Voltaire Quote

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
-Voltaire

Flannery O'Connor on Writing

The following comes from a lecture Flannery O'Connor once gave titled The Fiction Writer & His Country. I liked it a lot:

“The writer who emphasizes spiritual values is very likely to take the darkest view of all of what he sees in this country today. For him, the fact that we are the most powerful and the wealthiest nation in the world doesn’t mean a thing in any positive sense. The sharper the light of faith, the more glaring are apt to be the distortions the writer sees in the life around him.”

Peace,
Matt

A Message from Haiti

"...is every human being not a person?

Yes, all human beings are people. It is we, the afflicted, who speak now. We have come together...to discuss the great difficulties facing the sick. We've also brought some ideas of our own in our knapsacks; we would like to share them with you, the authorities, in the hope that you might do something to help resolve the health problems of the poor.

When we the sick, living with AIDS, speak to the subject of 'health and human rights,' we are aware of two rights that ought to be indivisible and inalienable. Those who are sick should have the right to health care. We who are already infected believe in prevention too. But prevention will not save those who are already ill. All people need treatment when we are sick, but for the poor there are no clinics, no doctors, no nurses, no health care.

Furthermore, the medications now available are too expensive. For HIV treatment, for example, we read in the newspapers that treatment costs less than $600 per year [in developing countries]. Although that is what is quoted in press releases, here in a poor, small country like Haiti, it costs more than twice that much.

The right to health is the right to life. Everyone has a right to live. If we were not living in misery, but rather in decent poverty, many of us would not be in this predicament today...

We have a message for the people who are here and for all those able to hear our plea. We are asking for your solidarity. The battle we're fighting - to find adequate care for those with AIDS, tuberculosis, and other illnesses - is the same as the combat that's long been waged by other oppressed people so that everyone can live as human beings."

-A Declaration made by a group of rural Haitians living with HIV, August 2001.

MLK II / Vincent Harding

"We preachers have also been tempted by the enticing cult of conformity. Seduced by the success symbols of the world, we have measured our achievements by the size of our parsonage. We have become showmen to please the whims and caprices of the people. We preach comforting sermons and avoid saying anything from our pulpit which might disturb the respectable views of the comfortable members of our congregations. Have we ministers of Jesus Christ sacrificed truth on the altar of self-interest and, like Pilate, yielded our convictions to the demands of the crowd? We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians, who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane patterns of the world."

-MLK, "Transformed Nonconformist"

Dr. Vincent Harding was in Bellingham over the weekend and I was fortunate enough to take 25 teens to an ecumenical discussion with him on Sunday afternoon along with teens from other churches in the county. It was great. Dr. Harding is a passionate man, but also a great teacher. He asked a lot of questions, remembered names, used multimedia, put us in break-out groups. He also said it how it is. He didn't let kids get off with the easy answers about who MLK was; he brought up King's fight against poverty and the war in Vietnam. I loved watching my kids squirm as Harding brought up the obvious parallels for today. It's always easier to admire a guy who is only remembered for the past. It's much harder when you imagine what they would say to us today. But kids did listen, and the highlight for me was watching one of my seniors go to Dr. Harding and ask him about non-violence and its biblical reasoning. Sure, I would have loved it if he asked me, but the fact that he asked at all was awesome. I think Martin Luther King would have been pleased to see such a small, but significant, interaction.

Peace,
Matt

Remembering MLK

"We are gravely mistaken to think that Christianity protects us from the pain and agony of mortal existence. Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. To be a Christian, one must take up his cross, with all of its difficulties and agonizing and tragedy-packed content, and carry it until that very cross leaves its mark upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way which comes only through suffering...

We must make a choice. Will we continue to march to the drumbeat of conformity and respectability, or will we, listening to the beat of a more distant drum, move to its echoing sounds? Will we march only to the music of time, or will we, risking criticism and abuse, march to the soul-saving music of eternity? More than ever before we are today challenged by the words of yesterday, 'Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.'"

-Martin Luther King Jr, from his sermon "Transformed Noncomformist."

Yet Another Quote

I know I just keep posting quotes and links, but I just can't help it. Today's comes from Wendell Berry:

Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.

Peace,
Matt

Have Yourselves a Jacques Derrida Christmas

From Derrida's The Gift of Death:

“On what condition does goodness exist beyond all calculation? On the condition that goodness forget itself, that the movement be a movement of the gift that renounces itself, hence a movement of infinite love. Only infinite love can renounce itself and, in order to become finite, become incarnated in order to love the other, to love the other as a finite other. This gift of infinite love comes from someone and is addressed to someone; responsibility demands irreplacable singularity.”

Merry Christmas, and Peace on Earth!

Matt

James Baldwin on Ministry

I read this early this morning. It's from James Baldwin, talking about his time as a teen preacher in Harlem:

"Being in the pulpit was like being in the theatre; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion worked. I knew the other ministers and knew the quality of their lives... I knew how to work on a congregation until the last dime was surrendered-it was not hard to do-and I knew where the money for 'the Lord's work' went. I knew, though I did not wish to know it, that I had no respect for the people with whom I worked. I could not have said it then, but I also knew that if I continued I would soon have no respect for myself... I was even lonelier and more vulnerable than I had been before. And the blood of the Lamb had not cleansed me in any way whatever. I was just as black as I had been the day that I was born. Therefore, when I faced a congregation, it began to take all the strength I had not to stammer, not to curse, not to tell them to throw away their Bibles and get off their knees and go home and organize, for example, a rent strike... But I had been in the pulpit too long and I had seen too many monstrous things. I don't refer merely to the glaring fact that the minister eventually acquires houses and Cadillacs while the faithful continue to scrub floors and drop their dimes and quarters and dollars into the plate. I really mean that there was no love in the church. It was a mask for self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that that meant everybody. But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did..."

Peace,
Matt