In yesterday’s DM, we spoke of the resistance happening in our time. Honoring individuals of braveness and values is a sort of resistance, additionally.
We generally name them saints for what they’ve undergone in protection of values that talk to one of the best of humanity’s struggles for peace, justice, and the widespread good.
Final week, I acquired within the mail from Tom Stang, brother of Dorothy Stang, a ebook known as Lighting the Means Ahead: Holy Individuals For Our Occasions: Tapestries by John Nava. Nava is well-known for creating the tapestries within the Cathedral in Los Angeles and likewise at USC and Princeton College. He was invited to create 52 tapestries on the College of San Diego for “Holy Individuals For Our Occasions.”
Among the many individuals celebrated on the West Wall are the next: The Dalai Lama, Sister Thea Bowman, Pope Francis, Saint Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Saint Lorenzo Ruiz, Mahatma Gandhi, and Saint Julian of Norwich. Every is named a “beacon of Mild, Religion, and Knowledge.”
Phrases cited from Oscar Romero embrace these: A church that doesn’t provoke a disaster, preach a Gospel that doesn’t unsettle, proclaim a phrase of God that doesn’t get underneath anybody’s pores and skin, or a phrase of God that doesn’t contact the true sin of the society by which it’s being proclaimed: What sort of Gospel is that?
On the East Wall, these individuals are amongst these celebrated: Abraham Joshua Heschel, Pierre Toussaint, Thomas Merton, Florence Nightingale, Tahirih, Edith Stein, C.S. Lewis, John Henry Newman, Catherine of Siena, Rumi, Flannery O’Connor, and Dorothy Mae Stang.
Heschel is cited for his assertion that “prayer is just not an alternative to motion; quite it’s a preparation for it,” and “racism is man’s gravest menace to man—the utmost of hatred for a minimal motive.” And “peace is just not an absence of battle, it’s the potential to deal with battle by peaceable means.”
Merton is cited for this remark: “To be grateful is to acknowledge the Love of God in all the things He has given us—and He has given us all the things.”
Edith Stein is cited for saying, “Don’t settle for something as the reality if it lacks love. Don’t settle for something as love which lacks fact! One with out the opposite turns into a damaging lie.”
Newman is remembered for this remark: “To stay is to vary, and to be excellent is to have modified usually.” (I used to be so impressed by this knowledge that I inscribed it on my card for the day I used to be ordained a priest in 1967.)
Dorothy Stang, who died a martyr defending the rain forest and serving the peasants working the land in Brazil, is remembered for these phrases: “We should stay merely in order that others could merely stay.” And, “the top of the forest is the top of our life.” Her dedication to the poor and to defending the forest put her at odds with highly effective landowners and loggers. They organized and paid for her homicide. She was additionally, I’m honored to say, a pupil in our Institute of Creation Spirituality.
A season of Thanksgiving and remembering such heroes and sheroes as these helps construct internal power and steels oneself for numerous types of resistance. Vive ethical creativeness!
Could our numerous efforts at birthing goodness, therapeutic, and justice flourish! Allow us to be grateful for these ancestors whose instance calls us to withstand in our personal time and our personal method.
*See Lighting the Means Ahead: Holy Individuals For Our Occasions: Tapestries by John Nava.
Banner Picture: John Nava’s tapestry for the East Wall depicts C.S. Lewis, John Henry Newman, Dorothy Mae Stang, Flannery O’Connor, Nguyen Van Thuan, and Rumi. Photograph from Lighting the Means Ahead: Holy Individuals For Our Occasions: Tapestries by John Nava; reprinted with permission.
Queries for Contemplation
Who amongst these holy ones conjures up you? What among the many shared teachings challenges you and your wrestle to withstand and to plant seeds for mild, fact, magnificence, and justice?
Associated Readings by Matthew Fox
Christian Mystics: 365 Readings & Meditations
Trump & The MAGA Motion as Anti-Christ
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Remodeling Evil in Soul & Society, pp. 301-304
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Consciousness with Social Justice
The Pope’s Battle: Why Ratzinger’s Campaign Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved
Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Imaginative and prescient of Love and Motion by Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, Jen Listug.
“Warriors for Ecological and Financial Justice,” in Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Occasions
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Imaginative and prescient For a New Technology by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox
