The Ministry of Reconciliation Quotes

“Sacrifice is a notoriously hard concept to understand. Indeed, it is not a univocal concept, but is a name used for a variety of actions that attempt communication between the human and the divine or transcendent spheres.7 Contemplation of the abyss reveals the enormity and complexity of the evil that has been perpetrated upon a society. What would it take to overcome it? The images of cross and blood figure prominently in the Pauline language of reconciliation (cf. Rom 5:9; Col 1:20; Eph 2:13-16). Both cross and blood have paradoxical meanings that allow them to bridge the distance between the divine and human worlds, between life and death. The cross was the ultimate sign of Roman power over a conquered and colonized people. To be crucified was the most dishonorable and humiliating of ways to die. The cross stood as a sign of reassertion of Roman power and the capacity to reject and exclude utterly. Yet it was through the crucified Christ that God chose to reconcile the world. The apparent triumph of worldly power is turned against itself and becomes “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1:24). For John, the cross is at once instrument of humiliation and Christ's throne of glory (Jn 12:32). Similarly, blood is a sign of the divine life that God has breathed into every living being, and its shedding is a sign of death. The blood of the cross (Col 1:20) becomes the means of reconciling all things to God. In its being shed, the symbol of violence and death becomes the symbol of reconciliation and peace. To understand sacrifice, one must be prepared to inhabit the space within these paradoxes. Sacrifice understood in this way is not about the abuse of power, but about a transformation of power. A spirituality of reconciliation can be deepened by a meditation on the stories of the women and the tomb. These stories invite us to place inside them our experience of marginalization, of being incapable of imagining a way out of a traumatic past, of dealing with the kinds of absence that traumas create. They invite us to let the light of the resurrection—a light that even the abyss cannot extinguish—penetrate those absences.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“The subtitle of this book is Spirituality and Strategies. In Reconciliation, I had proposed that reconciliation is more a spirituality than a strategy. It seemed to me that reconciliation had to be a way of living, had to relate to the profound spiritual issues that reconciliation raises and requires. To think of it only as strategy is to succumb to a kind of technical rationality that will succeed at best partially. Yet strategies cannot be dispensed with. Concrete experiences of struggling to achieve some measure of reconciliation require decisions, and those decisions must have some grounding. I still believe that reconciliation requires a certain spiritual orientation if it is to be successful. The challenge of reconciliation today is such that it requires an interreligious effort. Religious difference is sometimes the cause of social conflict; in all instances, religious people must find ways to work together to achieve reconciliation. What this book hopes to offer is the spirituality that will sustain Christians in their efforts to collaborate with others in that process.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“Reconciliation processes try to create new spaces that are safe for revisiting the experience of trauma.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“What often makes the readjustment process after transforming change so unsatisfying is that old relationships have not been allowed to change. One of the struggles in South Africa today, for example, has to do with moving from a posture of resistance to one of reconstruction. How do you move from struggling against a great evil to collaborating in order to create a just society? The process mobilizes a different set of emotions and calls for compromises. It is perhaps for this reason that reconciliation is so difficult to attain.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“The most important relationship of presence to combat absence will be in the Eucharist.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“Jesus tells her not to cling to him—“Do not hold on to me.” One cannot hold on to the dead; a new kind of relationship has to be established. Much of what Jesus does in the”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“This terrible absence is, like a black hole, not simply a passive emptiness waiting to be filled. It is a menacing awareness of a force that is fundamentally set against all that exists and is good. This absence is the experience of evil, what St. Augustine called many centuries ago the privatio boni, the absence of the good. Survivors of torture have expressed the experience of this special kind of absence. Devout Christians have recounted how, in the midst of their torture, they did not feel the presence of God, even though they knew that God sides with the oppressed. No, they did not feel that presence at all. All that they did experience was this menacing absence. Perhaps the women at the tomb that day experienced such a thing.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“That Jesus’ body appeared to have been taken away was the final insult after the humiliation and suffering of the execution.