U.S. people are doing in Central America is unjust, illegal, and immoral,”
‘Christ is risen’ means that we are a people of reconciliation, not of division; people who heal, not hurt; people of forgiveness, not of revenge; people of love, not of hate; people of life, not of death.”
Why should we act in the peace movement? So we can discover the source of violence in our own hearts. Why act to alleviate hunger? So we can unmask our own greed.
Active waiting is essential to the spiritual life. In
the paradox of waiting is that it requires full attention to the present moment, with the expectation of what is to come and the patience to learn from the act of waiting.
spiritual discernment is based on a concrete and dynamic spirituality that demands constant, careful listening to the people of God, especially the poor.
God is present in the silence between our thoughts.
