Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Most of us prefer the immediately measurable and Spirit is never that. Wait and pray, a good spiritual director will say. Do not do, but allow and trust and wait, as Jesus advised his disciples in the garden of Gethsemane.”

“I cannot become over reliant on anything self-affirming or self-validating. I can't help but see the shadow side of everything now. I have to watch the cynicism, but on my better days I'm not angry about it; I'm just sad about it, ... And this is a sadness I can live with, a sadness I can love with. Things do not have to be perfect for me to reverence them, respect them, honor them, love them, and forgive them.”

“Following his leading, I say, as it were, that you must go into Babylon (exile), and find a new kind of freedom there. Don't believe those who tell you that you can grow while staying in full control. It is a lie. In all of our lives, deeper love has to do with giving up some measure of control.”

“We move toward wholeness, I am convinced, by holding these conflicts and paradoxes together in the soul—more than the mind and letting them work their natural chemistry there. It is all about waiting trustfully, holding without panicking, and anticipating, even in the silence, that an answer will be given. It is hope added to faith and love. Those who trust this process create a new future...”

“The psychologist and theologian Gerald May put it well when he said that kind of dogged determination only made us terribly "willful" but not gracefully "willing," which is where growth in virtue lies. Virtue is more like a chemical change in a petri dish than the well-considered lines of an engineer's diagram.”

“I surely believe some form of projection of our anger onto others is at the heart of the nonstop world wars of the "Christian" nations. It's at the center of those cultures that encourage punitive or emotionally withholding parents or people with "stiff upper lips." Crying, at its best, teaches us to hold the emotion instead of projecting it elsewhere.”

“If we believe that God is angry in the way that humans are, then it is too easy for all of us to end up being angry "without limit." In fact, if we believe the Creator is always critiquing, judging, and punishing everything, it should be no surprise that our entire universe is bathed in rage and resentment. Isn't this, in fact, much of our world today? Someone must show us the way through.”

“I surely believe some form of projection of our anger onto others is at the heart of the nonstop world wars of the "Christian" nations. It's at the center of those cultures that encourage punitive or emotionally withholding parents or people with "stiff upper lips." Crying, at its best, teaches us to hold the emotion instead of projecting it elsewhere.”

“Healing work in the hospital, for example, has long been considered heroic (and it is), but it has taken us a long time to recognize the importance of bereavement ministries, hospice care, and grief counseling. Ministries of mere presence are seen as optional, even superfluous. It is our classic preference of the masculine over the feminine: doctors over nurses, priests over nuns, the immediate over the arduous.”

“This collective consciousness is the feminine way of Mary standing at the foot of the cross, complementing Jesus's agonizing death with her own weeping and public vulnerability. Here is that feminine performative prophecy again. Why do we only admire one form of love?”

“I often think that Christianity, or any religion for that matter, would be much more effective as a constant choice for human solidarity instead of this useless "cult of innocence" that it became. Simone Weil, the French mystic and resistance leader, spent her whole life seeking radical solidarity with human suffering, as did Saint Albert Chmielowski of Poland...”

“Maybe hope needs to be cosmic hope to be hope at all. Maybe pain needs to be borne together, and for all time; it is very hard to bear alone, or in the moment. We fight it as unfair and undeserved when we could instead carry it as an act of human and loving solidarity.”

“You can recognize in such an invitation, I am not the first nor the last to feel this dying. I can now choose to be a weak but willing member of the whole communion of saints! Surely such solidarity is our salvation, rather than private purity or personal wholeness.”

“in participation with the millions who have found similar solace there: "She passes her nights weeping, the tears run down her cheeks. Not one of all her lovers remains to comfort her, her friends have all betrayed her and become her enemies" (Lamentations 1:2)”

“The saints and mystics who wept before the cross were first of all weeping universal tears for the suffering world. All of reality is "signed" with the cross, and our tears often become a slow, sad recognition that we also are now on the same tragic, but also victorious, path. All things first and finally deserve tears much more than hatred, fixing, or denial.”

“You don't think yourself into crying. You cry yourself, if you will allow, into daring new ways of thinking and feeling.”

“The lower strata of the middle class—small tradespeople, shop-keepers, and rentiers, the handicraftsmen and peasants all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists...”

“No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer so far at an end that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.”

“Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the...master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of laborers crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers...Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are...enslaved by the machine”

“Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted...to the means of subsistence...”

“In my experience, tears have helped me glimpse the big secret that I still only half know that human beings are really made of love and for love. And we still don't know it! We can only cry it. Until a divine form of compassion enters the scene (and this might be the naked narrative underlying the whole Bible), we do not enjoy the deep alchemy that morphs human rage and judgment into holy sadness.”

“I also think of two Maasai warriors I met in Kenya years ago. They were given permission by their elders to show me their "caves of grief," where, as part of their initiation journey, they had to learn to literally cry for all the world—plants, animals, fellow humans, earth itself—before they could continue on to manhood.”

“After two days of invitation into liminal space and facing our own death, we talked about grief and sadness. It was on this third day, the "day of grief," that most men made their breakthrough or didn't. Some could not access their tears, but most would at least begin to talk about their hidden sadness, which changed the entire character and freedom of their grief.”

“In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of overproduction. ... it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence...”

“It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed.”

“A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

“Most folks invariably apologize for or try to hide their tears. One wonders why. Do they not want the deep self to be revealed? Perhaps it is because tears are so inexplicable? So out of control? Operating by their own rules? Humiliating? Always! Tears invite participation in a wider world and pull us out of our isolation.”

“This is an attitude of grief over universal and ontological evil, which is very different from our modern-day fixation on sensational anecdotes. Life is inherently sad, the prophets want us to know. Humanity is foundationally unfaithful to love and truth, they seem to shout. In this way, prophets act more as philosophers than as journalists or pundits, inviting us into the divine pity for all of creation.”

“Has God changed, or have we just grown up enough to hear a grown-up God? Old scripture passages of mercy and pity that once seemed sentimental or impossible begin to fi-nally make sense-and we suddenly notice their frequency, although they were always there. ... This process of transformation by way of tears is largely hidden and unconscious, characteristic of the work of the Spirit.”

“When I look for examples of such evolution in our own times, my mind recalls the Roman church's change in its official stance toward suicide. After Vatican II, the official emphasis shifted from punishment to empathy for the person and the family. "Why further punish the victim and family?" the Church concluded.”