Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.

I just discovered someone new, and he's full of great resources that also fit in here at ConsciousChrist. First off, check out: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/empowerhour

Just been working on stuff instead of sharing it. But here we are...connected.  A quote/poem-y thing for tonight:

There are only four questions of value in life.
What is sacred?
Of what is the spirit made of?
What is worth living for?
What is worth dying for?
The answer to each is the same. Only love.

Date:	2009-03-13 03:25
Subject:	race and culture
Security:	Public
Mood:	disappointed

I heard "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" on the radio today. What an AWESOME song. What a shining example of the best of country music, which is one of the treasures that "American" culture has produced. (I was just having a conversation here in Kauai this morning with a Polynesian friend about culture, and how those of us who are "white americans" are often expected to embrace and celebrate everyone else's culture, but never allowed to relish our OWN, and are expected to tolerate ridicule of it. But anyway...)
After the song ended, the radio DJ gets on and says "That was The Devil Went Down to Georgia by the Charlie Daniels Band. What a great song. It's funny though; who would have thought the Devil played a fiddle? I would have thought the Devil was a sitar player."
I wanted to cry. A withering example of anti-arab sentiment laid unobtrusively into an otherwise terrific moment. I'd like to think it's just that DJ carrying around some racist attitudes. But the sad part is how ingrained it has to be for it to pop up in such a mundane moment.  In a way it's worse than if he had said "Kill the Towelheads" because at least then, his attitude would be obvious and probably wouldn't be tolerated. In this case, it was a gentle enough jibe that most people won't even consciously notice it's effect or its offensiveness, and he's not going to get fired or censored like he would have for more overt racism. Anyway, I found it VERY disappointing. It's the reason that people with ancient cultures (like Polynesia or China...) often think white Americans don't HAVE a culture - because moments like that make even those of us who are part of that culture wish that we weren't.

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out--
    because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--
    because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--
    because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
    because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me--
    and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth." Say not, "I have found the path of the soul." Say rather, "I have met the soul walking upon my path." For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

-Khalil Gibran

"When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the services of my vision,
then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."
-Audre Lorde.

The superior person understands rightness; the inferior person understands profit.
(Confucius)

The first letter of the alphabet of Love:

On the last morning she was walking near the tents and huts of the desert dwellers, when in a lonely corner behind a wall she came upon a little golden-yellow flower, growing all alone. An old pipe was one tiny hole through which came an occasional drop of water. Where the drops fell one by one, there grew the little golden flower, though where the seed had come from, Much-Afraid could not imagine, for there were no birds anywhere and no other growing things [in this great desert].

She stopped over the lonely, lovely little golden face, lifted up so hopefully and so bravely to the feeble drip, and cried out softly, “What is your name, little flower, for I never saw one like you before.”

The tiny plant answered at once in a tone as golden as itself, “Behold me! My name is Acceptance-with-Joy.”

Much-Afraid thought of the things which she had seen in the pyramid: the threshing-floor and the whirring wheel and the fiery furnace. Somehow the answer of the little golden flower which grew all alone in the waste of the desert stole into her heart and echoed there faintly but sweetly, filling her with comfort. She said to herself, “He has brought me here when I did not want to come for his own purpose. I, too, will look up into his face and say, ‘Behold me! I am thy little handmaiden Acceptance-with-Joy.’”

— Hannah Hurnard, Hind’s Feet on High Places

Date:	2008-11-06 18:42
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	pleased

We join people in your country and around the world in congratulating you on becoming the President-elect of the United States. Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place. We note and applaud your commitment to supporting the cause of peace and security around the world. We trust that you will also make it the mission of your presidency to combat the scourge of poverty and disease everywhere. We wish you strength and fortitude in the challenging days and years that lie ahead. We are sure you will ultimately achieve your dream, making the United States of America a full partner in a community of nations committed to peace and prosperity for all.

- Full text of a message from Nelson Mandela, the first black president of South Africa, to Senator Barack Obama, the first black president-elect of the United States of America. (Source: The New York Times)

"Love is just like breathing when it's true"

A line in a hymn at church struck me today: something about having "more of Thee"
And I thought about what that meant to me...
Do I want MORE of God, and what does that mean, and is it possible to have more or less of God?
Yes,I do want MORE. More experiential knowledge of God. More wisdom about the nature of God and my place in it. More recognition of God in others.
More of LIFE. More of LOVE. More of COURAGE. More of Peace.  More laughter and health and giving.  More of SEEING the beauty, the connectedness, the present-moment-joy that exists.
More of understanding other people and being able to give to them.
More Awareness of the truly divine holy WONDER that is EXISTENCE.
More of a Christ-like willingness to sacrifice. More of what I have decided are the three traits I admire most in Jesus and in anyone who has these traits: Humility, Courage, and Compassion.
So if "Thee" is an expression, personified, of all I have described, well, that is what Im addressing what I'm saying "I want more of Thee."
And somehow, maybe because of my church background, the word "Thee" sitll sounds right even as I'm redefining everything for myself. It grasps the reverence that seems appropriate. And it also encompasses my experience, that somehow, I'm not sure how, I still feel like I can have a direct and personal relationship, with prayer, conversations, and gratitude, with GOD - even if God is nothing more (or less) than ALL of US put together, an expressoin of that connectedness, or maybe the Being that would exist if all of Us could come back together.  Somehow Creator and Father also fit...as does a divine Christ I can talk to.
I don't understand how it quite fits with my intellectual understanding of things at the moment, but that's the way I feel.

