"The sunlights differ, but there is only one darkness."
34th Kennedy Center Honors 2011
Every day, I make an effort to go towards what I don't understand.
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry and watch the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”
The Anthropocene Reviewed
“You can't see the future coming -- not the terrors, for sure, but you also can't see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”
"Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all...is grace.”
“Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.”
“I think despair is an endemic part of revolution. No revolution happens within one lifetime so we work to capacity, we believe in what we are doing knowing full well we won’t see the fruits of our labor. It is a hard place to hold.”
"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent."
“People living in poverty and with sickness deserve something better than what they’ve been offered, which is the sharp end of a stick.”
"Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgement at how they carry it. "
"Poverty is not a fate, it is a condition; It is not a misfortune, it is an injustice."
“For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”
“Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don't yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it's actually going to be possible.”
“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”
“The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.”
“To practice nonviolence, first of all we must learn to deal peacefully with ourselves.”
“God is not a Christian. God accepts as pleasing those who live by the best lights available to them that they can discern. All truth, all sense of beauty, all awareness of goodness has one source, God, who is not confined to one place, time or people.”
"I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community."
“Theological formation is the gradual and painful discovery of God's incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.”
Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope
“When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way, critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominant culture.”
Talking About a Revolution
“Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.”
"We cannot afford to do theology unrelated to human existence. We cannot be 'objective,' but must recognize, with Imamu Baraka, that 'there is no objective anything' -least of all theology"
The Collected Poetry, 1968-1998
“i hope i die
warmed
by the life that i tried
to live”