Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“There, on the edge of a rock, hidden in plain sight by still water, I found an ineffable contentment. Something about the simplicity was liberating to me. I had been around the world. I had knelt before its wonders and many times felt nothing at all. But this was ordinary beauty. And maybe the smallness of such beauty made its joy easier to access.”

“But I think we were made to be delighted in. And I think it takes just as much strength to believe someone’s joy about you as it does to muster it all on your own. We shouldn’t need to choose self-affirmation at the expense of the affirmation of another. I think we were meant for both. We need both a personal and a communal praxis that actively resists our self-hatred...we need...another’s voice to celebrate us.”

“Some of us go our whole lives without ever being—or rather, knowing that we are—truly enjoyed by a person. We can become cynical about communal affirmation, hoping that our affirmation of self will suffice. We try to meet our self-hatred with the sound of our own voice, because this, for whatever reason, is seen as a superior strength.”

“Joy, which once felt as frivolous as love to me, has become a central virtue in my spirituality.”

“He says, People say the birth of your child is the happiest moment of your life. But when your child chooses you…And his sentence doesn’t need a close.”

“Remember. You were never meant to prove your dignity.”

“We would never articulate it as such, but undergirding much of our concept of calling is the belief that our primary relationship to God is anchored in transaction.”

“We are seldom impressed by simplicity, unless it is the kind inflated with theatrics, which inevitably draws attention to itself—capsule wardrobes, minimalism, van life—and still is, in a manner, doing. But we fall on our knees at the sight of a man working sixty hours a week for his law firm in the city. We are in awe of the violence.”

“She says “to not rest is really being violent toward your body, to align yourself with a system that says your body doesn’t belong to you, keep working, you are simply a tool for our production.” But this violence has come to be celebrated and rewarded. And now we demand as much from one another as what has been demanded of us.”

“In community, we can push back on the expectation that we exhaust ourselves. It was no longer my father’s lone responsibility to put his two girls to bed or braid our hair every morning. In solidarity, my father’s mother and siblings made his sacrifice the sacrifice of the collective. They became harbors, allowing him to find a stability of heart—peace in a maddening world.”

“God, in Christ, learned something of this incessant demand. In one of the gospels, Jesus wakes up at daybreak just to go out to find a place to exhale alone for a bit. The crowds go and hunt him down, and they’re clinging to him, begging him to not leave again. Jesus puts them all in check, as if to say, Don’t you know I have other things going on? You are keeping me from my purpose. If Christ walked away, so can I”

“And it is the specter of scarcity that withholds the rest we have been made for, the paradox being that what feels so much like risk is actually the means of restoration. We sleep and we regenerate. Our cells begin a sacred rhythm of repair and release. And when we wake, we are more healed, more whole, less inflamed, more aware.”

“They distract us from this by dangling opportunity in the opposite direction. They appear as rescuers, demanding ceaseless labor from us but presenting it as a gift. We are expected to feel deeply lucky and even indebted to a society that allows us to work, even if that work cannot satisfy our most basic needs.”

“And this transaction is nearly always incongruent with the amount of labor one does. You can work, as my gramma did in California, for a full month just to be able to finally move from the shelter into low-income housing. Meanwhile, the powerful convince us that there is not enough while their pockets spill over out in the open.”

“In response to the risk and need around us, we have constructed systems around labor that leave even the hardest workers vulnerable, in deficit... Labor instead becomes a means to an end, not an avenue for flourishing but a transaction for survival. This is a grim human development, for no one wants to spend their days merely surviving.”

“Stillness makes for a capable mirror. Look down in a rough and fast current, and you won’t see a thing. Still water allows you to lean in without danger and really see yourself.”

“The curse of the world has made for restless hearts, bodies, minds. Our hands fidget, we open and close our emails, we obsess over something we said yesterday. It’s like the atoms that make us have begun darting around in and outside of us with no awareness of each other... and now God is trying to steady us and make it so that we can be still without becoming terrified of things, of ourselves.”

“Yet when we invite people into spirituality, too often rest is reduced to an inner posture someone should adopt while exhausting their body. But the Bible says, "In returning and rest, you shall be saved" (Isaiah 30:15)”

“It seems like anytime God is talking about salvation in the Bible, he makes a point to name rest. "I’ll refresh tired bodies" (Jeremiah 31:25, MSG). "Find rest for your souls" (Matthew 11:29). And, in Psalm 23:2, we have "He makes me lie down."
...
The most enduring yet undermined sentiment of evangelism: "Come to me all you that are weary…and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).”

“And you’d of course be right to ask the question: Can we be reconciled if there was no harmony to begin with? I suppose it is my faith that allows me, despite all the lack I see, to trace the plumb line back to an origin story of harmony—a shalom that can be repaired, however slowly and painfully.”

“There are some of us who have grown weary of talk of reconciliation. This is probably because it comes to us on the tongues of men who have paid no time to the process of true repair. It is both ego and shame concealed in shallow unity-speak that regresses any progress that has been made.”

“Forgiveness came to her not in a dramatic flourish or sudden comprehension... You participate in it... but it also is something that happens to you without you necessarily noticing. I don’t think we have as much control over our forgiveness as we think. You can’t force hair to grow faster than your body allows. I think this is okay. You cannot reason resentment away, nor the trauma that grew it. There is time.”

“If you cut me, I want you to apologize with grave specificity for the blood running down my back. And I want you to describe what in you made you do it. When you gain the courage to look at me, I want your soul to writhe like it was the back of God that was cut.”

“When you’re little, apologies of I’m sorry—or worse still, Sorry—are accepted as enough. It trains us for the wrong thing. A few years ago, I reached the conclusion that I will no longer accept an unspecific apology for specific wrongs.”

“Reconciliation is so elusive because so few ever occupy a state of sincere remorse. If we are to be reconciled, the offender must become disturbed by the state of their soul—a contrition that births apology not for the sake of its own forgiveness but to honor the dignity that was once at risk.”

“Truth-telling is critical to repair. But confession alone—which tends to serve the confessor more than the oppressed—will never be enough. Reparations are required. To expect repair without some kind of remittance would be injustice doubled. What has been stolen must be returned. This is not vengeance, it’s restoration.”

“When wounders, finally becoming exhausted of their dominion, dismantle their delusion of heroism or victimhood and begin to tell the truth of their offense, a sacred rest becomes available to them.”

“I think confession is liberation. It is easy to think that in injustice only the oppressed have their freedom to gain. In truth, the liberation of the oppressor is also at stake. Whether it’s the privilege we’ve inherited or space we’ve stolen, what began as guilt will mutate into shame, which is much more sinister and decidedly heavier on the soul.”

“Repair is more than justice. What do we do once the curse is lifted but the damage is untouched? When justice is had and the swords are beaten into plowshares but everyone’s wounds are still bleeding in the open, what then? Justice doesn’t survive without repair.”

“To be human in an aching world is to know our dignity and become people who safeguard the dignity of everything around us.”