PATIENCE

FORBEARANCE

I've been learning a lot about race and gender discrimination in our nation's history in my Constitutional Law II class and my Death Penalty Seminar. Not that I didn't already know a lot about the topic of intolerance, having been raised in Berkeley, but this is coming from a less biased, more historically accurate perspective. Nevertheless, the biases of our nation are depressing. Here's just a couple quotes:

"US Public Health Service statistics show that eight out of ten drug users are white, but of those in jail for drugs only one in ten is white"
-Eduardo Galeano

"The United States of America was established as a white society, founded upon the genocide of another race and then the enslavement of yet another."
-Jim Wallis (founder of Sojourners, and great post-ecumenical Emergent church leader)


There's a lot more to say (duh!), but I'm outta time at the moment.
Cheers.

Date:	2008-10-19 17:59
Subject:	Just some words of political wisdom, sarcastic and otherwise!
Security:	Public
Mood:	cynical

 On War and Government Weapons:

"I would no more teach my kids military training than teach them arson, robbery or assassination"
Eugene Debs 1855-1926

 
"Switching from coal to nukes is like giving up smoking and taking up crack"
Dan Becker

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?"
Mahatma Gandhi

"It is a peculiarly accepted notion that the United States, the only country ruthless enough ever to have used atomic weapons – and used them against a civilian population – should be trusted with a monopoly on weapons of mass destruction.”"
Mark Kurlansky

 
"There is no flag large enough to hide the shame of killing innocent people."
Howard Zinn

On Politicians:

"If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American President would have been hanged."Noam Chomsky

"If you steal a $500 television set, you can go to jail. Apparently if you steal $500 million from your corporation and your pension holders and everyone else, then nothing happens."US Senator Patrick Leahy

 From the Brits (outside looking in...):

"Mixing the church and state is like mixing ice cream with cow manure. It may not do much to the manure, but it sure messes up the ice cream."Tony Campolo

 "I think what people really mean when they say they are against organised religion is that they're against hypocritical religion, misguided religion, blind or unthinking religion, religion of rules and laws rather than love, religion that comes diced and preprocessed and shrink-wrapped like ground beef. And that's what I'm against.."Brian McLaren

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."

 "I am thoroughly fed up with the anti-alcohol propaganda on every broadcast news programme at this time of year. Look at George W Bush. As a wealthy alcoholic, he was a relatively harmless parasite on society. Then he sobered up, found God and killed millions. Leave alcohol alone - it does much less harm than religion.”"

 
"Take those televangelists who trot out a Bible verse and tell you that God wants you to be rich, and somehow the way the whole get-rich system that "God created" works is that you send them money. Well, it works for them. It doesn't seem to occur to them that Jesus was a homeless ex-carpenter turned preacher. Perhaps Jesus didn't know how the system worked.”"Rick McKinley

"Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in."  - Alan Alda

"All that is gold does not glitter, not all who wander are lost."  - JRR Tolkien

 "The unexamined life is not worth living."
-Socrates

 "You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need. We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression."
-Tyler Durden, Fight Club

 "Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting."
-Aldous Huxley

 
"The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.”
-Betty Friedan

 
"Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony."
-Gandhi

"The idols of today are unmistakable - self-esteem without effort, fame without achievement, sex without consequences, wealth without responsibility, pleasure without struggle and experience without commitment."


"The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community [even if their intentions are ever so earnest], but the person who loves those around them will create community"
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

-George Orwell


"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the centre."Kurt Vonnegut


"Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost."
-Chauncey Depew

"Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind."   -Dr Seuss

"No-one can make you feel inferior without your consent." - Eleanor Roosevelt

"The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums"G K Chesterton


"A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on."
-William S. Burroughs

"There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not." -Bobby Kennedy

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
-Mahatma Gandhi

"We must never be satisfied with mere protest or complaint about the things we believe are wrong. Rather we must do the harder, more creative, and ultimately more prophetic work of finding and offering alternatives."
-Jim Wallis

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried."
-G K Chesterton


"All around you, people will be tiptoeing through life, just to arrive at death safely. But dear children, do not tiptoe. Run, hop, skip, or dance, just don't tiptoe."
-US college professor


"You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth."
-Henrik Ibsen

"The root of war is fear"    -Thomas Merton



"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."
-Yoda (Star Wars)