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“ignorance about the disappeared undermines the reality of the world.”6”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“My wound had to heal without first being cleansed. I know he was killed, but they never returned his body to me. The mourning period is still going on.” “Every time I see a madman or a hobo in the street I think it may be my husband; or that he might be somewhere in a similar condition.” “Until recently we hoped to find them alive. Today we are going around looking for the bones. This is never going to end…this long nightmare from which I don't know if I can wake up, because I've forgotten what it means to live a normal life.”5”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“Moments when reconciliation occurs are moments of surprise, like the experience of encountering the risen Lord in the appearance stories. As was noted in the last chapter, reconciliation always takes us to a new place. It does not simply transport us back to where we had been before the trauma occurred. Those who have experienced reconciliation or work with those seeking it know how difficult it is to imagine an alternative, to be prepared for a surprise. Before they happen, alternatives and surprises seem not to honor the terror and the pain of the experience of violence. Yet what keeps people trapped in the memories of violence is precisely the dilemma of integrating the traumatic experience into their identity, on the one hand, and escaping its grasp, on the other. This is something to which we will return in later chapters.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“Women, and women's experience, are essential to the spirituality and the ministry of reconciliation. Women's endless experience of domination by men in cultures of patriarchy has been a school for thinking about alternatives, for seeing a different way. Since a ministry of reconciliation requires seeing a different way, part of creating communities of reconciliation is the cultivation of ways of living together outside the usual paths of power and domination.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“All of this points to an important dimension of a spirituality of reconciliation. A spirituality of reconciliation involves not directing one's thinking along the traditional channels of power, but making possible the springing up of alternatives to dominative power. To counter power with the same kind of power may restrain it, but it does not lead to peace. This is something practitioners of non-violence have known for a long time. But it is a lesson hard to learn. The power that broke the hold of sin on the world was the powerlessness, the agony, and the humiliation of the cross. The blood that was shed in violence becomes life-giving, redeeming blood. Reconciliation requires finding a different kind of power from dominative power to transform situations. Matthilde Mellibovsky, one of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, speaks of it as a “circle of love around death.” The women in Croatia called it a wall of peace. It is the power that raised Jesus from the dead.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“Perhaps that is why Jesus appeared first to women: they are the ones who most frequently lead acts of reconciliation that can come to make a difference. They are the ambassadors of reconciliation par excellence.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“What all of these stories point to is the pivotal role women play in suffering, violence, and reconciliation. They are frequently the victims. They are the ones left behind to reconstruct a new society. They are the ones who survive. And they are the ones who find a non-violent way out of violent situations. They teach others how to cope, to heal memories, and to move on.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“Her account of being released from prison reminds us that women not only suffer from violence, but their suffering is different from that of men: Being a woman of forty and coming out of prison is very different than when a man of forty is released. We all have to cope with a world that's changed enormously. We have to get used to the fact that we can walk more than a few metres; our health is considerably worse. Often your eyes need to adjust to seeing at a distance. All things you've forgotten in prison. Men have a wife or family waiting for them. But a woman has to take care of her family when she's released.3”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“They formed what they called the “wall of peace.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“One of the central facts that must be faced in a ministry of reconciliation is that men are most frequently the source of the violence that rends families, communities, and nations apart. Some account for this by noting that males are more aggressive physically than are females, and that this goes back to our distant past when the man's strength was needed to defend women and children from harm. Whether aggression is in the genes or whether it is learned behavior remains a matter of debate. However, it always leaves human wreckage strewn in its wake. The other side of this fact is that it is often left to women to find ways of repairing the damage that men's violence and conflict have wrought. Sometimes they are the survivors; the men are no longer there. At other times women are the ones who are able to imagine alternatives that break the deadlock of a conflictive situation. The stories that could be cited are many.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“Reconciliation had touched her heart, and she did not seek revenge. She only wanted an acknowledgment on the part of the new government of what the apartheid government had done.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“Interspersed within those meditations are reflections on issues important for both a spirituality of reconciliation and strategies of reconciliation: memory, healing, forgiveness, truth, and ministry.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“because, after all the struggles to reconstruct democracy in Chile and having endured so much suffering, people needed a new source of hope. It dawned on me that the resurrection stories of the appearances of Jesus might just hold the key to hope. The lectures were presented as examples of “master narratives” into which we can put our own stories.”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality

“Two events in 1996 spurred me to consider writing another book on reconciliation. The first was an invitation from Antonio Baus, C.PP.S., to come to Chile in January 1997”
― Robert J. Schreiter, Ministry of Reconciliation: Spirituality & Strategies: Strategies and Spirituality