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Kindle Notes & Highlights
vulnerability—a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity.
Politics is the art of the possible.
the pressure of coming to agreement works against really understanding each other. And we don’t understand each other.
The need to approach others positively and with enthusiasm for difference is absolutely critical to any change.
differences with this notion that there is good in the other.
It’s what we do instinctively with great truths—we take them to extremes.
the real practice is living your life as if it really mattered from moment to moment. The real practice is life itself.
In prosperous postwar America, a newly minted virtue, “convenience,” overrode the wisdom of the body.
These days I suspect that, in everything, how we inhabit our senses tests the mettle of our souls.
we are the one creature that is conscious that everybody has to eat.
Dan Barber says that when it comes to food, the ethical thing is almost always also the pleasurable thing.
When you are greedy for the best food, you are by definition being greedy for the kind of world that you want used in the proper way. That’s the true definition of sustainability.
the Jewish notion of the soul, nephesh, which is not something preexistent but emergent—forming in and through physicality and relational experience.
The body is where every virtue lives or dies,
The cancer, the car accident—these are extreme experiences of other trajectories we’re on—aging, the loss of love, the death of dreams, the child leaving home. Grief and gladness, sickness and health, are not separate passages. They’re entwined and grow from and through each other, planting us, if we’ll let them, more profoundly in our bodies in all their flaws and their grace.
Your body, for as long as it possibly can, will be faithful to living. That’s what it does.
Aging is the ultimate slow motion loss, inevitable for us all, and yet somehow
it’s come as a surprise.
Beauty is about more rounded substantial becoming. And when we cross a new threshold worthily, what we do is we heal the patterns of repetition that were in us that had us caught somewhere. So I think beauty in that sense is about an emerging fullness, a greater sense of grace and elegance, a deeper sense of depth, and also a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life.
music is what language would love to be if it could.
To attend to the beauty in the other is to redirect the trap of “charity” and “development” in the century now past—to become unable to define and reduce other human beings as problems to help and to solve.
Beauty is visible, palpable, in moments when human beings reach across the mystery of each other.
compassion in both Hebrew and Arabic derives from the word for womb.
Mother Teresa: “One of the realities we’re all called to go through is to move from repulsion to compassion and from compassion to wonderment.”
Loving reality in all its imperfection is the necessary prelude to discovering God present and alive.
connection between the pleasurable thing and the ethical thing.
“ethics of desire”
have become allergic to an ethics
the deepest desire for us all is to be appreciated, to be loved, to be seen as somebody of value.
we don’t know what to do with our own pain, so what to do with the pain of others? We don’t know what to do with our own weakness except hide it or pretend it doesn’t exist. So how can we welcome fully the weakness of another, if we haven’t welcomed our own weakness?
feeling safe has to be a bodily perception, not just a cognitive perception.
“I had embraced a form of Christian faith devoted less to the experience of God than to abstractions about God, a fact that now baffles me: how did so many disembodied concepts emerge from a tradition whose central commitment is to ‘the Word become flesh’?”
I do not believe that the God who gave me life wants me to live a living death. I believe that the God who gave me life wants me to live life fully and well.
Love is the superstar virtue of virtues, and the most watered down word in the English language. I love this weather. I love your dress. And what we’ve done with the word, we’ve done with this thing—this possibility, this essential bond, this act. We’ve made it private, contained it in family, when its audacity is in its potential to cross tribal lines. We’ve fetishized it as romance, when its true measure is a quality of sustained, practical care. We’ve lived it as a feeling, when it is a way of being. It
None of the great virtues—even this—is meant to be carried in isolation.
the lack of love in my life was not a reality but a poverty of imagination and a carelessly narrow use of an essential word.
if God would bless the people who wiped away the tears of people who suffered, wouldn’t God also bless the people who made it so that tears were not shed?
Well, if we’re open-handed, then I know a few things. One is, no guarantees. All is fragile. It’s all gift. And being willing to share what I have or what I have been given then becomes the way that we can really engage each other. One of the pieces that gets lost is that it’s as much about our stories as it is monetary. How could I leave you out if I’ve heard your story? I can’t.
This could be useful for my Luke 16 paper.
Whatever our part is. Just do one thing. That’s all we have to do. The guilt—or the curse—of the progressive, the liberal, the whatever, is that we think we have to do it all. And then we get overwhelmed. I get all those solicitations in the mail. And I can’t do everything. And so I don’t do anything. But that’s the mistake. Community is about just doing my part.
Share this with Nan for her indivisible group.
She offers these lines of self-appraisal on whether one is being true to deep listening in any situation: “Am I responding in generosity? Am I responding in selfishness? Am I responding in a way that builds up people around me, that builds me up, that is respectful of who I am?” Such questions are tools to start walking willingly towards the more exacting question of what would it mean, day to day, year to year, to become the beloved community. And how, concretely, to begin.
As creatures, we imagine a homogeneity in other groups that we know not to be there in our own. Yet in our own groups of family and colleagues and circles of friends, there are people we admire and people we dislike, people we adore and people who drive us crazy. We find ways, if we can, to stay in relationship—to find out what love can mean with this person at this moment, and a year later, and ten years later.
I don’t look for God or God’s work in magic or in tricks or in, you know, “this is what I want” and then I get it. I look for God’s work always in how people love each other, in just the acts of love that I see around me.
If you decide that the most important thing, the highest possible value, is life—breath in the body and walking around and eating sandwiches and whatever—then you’re lost. Then you’ve lost. Because we’re all going to die.
So if I posit instead that the most important thing is love, then what I have is, yes, I have a world that’s full of suffering and evil and pain. And I have something to do. I have something to look for, and I have something to do.
The phrase “spiritual but not religious,” now common social parlance, is just the tip of an iceberg that has already moved on.
Fear comes out in public looking like anger, when it comes to nations as well as individuals.
any conviction worth its salt has chosen to cohabit with a piece of mystery, and that mystery is at the essence of the vitality and growth of the thing.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks,
The Bible is saying to us the whole time: Don’t think that God is as simple as you are. He’s in places you would never expect him to be.
By being what only I can be, I give humanity what only I can give. It is my uniqueness that allows me to contribute something unique to the universal heritage of humankind.
