March 3rd

Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.

Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

Talk about smart people.  Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not. 

What do you care about? 

My sister posted a quote for me recently that the only poverty is the absence of love. Could we really prevent people from suffering, from starving, from dying - with love? I believe that Mother Theresa has proved that you can.  

I'd like to prove it too. 

I may be just one person - and you may be just one person - but if we ACT on our care, things will get better.  I care, and things are getting better.

OK - so I had actually posted this blog and then read this from the Center for Action and Contemplation <cac@cacradicalgrace.org>:

DISCERNING OUR COMPLICITY

We are all complicit in and benefitting from what Dorothy Day called “the dirty rotten system.” That’s not condemning anybody; it’s condemning everybody because we are all complicit and enjoying the fruits of domination and injustice. (Where were your shirts and underwear made?) Usually the only way to be really non-complicit in the system is to choose to live a very simple life. That’s the only way out of the system!  Thus most of the great wisdom teachers like Gandhi, Saints Francis and Clare, Simone Weil, Dorothy Day, Jesus and Buddha—lived voluntarily simple lives. That’s almost the only way to stop bending the knee before the system. This is a truly transfigured life in cultures which are always based on climbing, consumption, and competition (1 John 2:15-17). Once we idealize social climbing, domination of others, status symbols, power, prestige and possessions, we are part of a never ending game that is almost impossible to escape. It has its own inner logic that is self-maintaining, self-perpetuating, and self-congratulating as well as elitist and exclusionary. It will never create a just or happy world, yet most Christians never call it into question. Jesus came to free us from this lie which will never make us happy anyway, because it’s never enough, and we never completely win. Adapted from The Spiral of Violence: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (CD/MP3) Prayer: Hold me accountable to Love. Well... that leaves something new to think about eh?

Aloha, 

Emily