Other People's Words

These are two passages I've come across in reading recently that touch on certain concepts which have come to me recently and renewed my thinking about the world around me. They have formed a significant reformation in my thinking and perspective, and to a minor degree my own behaviour. I feel limited in my word capacity today, not to mention time. So, I'll let these eloquent individuals speak for me. Enjoy.

From Dallas Willard's "The Divine Conspiracy"

"We hear the cries from our strife-torn streets: 'Give peace a chance!' and 'Can't we all just get along?' But you cannot give peace a chance if that is all you give a chance. You have to do the things that make peace possible and actual. When you listen to people talk about peace, you soon realize in most cases that they are unwilling to deal with the conditions of society and soul that make strife inevitable. They want to keep them and still have peace, but it is peace on their terms, which is impossible.

And we can't all just get along. Rather, we have to become the kinds of persons who can get along. As a major part of this, our epidermal resonses have to be changed in such a way that the fire and fight doesn't start almost immediately when we are 'rubbed the wrong way.' Solitude and silence give us a place to begin the necessary changes......they also give us some space to reform our inmost attitudes toward people and events. They take the world off our shoulders for a time and interrupt our habit of constantly managing things, of being in control, or thinking we are."

From Thomas Moore's introduction to Thomas Merton's "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander"

"(A) central paradox Merton knew well is perhaps the most difficult of all: power and vulnerability. I won't say 'nonviolence', because it shouldn't be described negatively, this grossly misunderstood human capacity to be dependent, open, tolerant, forgiving, and compassionate. The words of Ghandi are strewn throughout these entries. Merton quotes John Chysostom, as well from the lessons of St. Barnabas' Day: 'As long as we remain sheep, we overcome. Even though we may be surrounded by a thousand wolves, we overcome and are victorious. But as soon as we are wolves, we are beaten.'

People who profess religious faith can listen to words like these from pulpits week after week and still go on trying to avoid being victims and to flex their political and business muscles. All our political news and speeches sound like the howling of wolves, and never the bleat of sheep. Maybe we think about power too literally, and imagine that in being sheep we would be literal masochists, puny hearts in uncourageous bodies. But in all his writing Merton was onto this mystery that can be appreciated only through religious vision or through an extraordinarily subtle psychology: genuine strength arises only in a condition of vulnerability. The flagrant display and self-serving use of power are an admission of deep incapacity."