Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“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.”

“Felt reality is invariably wept reality, and wept reality is soon compassion and kindness. Decisive and harsh judgments slip away in the tracks of tears.”

“Saint Francis was depicted as crying all the time in his early biographies, and I always wondered why. I now believe, after fifty-four years of public ministry, that the gift of tears and the gift of healing are almost one and the same. "Blessed are those who weep," says Jesus, "for they will be comforted" (Matthew 5:4). Francis healed people and situations because he could deeply weep over them.”

“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers…”

“We have in great part created God in our own self-justifying image, just as Job's friends and the early-stage prophets tried to do.”

“Job was acquainted with the tears of things. Elijah, Jonah, and John the Baptizer could only go so far, but Job embodies the transformed perspective of a mature prophet. (Islam seems to understand this, since Job appears as one of the twenty-five prophets named in the Koran.)”

“Progressives must get out of their heads and move beyond the political correctness that passes for enlightenment.”

“Many Catholics, meanwhile, assume we are saved by doing church rules right and not really by the pure grace and experienced love of God that radically rearranges our consciousness. Both groups are, in a sense, externally baptized with water, but not the "fire and Spirit" of Jesus's baptism.”

“I have seen so many Christians, on the one hand, and justice activists, on the other, who are morally correct in their actions but spiritually quite immature—doing the right things for the wrong reasons. (This was one of the major reasons I founded the Center for Action and Contemplation...) Some live a countercultural lifestyle, not really to help the poor, but to be seen as counter-culturally chic.”

“In his aloneness and anguish, this prophet saw what a majority still cannot see twenty-five hundred years later. Our refusal to allow ourselves to be loved undeservedly and unconditionally will probably forever be the anguish of every prophet and the burden of every mystic or saint.”

“Collective evil—such as institutionalized racism, corporate greed, structural homophobia, and gun culture—is almost impossible to adjudicate and, sadly, almost always implicates us! So we just keep looking for obvious bad apples out there. If we can identify those wrongdoers, blame them, punish them as scapegoats, we can carry on living as we did.”

“This message of necessary disorder is very hard for overly ordered people and super-patriots to believe, but it is a crucial presence in our world. If we allow it to do its work on us, this prophetic disruption can open up our accepted sense of what's possible, making room for evolving people, for exceptions to our normal ways of doing things, and for something genuinely new to happen.”

“The prophet is never shocked by death-even the death of what we might think immortal. And this is exactly my point: The prophet can best hear and be heard during times of holy disorder (what mystics have called "darkness" and what I call "liminal space"). When our "sure things" fall apart, the prophets show how they were built on illusion and power to begin with, and not finally real.”

“You see, prophets seldom preach peace and prosperity, as we're accustomed to hearing from political candidates and most people who seek public notoriety. ... Why? Because things are always falling apart and the prophet's job is to illustrate that catastrophes eventually have to happen and we must allow them to happen.”

“The prophet's goal, then, is always to create an alternative world based in Spirit and not in mammon.”

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.… All old-established national industries have been destroyed…”

“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.”

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations… and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'… It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and …has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — free trade … for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions…”

“Center for Action and Contemplation... a classic and creative tension, in which and is the most important word. Action comes before contemplation because you do not have anything to contemplate until you have acted in the world and recognized that the real issues are difficult to resolve—tied up in deep motivations like identity, power, and money. Often what you think is the issue is not even the issue at all.”

“Negative energy, or critical energy, does not usually become constructive or useful unless some prophetic types enter the scene early in the process of change.”

“few cultures have had training for these crucial dissenters, apart from the Jewish people. If such internal, legitimated critics are not allowed, let alone encouraged and trained, history will only move forward at the cost of blood and heartbreak. Growth will not be organic or inclusive; instead, it will be largely exclusionary and punishing of whatever is in that moment considered the problem.”

“An Indigenous person who believed the myths of his or her culture probably had a stronger sense of self than today's postmodern person, who denies all real or operative transcendence.”

“But when personal or historical disorder shows itself—and it always does—we will begin a necessary period of critique, change, or rebellion. I am calling this disorder the "prophetic rule." It is always opposed and resisted, and thus needs wise protectors and guides and the strong ego structure that the preceding order provides.”

“Reforms rarely move directly from the existing order to a new order automatically or by a single positive insight. The old order has to somehow show its disorder, its shadow self, its injustices, its wrongness. Then there must be a period of disorder, a fertile time of searching before a new order can be found.”

“The Jewish prophets never reached the same critical mass as the ordained elders, scribes, and teachers of the law, but they were the ones who held on to the purified, mystical message of Judaism and Christianity, and thus kept it from disappearing. A minority within a minority, they taught the refined and actual message of love of God and neighbor as one, which is full religious transformation.”

“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”

“Once you have been met on the inside, you know there is an inside because it has met you there.”

“Only mystics and those who pray from the heart escape this trap, it seems to me. They have met the infinite mercy and stopped counting, measuring, and weighing themselves and others. They know these acts are meaningless. The rest of us keep trying to compute and settle for polite civil religion instead of presencing and participating in what is always immeasurable.”