Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Our histories, stories, and sins render us so defensive of our delusions of good selves that we are unable to see the tears of another clearly. This can function on the communal level, too, as entire countries convince themselves of a positive hero image, drowning out the cries of those around the world with anthems and stories of the nation’s greatness. The church is not exempt from this.”

“People whose faiths are predicated on happiness make for dangerous friends and woefully disconnected fellow humans.”

“We will not heal divorced from our emotions. A spirituality that depends on positivity will lead not only to emotional fallacies but also eventually to delusions of all kinds.”

“Now there is a distinction to be made between true lament and the more sinister form of sadness we know as despair. Despair is lament emptied of hope. It is a shell that invites the whole of your soul to dwell in its void. Many of us will visit this shell, but despair depends upon our staying.”

“Lament is not anti-hope. It’s not even a stepping-stone to hope. Lament itself is a form of hope. It’s an innate awareness that what is should not be. As if something is written on our hearts that tells us exactly what we are meant for, and whenever confronted with something contrary to this, we experience a crumbling.”

“Too often I have heard people’s pain met with a Christian consolation which essentially communicates that the person in pain should learn to cling to hope, to trust in God. More often than not, I’ve found this unhelpful, and at worst a form of spiritual abuse that uses language of hope to manipulate the hurting into a feigned happiness.”

“I kept going to church, but I didn’t tell a soul for months. I did not trust them to hold my pain in raw form.”

“I was not afraid of seeing him "this way"; I had seen him in the basement dark. I was afraid of him seeing me. Of us seeing each other and knowing once and for all that a profound veil between us had just been torn. Him seeing me see him.”

“True lament is not born from that trite sentiment that the world is bad but rather from a deep conviction that it is worthy of goodness.”

“In lament, our task is never to convince someone of the brokenness of this world; it is to convince them of the world’s worth in the first place.”

“I am most disillusioned with the Christian faith when in the presence of a Christian who refuses to name the traumas of this world. I am suspicious of anyone who can observe colonization, genocide, and decay in the world and not be stirred to lament in some way.”

“When we weep for the conditions of this world, we become truth-tellers in its defense.”

“Perhaps to fear God is to refuse to submit to the demagogues of this world, to refuse to grant them the power they crave, and to place our waiting in the hand of God, who won’t manipulate and wield our fears against us but will hold them in tenderness.”

“Tyrants thrive in communities of fear. They deceive the fearful into believing they will resolve their agony. They’ll promise safety, power, belonging to those who require their hope be attached to a person, usually a person of status. But as tyrants gain confidence, they have less need to obscure their evil... they can threaten, insult, and abuse their followers directly and openly, past the point of rebuke.”

“In fear communities, the source of the threat can be so woefully oblique that you turn against something or some other that you can grab hold of. It convinces you that the path to safety, security, and rest is not love but violence or rejection. The situation becomes gravest when the fear erodes your capacity to hold hope for anyone but your sect.”

“In communities of fear, a kind of sectarianism emerges. People group together by allegiances because there is power in numbers. You will find it in communities as small as a household and as vast as a society. A fear that demands a loyalty from you. And fear’s economy is so scarce, you must choose whom to be afraid for and whom to hope for.”

"Jan Patocka used to say that the most interesting thing about responsibility is that we carry it with us everywhere. That means that responsibility is ours, that we must accept it and grasp it here, now, in this place in time and space where the Lord has set us down, and that we cannot lie our way out of it by moving somewhere else, whether it be to an Indian ashram or to a parallel polis. "

“Historical experience teaches us that any genuinely meaningful point of departure in an individuals life usually has an element of universality about it. In other words, it is not something partial, accessible only to a restricted community, and not transferable to any other. On the contrary, it must be potentially accessible to everyone; it must foreshadow a general solution...”

“the parallel structures do not grow a priori out of a theoretical vision of systemic changes (there are no political sects involved), but from the aims of life and the authentic needs of real people. In fact, all eventual changes in the system, changes we may observe here in their rudimentary forms, have come about as it were de facto, from “below,” because life compelled them to...”

“You will do what you can until you can't, and then you'll fall asleep on the chests of those who love you. Find those who tell you, do not be afraid, yet stay close enough to tremble with you. This is a love.”

“...all attempts by society to resist the pressure of the system have their essential beginnings in the pre-political area. For what else are parallel structures than an area where a different life can be lived, a life that is in harmony with its own aims and which in turn structures itself in harmony with those aims?”

“The ancient answer to fear is the recognition that to be human is to be vulnerable — to pain, to suffering, to death itself.”

“Uncertainty is fear's playground.”

“Fear becomes anxiety when it makes it's home in you.”

“For something at the root of so much of human behavior, it is rare that we ever truly behold another person’s fear. So many of us express our fear in ways that only serve to mask it. In conflict, we may see anger or hate or apathy, but it is much more difficult to perceive fear in a person. It’s even more difficult to name it. Yet fear stalks so much of our words and actions and even loves.”

“The key to a humane, dignified, rich, and happy life does not lie either in the constitution or in the Criminal Code... they can never give life substance or meaning... Without keeping ones eyes open to the real dimensions of life's beauty and misery, and without a moral relationship to life, this struggle will sooner or later come to grief on the rocks of some self-justifying system of scholastics.”

“It is possible to imagine a society with good laws that are fully respected but in which it is impossible to live. Conversely, one can imagine life being quite bearable even where the laws are imperfect and imperfectly applied. The most important thing is always the quality of that life and whether or not the laws enhance life or repress it, not merely whether they are upheld or not.”

“the law is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse. By itself, the law can never create anything better. Its purpose is to render a service and its meaning does not lie in the law itself. Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions”

“They have no other choice: because they cannot discard the rules of their own game, they can only attend more carefully to those rules. Not to react to challenges means to undermine their own excuse and lose control of their mutual communications system.”

“Demanding that the laws be upheld is thus an act of living within the truth that threatens the whole mendacious structure at its point of maximum mendacity.”