Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“To shed the burden of traditional political categories and habits and open oneself up fully to the world of human existence and then to draw political conclusions only after having analyzed it: this is not only politically more realistic but at the same time, from the point of view of an "ideal state of affairs," politically more promising as well.”

“People who live in the posttotalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being.”

“But each year I know love and belonging—a love that doesn’t require sacrifice at the altar of acceptance—I become more of who I already am. I am liberated into what Merton calls my "true self." I believe this is my deepest calling... I am called to them because on some deep plane of the soul, they are already true of me. I choose them out of a fidelity to self, not an aspiration toward an idealized self.”

“From horoscopes and the Enneagram to the social archetypes of the high school cafeteria, we are desperate for ways to make sense of who we are in relation to the world.”

“The question of calling is not primarily a question of what we might become, but a question of what is already true—not least of which is what is true about the self. Ask me what I want to be, but not before you ask me who I want to be. Ask me who I want to be, but not before you ask me the more searing question of who I am.”

“And once we name that we do not have enough, the system convinces us that it is our task to do more. We live depleted of that rest which is the only reliable gateway to wonder. We inhabit an economy of power that views wonder and awe as frivolities or naïveté, distractions on the path to liberation.”

“And once we name that we do not have enough, the system convinces us that it is our task to do more. We live depleted of that rest which is the only reliable gateway to wonder. We inhabit an economy of power that views wonder and awe as frivolities or naïveté, distractions on the path to liberation.”

“When we grow accustomed to neglecting beauty, we eventually become creatures of hatred. We lose our imagination—a virtue to which wonder is helplessly tied. Why care for barren land? Why advocate for justice in a system predicated on injustice? ... We become unable to conceive of anything worthwhile in our own image until we empty ourselves of all beauty and turn against our own bodies in disgust.”

“Practicing wonder is a powerful tool against despair. It works nearly the same muscles as hope, in that you find yourself believing in goodness and beauty even when the evidence gives you every reason to believe that goodness and beauty are void. This can feel like a risk to those of us who have had our dreams colonized, who have known the devastation of hope unfulfilled.”

“The real sphere of potential politics... in the continuing and cruel tension between the complex demands of that system and the aims of life...is... the elementary need of human beings to live... in harmony with themselves... not to be humiliated by their superiors and officials, not to be continually watched by the police, to be able to express themselves freely... to enjoy legal security, and so on.”

“Wonder includes the capacity to be in awe of humanity, even your own. It allows us to jettison the dangerous belief that things worthy of wonder can only be located on nature hikes and scenic overlooks. This can distract us from the beauty flowing through us daily. For every second that our organs and bones sustain us is a miracle.”

“More than the grand beauties of our lives, wonder is about having the presence to pay attention to the commonplace. It could be said that to find beauty in the ordinary is a deeper exercise than climbing to the mountaintop. When people or groups become too enamored with mountaintops, we should ask ourselves whether their euphoria comes from love or from the experience of supremacy.”

“I think awe is an exercise, both a doing and a being. It is a spiritual muscle of our humanity that we can only keep from atrophying if we exercise it habitually. ... Awe is not a lens through which to see the world but our sole path to seeing. Any other lens is not a lens but a veil.”

“As we grow older, the "serious" becomes a simulacrum for wisdom and even honor. Impoverished by the honor withheld from us in childhood, we become very willing participants in a kind of spiritual maturation that honors the profound and grave, even at the expense of the simple and beautiful.”

“I do not know from where my ancestors were abducted. ... I don’t know what sound the waves and soil speak. These things were stolen from me as they were from them. I think it is one of the deepest evils to become a thief of place, to make someone a stranger to their home, and then mark their relationship to the land by bondage instead of love. To steal place has less to do with power than with hatred.”

“As someone who is made of more doubt than faith, I find that Christians tend to want to talk to me about salvation. They seem quite concerned with the future of my faith, but they make the mistake of showing little interest in my present conditions. If asked to choose, I want a God who is someplace. Not just in “the heart,” ... I don’t just want to be rescued; I want to be taken someplace safe and good.”

“To find a manner of anonymity, to experience that dreadful thing we call "blending in," can be a kind of haven. It is not to become untethered but to become a part of. To walk a street apprehending you are one small refrain in a holy cacophony, and as the place becomes more familiar, your own selfhood becomes more lucid.”

“French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil said, "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." Alienation and trauma of place are best met not with dislocation but with belonging, with a defiant rootedness, even if those roots stretch out to new and safer places.”

“Our dignity may involve our doing, but it is foremost in our very being—our tears and emotions, our bodies lying in the grass, our scabs healing. I try to remember that Eve and Adam bore the image of God before they did anything at all. This is very mysterious to me, and it must be protected.”

“We cannot help but entwine our concept of dignity with how much a person can do. The sick, the elderly, the disabled, the neurodivergent, my sweet cousin on the autism spectrum—we tend to assign a lesser social value to those whose "doing" cannot be enslaved into a given output.”

“Our societies and communities have a way of grinding up and serving out dignity in portions based on our own human ideals and idols. In the history of the white Western world, you can trace a perversion of dignity in the name of usefulness. You are no longer the image of God, you are currency.”

“I don’t have many certainties about God. I do have many hopes. Chief among them is that it’s true what they say: that God is love...”

“There will always be those who expend a great deal of effort trying to manipulate someone into believing there’s something in their reflection that isn’t truly there. These are dangerous and desperate souls. Yet for all their trying, dignity was not and is not something that can be taken. Glory can’t be unborn.”

“Perhaps the more superior we believe ourselves to be to creation, the less like God we become. But if we embrace shalom—the idea that everything is suspended in a delicate balance between the atoms that make me and the tree and the bird and the sky—if we embrace the beauty of all creation, we find our own beauty magnified. And what is shalom but dignity stretched out like a blanket over the cosmos.”

“I do find it peculiar that humans have come to wield this over the rest of creation as though we are somehow superior... I wonder if we knelt down and put our ear to the ground, it would whisper up to us, Yes, you were made in the image of God, but God made you of me. We’ve grown numb to the idea that we ourselves are made of the dust, mysteriously connected to the goodness of the creation that surrounds us.”

“The God I’ve known does not dominate; he kneels and washes his enemies’ feet.”

“As a default, I imagine God as a white man. Even now that I know the tragedy and the lie in the image, ... what else should be expected of me with all the stained glass and oil paintings? Does the church truly believe that God might look as much like me... as a white male? It has damaged many to think that the holiest being that ever was looks precisely like the man who kept our ancestors in bondage.”

“It is not wholly unusual for individuals or cultures to imagine God as being like them in some way. … If God is like me, then perhaps she becomes more predictable. Safer. But when we force our picture of God on another, or when God is presented as singular, we tend to colonize the image of God in others.”

“For me, most simply, contemplative spirituality is a fidelity to beholding the divine in all things. In the field, on the walk home, sitting under the oak tree that hugs my house. A sacred attention.”

In first few pages, I am reading things I just have to sit with.