Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“To love and to be loved only serves mutually to render this existence more concrete, more constantly present to the mind. But it should be present as the source of our thoughts, not as their object. If there are grounds for wishing to be understood, it is not for ourselves but for the other, in order that we may exist for him.”

“We are attached by a cord to all the objects of attachment, and a cord can always be cut. We are also attached by a cord to the imaginary God, the God for whom love is also an attachment. But to the real God we are not attached and that is why there is no cord which can be cut. He enters into us. He alone can enter into us.”

“The Love of Phaedrus. He neither exercises force nor submits to it. That constitutes the only purity. Contact with the sword causes the same defilement whether it be through the handle or the point.”

“God's love for us is the reason for us to love ourselves.”

“Thus perfect detachment alone enables us to see things in their naked reality, outside the fog of deceptive values. That is why ulcers and the dung-heap were necessary before Job could receive the revelation of the world's beauty. For there is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present also.”

“Religion and education must change one's internal feelings, but it is scarcely a moral act to encourage others to patiently accept injustice until a man's heart gets right. All that we seek through legislation is to control the external effects of one's internal feelings.”

“The law does not seek to change one's internal feelings; it seeks to control the external effects of those internal feelings. For in-stance, the law cannot make a man love me-religion and education must do that... but it can keep him from lynching me. The law cannot make an employer have compassion for me, but it can keep him from refusing to hire me because of the color of my skin.”

“I... [would] attempt to combine two apparent irreconcilables. I would seek to arouse the group to action by insisting that their self-respect was at stake and that if they accepted such injustices without protesting, they would betray their own sense of dignity and the eternal edicts of God Himself. But I would balance this with a strong affirmation of the Christian doctrine of love."

“At our gate stands some poor Lazarus who has been deprived of all of these. There is a gulf. But the gulf can be bridged by a little love and compassion. Bridge the gulf before it becomes too late. It is now passable. But it can become impassable.”

“[the Rich Man] is the American capitalist who never seeks to bridge the economic gulf between himself and the laborer because he feels that it is natural for some to live in inordinate luxury while others live in abject poverty.”

“[the Rich Man] was condemned because his selfishness caused him to lose the capacity to sympathize. There is nothing more tragic than to find a person who can look at the anguishing and deplorable circumstances of fellow human beings and not be moved. His wealth had made him cold and calculating; it had blotted out the warmth of compassion.”

“There is a gulf. But the gulf can be bridged by a little love and compassion. Bridge the gulf before it becomes too late. It is now passable. But it can become impassable.”

“'I was naked, and ye clothed me.' This gift is simply an indication of the state of those who acted in this way. They were in a state which made it impossible for them not to feed the hungry and to clothe the naked; they did not in any way do it for Christ, they could not help doing it because the compassion of Christ was in them.”

“What do the energy, the gifts, etc. which are in me matter?”

“God can love in us only this consent to withdraw in order to make way for him, just as he himself, our creator, withdrew in order that we might come into being. This double operation has no other meaning than love, it is like a father giving his child something which will enable the child to give a present on his father's birthday. God who is no other thing but love has not created anything other than love.”

“The self is only the shadow which sin and error cast by stopping the light of God, and I take this shadow for a being.”

“God allows me to exist outside himself. It is for me to refuse this authorization. Humility is the refusal to exist outside God. It is the queen of virtues.”

“It is necessary not to be 'myself', still less to be 'ourselves'. The city gives us the feeling of being at home. We must take the feeling of being at home into exile. We must be rooted in the absence of a place.”

“God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself. Holiness should then be hidden too, even from consciousness in a certain measure. And it should be hidden in the world.”

“Belief in immortality is harmful because it is not in our power to conceive of the soul as really incorporeal. So this belief is in fact a belief in the prolongation of life, and it robs death of its purpose.”

“Those who wish for their salvation do not truly believe in the reality of the joy within God."

“If we consider what we are at a definite moment–the present moment, cut off from the past and the future–we are innocent. We cannot at that instant be anything but what we are: all progress implies duration. It is in the order of the world at this instant that we should be such as we are. To isolate a moment in this way implies pardon. But such isolation is detachment.”

“Renunciation demands that we should pass through anguish equivalent to that which would be caused in reality by the loss of all loved beings and all possession, including our faculties and attainments in the order of intelligence and character, our opinions, beliefs concerning what is good, what is stable, etc. And we must not lay these things down of ourselves but lose them–like Job.”

“The first operation is one of reversal-Conversion. "Except the seed die..." It has to die in order to liberate the energy it bears within it so that with this energy new forms may be developed. So we have to die in order to liberate a tied up energy, in order to possess an energy which is free and capable of understanding the true relationship of things. ”

“We believe that the gospel of Jesus is raceless, that Jesus lived as a Jewish man and should not be exorcised from his cultural setting in Nazareth, an agricultural community, to serve the needs of American culture, its stereotypes, and prejudices.”

“The raceless gospel requires us to deconstruct race and to decolonize identity. It begins with the way we speak about ourselves, our neighbor, and our God. I invite you to tear down the linguistic, legal, and living structures that support the defacing of the Imago Dei in all human beings.”

“The raceless gospel, rooted in baptismal identity, is an embodied ecclesiology, that aims to drown out all competing identities.”

“"Jesus reached beyond his people, beyond his perceived mandate, beyond his tradition, extending himself to the 'other.' ... All of us to some extent, hold the line against the other. All of us, to some extent, know that our faith calls us out beyond that," wrote Walter Brueggemann in A Way Other Than Our Own. Those early Christians knew that their place was with everyone.”

“Jesus didn't come up from the water with an air of superiority or a claim of supremacy. Instead, God claimed him as son. And Jesus didn't call his followers to walk away from the marginalized family, my beloved and minoritized.”

“Degrading bodies racialized as black while elevating others racialized as white, race supports an unbalanced power dynamic, masquerading as identity.”