LOVE
Love and ever more love is the only solution to every problem that comes up. If we love each other enough, we will bear with each other’s faults and burdens. If we love enough, we are going to light that fire in the hearts of others. And it is love that will burn out the sins and hatreds that sadden us. It is love that will make us want to do great things for each other. No sacrifice and no suffering will then seem too much.
Dorothy Day
Cost Benefit Analysis
…life is about more than just the sum of the day-to-day pleasures and pains that follow from our choices. Adding up costs and benefits — what I call narrow utilitarianism — may seem like the height of rationality. But it can easily undervalue the most important but less obvious aspects of a life well lived.
Human beings want purpose. We want meaning. We want to belong to something larger than ourselves. The decisions we make in the face of wild problems don’t just lead to good days and bad days. They define us. They determine who we are, who we might aspire to become, who we might come to be.
… decisions look irrational only until we remember that the future is veiled from us and that life is about more than simple pluses and minuses. …daily happiness is less important than how we thought we should live his life and who and what we wanted to become.
Russ Roberts
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/21/opinion/how-to-make-decisions.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ty_20220723&instance_id=67246&nl=opinion-today®i_id=98699252&segment_id=99384&te=1&user_id=979ff7ea8eb24fcd7abe710b579081f5
What kind of friend do you want?
“Jesus said, “Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing. . . . As the Father loves me, so I also love you. Remain in my love.” —John 15:4–5, 9
I want you to be honest: Would you rather have a friend who is always right or one who is in right relationship with you? I think I know the answer: We’d rather have someone who’s in right relationship with us. In fact, someone who’s right all the time can be pretty obnoxious. Would we rather have a friend who’s always correct or a friend to whom we’re always connected? Of course, we’d rather have the second.
So why did we in the West seemingly change the rules for God? Many of us grew up thinking God wanted us to be right, to be correct, even to be perfect. What this passage in John’s Gospel is saying is that God wants people who are in right relationship, which means that we are open, and that we can listen to others with understanding and compassion. It means that we can admit when we’re wrong, which is almost every day for most of us. It certainly is for me.
Richard Rohr
“the mind of Christ.”
The mind of Christ draws us to the power of God that shows up in weakness, great fear, and trembling. The mind of Christ doesn’t draw us to the top, but to the bottom. We know nothing except Christ and him crucified. That knowledge marks you as “spiritual.”
By contrast, ambition and pride mark you as unspiritual, immature, lost and blind. And whenever you see Christians flying flags of support for various leaders–“I follow [insert name of leader].”–we are seeing “mere humans,” immature and worldly Christians, not the spiritually enlightened.
Richard Beck
It’s about sex
In the Old Testament, it is said that a man “knew his wife,” when making reference to their conjugal union. Modern thought tends to smile knowingly and think that what is being said is but a quaint metaphor for sex. But “sex” is itself the crude metaphor of an individualistic culture that has reduced “union” to a set of feelings. The Biblical phrase expresses the understanding that what is taking place between husband and wife transcends its physical expression. It is a true union in which the two “become one flesh.” Again, such a statement is treated as “mere metaphor” in our modern culture, when it is quite the opposite. It is an effort, in words, to give voice to an experience of knowing that is virtually inexpressible. The modern assumption is that the phrase, “knew his wife,” is an effort to avoid what is actually happening, when it is, in fact, an effort to actually express what is happening beyond direct observation.
Fr Stephen Freeman
In our cultural context, to use the word “love,” is to invite the entire world of sentimentality into a conversation where it does not belong. The contemporary world knows very little of love in its proper sense. For “love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” (1John 4:7).
Fr Stephen Freeman
Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you[?]
Paul does not say, “Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Look at your activity log over the last week and see if you did anything that would point to faith. Did you read your Bible or pray or love your neighbor or go to church or give money to a person in need?” This is the deep rut in which most Christians are stuck—the tired movement between aspiration and activation; between inspiration and application. It’s why the most common thing we hear people say when it comes to faith is something along the lines of, “I need to do better,” or “I need to try harder.” And there is no end to this cycle. In time, it leads to two equally soul-stunting outcomes: Easy believe-ism on the one hand and harsh legalism on the other; abdication or addiction.
No, Paul is not looking for the presence or absence of activity as the mark of passing or failing the test. He is looking for a realized actuality:
Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you[?]
J D Walt
Deep listening …
is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear. When I really want to hear another person’s story, I try to leave my preconceptions at the door and draw close to their telling. I am always partially listening to the thoughts in my own head when others are speaking, so I consciously quiet my thoughts and begin to listen with my senses. . . . The most critical part of listening is asking what is at stake for the other person. I try to understand what matters to them, not what I think matters. Sometimes I start to lose myself in their story. As soon as I notice feeling unmoored, I try to pull myself back into my body, like returning home. As Hannah Arendt [1906–1975] says, “One trains one’s imagination to go visiting.” [1] When the story is done, we must return to our skin, our own worldview, and notice how we have been changed by our visit.
Valarie Kaur
View from the front porch
A post from the past:
I Can Identify with President Obama
If not comforting, it is interesting that I have come to identify with President Obama in his efforts to single-handedly solve most of our country’s problems. Let me explain.
In the mid-seventies I returned from an educational leave to a new job in labor relations at Ford. As a labor relations representative my first significant assignment was to conduct absentee hearings. The assignment meant that each day I would go to an interview room in the plant and conduct hearings for employees that had been absent or tardy the previous few days. Typically, dozens of employees would line up for their opportunity, accompanied by their union committeman, to face my stinging interrogation regarding their absence/tardiness. Without a reasonable explanation supported by appropriate documentation, I would administer discipline which could be as little as a verbal warning or as drastic as termination depending upon their attendance records. We employed a progressive discipline system which meant that each penalty was more severe that the last. Within certain limits, I had the latitude to exercise discretion in what the penalty would be. For example, I could give a person a three-day suspension without pay and then their next discipline would be a week suspension, and so on. I might, because of mitigating circumstances, administer the penalty but waive the time off. Theoretically, the employee having been given a gracious gift and facing a next penalty of one week (appropriately threatened with such at the time of the gift) would see the error of his ways and come to work from that point on.
You must be thinking, what does this have to do with President Obama?
When assigned to the absentee hearings, I inherited all the documented absentee records of every employee. Those who came the hearings were most often employees that had a history of habitual absence/tardiness. I looked at the terrible attendance records and talked with the employees and heard their pleadings and hard luck stories and tears et al. I began to believe, that despite the failed efforts of experienced labor relations representatives to correct their behavior, I possessed qualities and skills that would succeed where others had failed. As a result, I launched a personal campaign to single-handedly solve the plant’s desperate absentee problems. It was obvious to me that my predecessors had not explained clearly nor used the tools of persuasion as I was capable of doing to turn this around. To make a long story shorter, in a short time disciplinary actions decreased and absenteeism began to increase. This did not go unnoticed by my superiors. I was informed that if I didn’t get on track I would be fired. So rather than be fired, I fired. My delusions of grandeur were burst and I learned a valuable lesson. The lesson wasn’t that I didn’t have some special or unique skills and/or qualities that may have very well improved the process. I learned that I could not ignore the reality of history and experience and succeed by the force of my personality. What success I ultimately achieved in improving attendance came because I recognized the reality of the circumstances around me and then began to apply whatever special traits I possessed to those circumstances.
There is, I believe, a basic human trait that leads us to arrogantly believe that we individually possess knowledge and understanding that transcends all others and as well as lessons learned from the past.
It is comforting(?) to know President Obama is human.
STILL ON THE JORNEY