Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“A persistent and never-ending appeal to the laws—not just to the laws concerning human rights, but to all laws—does not mean at all that those who do so have succumbed to the illusion that in our system the law is anything other than what it is.”

“Audre Lorde said, "Without community there is no liberation." There is no promised land without a multitude. You think you can get there alone, and maybe by some rare chance you do. But what will become of the promise when it is collapsed by loneliness?”

“We need other people to see our own faces—to bear witness to their beauty and truth. God has made it so that I can never truly know myself apart from another person.”

“Like ideology, the legal code is an essential instrument of ritual communication outside the power structure. It is the legal code that gives the exercise of power a form, a framework, a set of rules. It is the legal code that enables all components of the system to communicate, to put themselves in a good light, to establish their own legitimacy.”

“Thus an attitude that turns away from abstract political visions of the future toward concrete human beings and ways of defending them effectively in the here and now is quite naturally accompanied by an intensified antipathy to all forms of violence carried out in the name of a better future, and by a profound belief that a future secured by violence might actually be worse than what exists now...”

“...the fundamental lines of conflict run right through each person. In this situation, no attempt at revolt could ever hope to set up even a minimum of resonance in the rest of society, because that society is soporific, submerged in a consumer rat race...”

“At the opposite end of the spectrum from cults, you find communities of true solidarity. Solidarity is a group that stands together, and would do so for even its weakest member. It is that community which resists the intoxicating lie of individualism—we live for ourselves and by ourselves.”

“Cults may appear to exercise community, but it is a community that does not stand for each of its members. Cults stand only on behalf of a single member. And it is never reciprocal.”

“But if you took this notion to the extreme, you would observe something interesting: There is a point at which the uncertainty becomes so great that the brittle bond is actually strengthened. On the other side of that line, you will find not community, but cult—where a sense of deep alienation meets the poisoned possibility of belonging through the death of selfhood.”

“Durable friendship is a bond that is able to endure both truth-telling and conflict. Bonds without these things become brittle. When your standing is always at stake in the group, it fosters assimilation and competition.”

“I’m convinced that in most bonds it is not conflict we fear; it is abandonment after conflict. We fear it because we know something is at risk. For this reason, we can become cruelest to those we know will stay. And we resort to flattery or appeasement for those we are uncertain will do so.”

“Friendship can, of course, be found in the home, neighborhood, or blood, but it doesn’t necessarily begin there. It is two or more disparate parts being compelled toward one another by interest, circumstance, or even loneliness. We feel a distinct longing for this out of our longing to be chosen.”

“At the intersection of belonging and choice, you’ll often find friendship. It is that rare bond in which attachment feels so much like a risk because its origin lies in the bond itself.”

“You make bravado out of your loneliness. It is one way to numb the pain of the wound. You elevate yourself above community, looking down at it as frivolous or needy or less enlightened—this is in denial of your own needs, of course.”

“If you go without belonging for long enough, if you’ve known the sting of betrayal, you can end up manufacturing an identity from your alienation. To protect yourself from the reminder and risk of exclusion, you begin initiating distance on your own, calling yourself loner or independent. This becomes a form of lived escapism as you run from the belief that you will be rejected again or that you cannot trust again.”

“People talk about God as three distinct people in one. If this is true, it means the whole cosmos is predicated on a diverse and holy community. And if we bear the image of God, that means we bear the image of a multitude. And that to bear the image of God in its fullness, we need each other.”

“We know from a number of harsh experiences that neither reform nor change is in itself a guarantee of anything. We know that ultimately it is all the same to us whether or not the system in which we live, in the light of a particular doctrine, appears changed or reformed. Our concern is whether we can live with dignity in such a system...”

“If a better economic and political model is to be created, then... it must derive from profound existential and moral changes in society. This is not something that can be designed and introduced like a new car. If it is to be more than just a new variation of the old degeneration, it must above all be an expression of life in the process of transforming itself.”

“In mutuality, belonging is both a gift received and a gift given. There is comfort in being welcomed, but there is dignity in knowing that your arrival just shifted a group toward deeper wholeness.”

“Maybe you’ve heard it said that you need to learn how to be alone before you can be with someone. I say you have to learn how to be with and a part of something in order to know how to be alone. I think it is only out of a deep anchoring in community that one can ever be free to explore the solitary. When I write community, I mean to say any group of people that is committed to being a collective.”

“I do join the scores of others who have said that, in more ways than one, the flourishing of a healthy community lies in the ability of its parts to be solitary.”

“those tiny moments of being seen, of being felt, collect like a hope in her, carrying her through her loneliness to this day. We were made for belonging. I don’t need a verse in Genesis to tell me that it is not good for one to be alone.”

“Protect the truest things about you and it will become easier to hear the truth everyplace else.”

“I was desperate for a synchrony that wouldn’t tear me apart. I needed to know that it was, in fact, possible to honor the sacred in our work without creating spiritual hierarchies depending on the kind of labor being performed.”

“We cannot talk about work as calling without contending with the fact that there are those who have been denied choice, equity, and dignity in their work.”

“He sees people in such a manner that they crave nearness to him.”

“Just as outer voices can lead you away from the well of your own selfhood, they also have the capacity to usher you into new depths of it. And if practiced right, your calling into selfhood may enhance the sound of self in someone else.”

“"Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear." This is his assurance that our calling into self need not be solitary.”

“My journey to the truth of God cannot be parsed from my journey to the truth of who I am. A fidelity to the true self is a fidelity to truth.”

“More than ever before, such a change will have to derive from human existence, from the fundamental reconstitution of the position of people in the world, their relationships to themselves and to each other, and to the universe. If a better economic and political model is to be created, then perhaps more than ever before it must derive from profound existential and moral changes in society.”