Category: Voice of the Day

"You can find Calcutta anywhere in the world. You only need two eyes to see. Everywhere in the world there are people that are not loved, people that are not wanted nor desired, people that no one will help, people that are pushed away or forgotten. And this is the greatest poverty"

~Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa’s acts and vision for ministry continue to challenge and inspire me.  Becoming a bit of a repeating theme is how vision is important for missional formation…an eschatalogical vision of love incarnated.  May we begin to see people with the eyes of Jesus as Mother Teresa exemplified for us.

Continue reading “Voice of the Day – Mother Teresa”

"What do we want the Church to do? We don’t ask for more cathedrals. We don’t ask for bigger churches of fine gifts. We ask for its presence with us, beside us, as Christ among us. We ask the Church to sacrifice with the people for social change, for justice, and for love of brother. We don’t ask for words. We ask for deeds. We don’t ask for paternalism. We ask for servanthood."

~Cesar Chaves

Chaves summarizes well what is desperately needed from the Church…

We are deeply, passionately dedicated to the cause of nonviolence, to the force of truth and love, to soul-force. To those who say that we are naive, utopian idealists, we say that we are the only realists, and that those who continue to support militarism in our time are supporting the progress towards total self-destruction of the human race.

Betty Williams, in her 1976 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

It is in community that we come to see God in the other. It is in community that we see our own emptiness filled up. It is community that calls me beyond the pinched horizons of my own life, my own country, my own race, and gives me the gifts I do not have within me.

Joan Chittister

"When you love people, you see all the good in them, all the Christ in them. God sees Christ, His Son, in us and loves us. And so we should see Christ in others, and nothing else, and love them. There can never be enough of it. There can never be enough thinking about it."

~Dorothy Day, from Sojourners

A woman who’s heart for Christ spawned nothing less than self abandonment for the sake of serving others.  Why is this normal experience of Christ struggling to shape us likewise?

I’m serious, why?  For me it is becoming more a question of vision than anting else.  When you look at the world, what is it that you see? (Bono)

Some truthful words from a saint who lived the justice and mercy of God…

"It is more difficult to fight poverty in a rich country than in a poor one."

Mother Teresa

For Monday the 13th of November…

"Prophets are, by their nature, inconvenient party-poopers. It is a mistaken notion that prophets can see the future. Rather, they tell us what is true right now."

Thomas Cahill, in Hey You, Listen Up! Sojourners, March-April 2003

A new addition to the blog will be the "Voice of the Day" from Sojourners.  When appropriate, i will post for your contemplative pleasure.  This one caught my eye initially…

"So long as the word remains in any way theoretical and is not incarnated by actions and translated into deeds, then it is not faith. It might be theology, not very good theology at that, but it is not faith. Faith is a combination of conviction and deeds, and it cannot be one without the other. Faith divorced from deeds is as lifeless as a corpse."

Murphy Davis in "Turning Dreams into Deeds," Sojourners, June 1985