‘I wonder sometimes if the teacher is not the real student and beneficiary’ (George Steiner)
As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. … Once a situation of violence and oppression has been established, it engenders an entire way of life and behavior for those caught up in it – oppressor and oppressed alike. Both are submerged in the situation, and both bear the marks of oppression.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
Mary Oliver, Thirst
Hell is … a failure of openness, a failure of love and a consequent and dreadful entrapment within the self.
Thus Tony Milligan, in Love, who goes on to note that for Milton love of others and hell, defined as ‘hell within’, are mutually exclusive.
Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God’s name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall.
Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
To help lift a burden, to help light a path, to help heal a hurt, to help seek a truth – these struck me as the sorts of things that human beings were created to do for one another ….
Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
We cannot love God or our neighbour. We love both or neither. And what love means is rejoicing in the otherness of the other because the depth of this awareness is the depth of our communion with the other. … in the people we live with we find not objects to be cast in our own superficial likeness but, much more, we find in them our true selves, for our true selves only appear, only become realized, when we are wholly turned towards another.
[…]
In this recognition of the other person, a recognition that remakes my mind and expands my consciousness, the other person comes into being as they really are, in their real self, not as a manipulated extension of myself. People move and act out of their own integral reality and no longer as some image created by my imagination.
[…]
The essence of community … is a recognition of and deep reverence for the other.
John Main, Word into Silence
Karl Möller 