Those who attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening their own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. They will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of their own obsessions, their aggressiveness, their ego-centered ambitions, their delusions about ends and means, their doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. There is nothing more tragic in the modern world than the misuse of power and action to which people are driven by their own Faustian misunderstandings and misapprehensions. We have more power at our disposal today than we have ever had, and yet we are more alienated and estranged from the inner ground of meaning and of love than we have ever been. -Thomas Merton; Seeds
I'm just copying this quote that my friend Paul put up today. I was very impressed by these thoughts and they seem very timely to me. I see so much of this - Christians pushing for their agendas about this and that and the other thing. It all seems very, well very NOT what we should be concentrating on in our lives as children of the living God. Whenever I see or hear this going on, it honestly discourages me. It makes me want to sit down and stop.
I'm certainly not saying we shouldn't talk about things we believe to be important. How we do that is also important, I think. Waiving flags, toatin' signs, screamin' and hollerin' about things... I'm not sure that's what we want to be about. And just as certainly, there will be some of my siblings who will disagree. Ah well, go for it. I'm simply concerned about the face this puts on Jesus to the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah, money changers in the temple courtyard - yada, yada. I believe there is something much deeper about what Jesus was doing/is doing than that, as an example, can really show us.
So, whether it's my agenda or your agenda or even something you or I believe to be "God's agenda," we should probably watch how we go about raising these issues. We are not the judgment hammer of God. Our anger will not accomplish His Will.
August 07, 2009
> 11:45 AM
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