A Quote by Don DeLillo
The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future.
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I think morality is more important than ever before. As we gain more power, the question of what we do with it becomes more and more crucial, and we are very close to really having divine powers of creation and destruction. The future of the entire ecological system and the future of the whole of life is really now in our hands. And what to do with it is an ethical question and also a scientific question.
... I know for sure, that the universe is wise and compassionate. The question then becomes: How can there be such brutality and pain and such suffering in the world if the universe is compassionate and wise. The reason is we put it there. We create it. And it is up to us to stop creating it.
Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is around us, for it is everywhere; and those spirits watch us, for they are commissioned to gaurd us; and if we were dying in pain and shame, if scorn smote us on all sides, and hatred crushed us, angels see our tortures, recognize our innocence, and God waits ony a speration of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward.
In the Eucharist, priest and people together come to concelebrate. Here the ladder Jacob saw only as a dream becomes for us a reality, the medicine that cures our souls.
We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying and our strength leaves us, and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood, cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.
Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. To me, neither option is worth pursuing.
When we are children we seldom think of the future. This innocence leaves us free to enjoy ourselves as few adults can. The day we fret about the future is the day we leave our childhood behind.
Perfection is the natural consequence of eternity: wait long enough, and anything will realize its potential. Coal becomes diamonds, sand becomes pearls, apes become men. It's simply not given to us, in one lifetime, to see those consummations, and so every failure becomes a reminder of death.
I think that for those of us who come from oppressed backgrounds and who do our work in marginalized communities, recovering our innocence is one of the most important acts of self-liberation and de-colonization. Not letting the requirement that we adapt to impossible circumstances and unconscionable crimes leave us shackled to the kind of cynicism and armor such that we can't breathe and laugh and magnetize to ourselves all the genius and love and support that we need to transform the situation. That's probably the biggest challenge, is to recover our innocence.
How our availability, our showing up, our presence, leaves us open to that violence. I think it's a question of language, as it arrives from one body to another. It becomes the thing in between the two bodies.
The circle is a reminder that each moment is not just the present, but is inclusive of our gratitude to the past and our responsibility to the future.
From my perspective, I think the question of how we build a better future is an extremely important overarching question, and I think it's become obscured from us because we no longer think it's possible to have a meaningful conversation about the future.
We must be careful not to choose, but to let God's Holy Spirit manage our lives; not to smooth down and explain away, but to stir up the gift and allow God's Spirit to disturb us and disturb us and disturb us until we yield and yield and yield and the possibility in God's mind for us becomes an established fact in our lives, with the rivers in evidence meeting the need of a dying world.
We are the wise. Do not envy us— We who are too wise to draw near the fire Lest we get burned; We who are too wise to love Lest love should vanish and we be hurt. We are the wise. Do not envy us our wisdom— We who are too wise to live Lest we should die.
Innocence never gets destroyed because it is eternal, but it may happen that it will get covered with some clouds by our mistakes that we commit. But once you get your Realization, your innocence is re-established, manifests, and you become innocent. Your attention becomes innocent.
The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.
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