‘I wonder sometimes if the teacher is not the real student and beneficiary’ (George Steiner)
What matters … is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages, which are already upon us. The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theology
It’s the really hungry who can smell fresh bread a mile away. For those who know their need, God is immediate – not an idea, not a theory, but life, food, air for the stifled spirit and the beaten, despised, exploited body.
Rowan Williams, as quoted by Sara Miles, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion
In her poem ‘The Lord’s Prayer from Guatemala’ (1979), also published in Threatened with Resurrection/Amenazado de resurrección, Julia Esquivel envisages that:
churches abandon their structures of power and domination
and become instead a source of life and service
for all humankind.…
For yours is the kingdom
belonging to no usurper,
yours is the power
belonging to no structure or organization,
and yours is the glory,
for you are the only God and Father
forever and ever, AMEN.
The marks offered them
sure and peaceful sleep,
a way to acquire prestige
and a thousand unnecessary things.
To continue along this path,
they had to harden themselves
against the Lamb and against
His Kingdom of Peace and Justice.
The strategy was always
…
to gain control
over all the world’s inhabitants,
to acquire all of their wealth,
and appropriate all their glory,
always in obeisance of the Beast.
From Julia Esquivel’s poem ‘Thanksgiving Day in the U.S.’ (1981), published in Threatened with Resurrection/Amenazado de resurrección
As Ian Adams points out, in Cave, Refectory, Road: Monastic Rhythms for Contemporary Living:
In the religious communities that I know, sandals with socks are more than fine.
Yay!
It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or perhaps even always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.
Thus Simone Weil in Waiting for God. Quoting Weil in an interview with The Other Journal, Barbara Brown Taylor comments:
To learn to look at things instead of devouring them is to discover how quickly the feeling of deprivation can turn to liberation instead. Every time I say no – to more stuff, more speed, more activity, more food – this great big space opens up in my life. … If the church is meant to embody an alternative way of life, then what better witness could there be than a community that decided to live on less in order to live more richly? That sounds like the kind of truth that could make people free.
Karl Möller 