Inspirations

“I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.” 

_{Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (Little, Brown and Company, 1995), 624.}

“No man is an island entire of himself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If clod be washed away by sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind. Therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”

_{I had to memorize this paragraph for my first high school English course. It is an excerpt from “Meditation XVII” in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) by John Donne (1572-1631) an English poet and cleric of the Church of England. It has stayed with me over these 57 years because it remains relevant.}

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.
And then they came for me, and there was no one to speak out for me.”

_{Martin Niemõller (1992-1984) was a Lutheran pastor in Germany. He sympathized with many Nazi and right wing ideas before Adolf Hitler came to power.  Once Hitler came to power, he became an outspoken critic, and from 1937 to 1945 he was imprisoned in Nazi prisons and concentration camps.  In his public speeches after the war, he often shared various versions of the above confession.}

“How good of you, God, to make truth a relationship instead of an idea.“

—Richard Rohr, Things Hidden

C. G. Jung, “A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity,” in Psychology and Western Religion (Princeton University Press, 1984), 75.

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness…. “

– Thomas Merton, 1958, Conjectures of Guilty Bystander