“Our [Quaker] testimonies against war and inequality have been aimed at persuading people, and reminding ourselves, as to where their wealth lies: in the discovery of a common identity and a common cause with other human beings.”
When despair for the world grows in me / and I wake in the night at the least sound / in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, / I go and lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
“This is a marvelous world, full of beauty and splendour; it is also an unrelenting and savage world, and we are not the only living things prone to dominate if given the chance. In our fumbling, chaotic way, we do also make gardens, irrigate the desert, fly to the moon and compose symphonies. Some of us are trying to save species other than ourselves…”
“We are called to see what love can do: to love our neighbor as ourselves, to aid the widow and orphan, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, to appeal to consciences and bind the wounds.”
“We are building towards the climax of crisis. The spiritual crisis is folding into the ecological crisis and the ecological crisis is folding into the economic crisis. As Christians, it seems to me, we are now required to critically assess the capital driven market economy and identify it as a false religion, a fabulously productive but ultimately destructive system bringing closure on God’s goodness in creation and bringing a creeping atheism to the soul. To look this system straight in the eye and call it to account is a critical test of Biblical faith.”
“In the sun, the coming together of two hydrogen atoms at intense temperatures and pressures to form an atom of helium results in the release of an energy which is essential to our planet.
This energy has warmed the earth, set the stage for creation, and provided the supporting energy for all life on earth. The dance of the ever-moving atomic particles in the center of the sun could well be described as ‘ascending leaps of unpremeditated joy.'”
“In my studies of the world’s various religions, I have noticed that miracles are important in all of them, miracles meaning events that go beyond any natural explanation and are believed to confirm the power and truth of each tradition.”
“At Blackwater Pond the tossed waters have settled / after a night of rain. / I dip my cupped hands. I drink / a long time. It tastes / like stone, leaves, fire.”
“It would go a great way to caution and direct people in their use of the world, that they were better studied and known in the creation of it.
For how could man find the confidence to abuse it, while they should see the great creator stare them in the face, in all in every part thereof?”
“I thought of myself as a former Peace Corps volunteer who had loved living in a mud hut, and now I had more bathrooms than I could keep clean. I thought of myself as a person who used canvas shopping bags twenty years before it was mainstream, but now with two cars and two electronics-addicted teenagers, I’d developed a low-level despair about my inability to protect the planet they would inherit. I’d been reading about how global warming was withering maize crops in Botswana, the southern African country where I had taught decades earlier – the place that had originally taught me about social responsibility. Our new house was so big, no one heard me when I cried…”
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