Communion in bread

Communion

Sometime in your life,
hope that you might see one starved man,
the look on his face when the bread
finally arrives. Hope that you
might have baked it or bought it
or even kneaded it yourself.
For that look on his face,
for your meeting his eyes
across a piece of bread,
you might be willing to lose a lot,
or suffer a lot,
or die a little even.

                    

                                      --Daniel Berrigan

Unique Special Event at The Nest

Be Our Guest! You're Invited to a Special Reception to Celebrate a Fundraiser and Food Drive Benefiting CitySquare

Nest, a unique gifts and home accents store in mid-town Dallas, is hosting a fundraiser for CitySquare. Visit Nest and bring in non-perishable food items during the month of February and save on your purchases! A portion of sales will benefit CitySquare's programs and food items collected will be donated to our Food Pantry. We would like to invite you, a strong supporter and friend of CitySquare, to a special event for the promotion on February 9th from 6 to 8 pm at the Nest store. We hope to see you there so please confirm your attendance with RSVP@NESTDALLAS.COM See full details below.

Things aren't working. . .

Did you see the 60 Minutes program last night regarding the growth in the numbers of homeless families and children?  Families living in their cars.  Children "learning how to be homeless."  Check it out here.

Somehow current lectures about freedom, rugged individualism, tax cuts for the wealthiest, no matter what the human cost; and shrinking government ring right hollow when you have to face the stories of these families fallen on very hard times. 

One out of 4 children in America is classified as living at or below the poverty line. 

Almost 50 million Americans find themselves scratching out a living at or below the poverty line.

People want to work, but our economy is not working for growing numbers of us. 

If we don't begin to do better, I say. . .

Shame on us!

Time

It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills.  Actually time is neutral.  It can be used wither destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will.  We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.  We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.  It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the fores of social stagnation.  We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.  Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy, and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.  Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity. 

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham City Jail

Brand "stunt"

We retained The Richards Group to help us with our new brand development.  Frankly, we had a blast working wtih these professionals for well over a year to craft a new name and brand identity. 

The result:  CitySquare!

Following the advice of our counselors at The Richards Group, we organized a PR "stunt" on Monday, October 25, the day of our public "roll out" for the new brand.  The exercise involved over 100 of our team gathering in Downtown Dallas before 7:00 a.m.  We then spread out with large square stencils and sidewalk chalk in hand to about 100 locations plotted in the central business district. 

We drew large squares on the sidewalks at strategic corners so that all of the people walking to work would see our message.  Inside the squares we recorded a "poverty fact" about Dallas, Texas and/or the USA. 

Our action created quite a stir!  And, since they had been tipped off, lots of press showed up to take photos and to capture video for TV news coverage.  And, just for the record, we had cleared our plans with the police department's Downtown unit! 

Here are a few images from the morning.

For Sunday: Psalm 82

Psalm 82


A Plea for Justice

A Psalm of Asaph.

1 God has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgement:

2 ‘How long will you judge unjustly
and show partiality to the wicked?

3 Give justice to the weak and the orphan;
maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute.

4 Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.’
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8 Rise up, O God, judge the earth;
for all the nations belong to you!

(New Revised Standard Version)

Avoid "Social Justice Churches"

So, I suppose Moses, David, Amos, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jesus and James would not be welcome at Glenn Beck's church, wherever that is, if it exists. 


Amazing commentary.  No wonder we have stalemate on so many policies in this nation.

Clearly, the words of scripture, read in every church including Beck's, deal with social and economic justice, the concerns of laboring people and a very real commitment to equity and to standing with the poor.  Possibly, a branch of American Christianity now has decided to abandon this central part of the tradition and message of our faith.  Such a heretical decision does not remove the truth from the Bible, but only from exposure to congregants who aren't allowed to hear the whole story for themselves. This one is really hard for me to understand.

Glenn Beck Urges Listeners to Leave Churches That Preach Social Justice

On his daily radio and television shows last week, Fox News personality Glenn Beck set out to convince his audience that "social justice," the term many Christian churches use to describe their efforts to address poverty and human rights, is a "code word" for communism and Nazism. Beck urged Christians to discuss the term with their priests and to leave their churches if leaders would not reconsider their emphasis on social justice.

"I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"

To read more and listen to the audio click here.

The sin of Sodom and the New York Times

So now comes Nicholas D. Kristof, columnist for The New York Times, to instruct us all on the values of the Kingdom of God as over against those who often spouted by religious types from pulpits and across electronic media airwaves. 

Tell me what you think.

Learning From the Sin of Sodom
Published: February 27, 2010
Nicholas D. Kristof

For most of the last century, save-the-worlders were primarily Democrats and liberals. In contrast, many Republicans and religious conservatives denounced government aid programs, with Senator Jesse Helms calling them “money down a rat hole.”

Over the last decade, however, that divide has dissolved, in ways that many Americans haven’t noticed or appreciated. Evangelicals have become the new internationalists, pushing successfully for new American programs against AIDS and malaria, and doing superb work on issues from human trafficking in India to mass rape in Congo.

A pop quiz: What’s the largest U.S.-based international relief and development organization?

It’s not Save the Children, and it’s not CARE — both terrific secular organizations. Rather, it’s World Vision, a Seattle-based Christian organization (with strong evangelical roots) whose budget has roughly tripled over the last decade.

World Vision now has 40,000 staff members in nearly 100 countries. That’s more staff members than CARE, Save the Children and the worldwide operations of the United States Agency for International Development — combined.

A growing number of conservative Christians are explicitly and self-critically acknowledging that to be “pro-life” must mean more than opposing abortion. The head of World Vision in the United States, Richard Stearns, begins his fascinating book, “The Hole in Our Gospel,” with an account of a visit a decade ago to Uganda, where he met a 13-year-old AIDS orphan who was raising his younger brothers by himself.

“What sickened me most was this question: where was the Church?” he writes. “Where were the followers of Jesus Christ in the midst of perhaps the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time? Surely the Church should have been caring for these ‘orphans and widows in their distress.’ (James 1:27). Shouldn’t the pulpits across America have flamed with exhortations to rush to the front lines of compassion?

“How have we missed it so tragically, when even rock stars and Hollywood actors seem to understand?”

To read the entire essay and to get to the part about Sodom click here.

Secret Agents of Change. . .cool site, smart notion

Blog Action Day

Check our this site.

Then, you can go to this site to find out more and to get involved!

Already, we've had calls from people wanting to contribute to CDM from this effort.

Great stuff! Fits well with our plans for Community Hunger Day on October 27, 2008. Hope you'll get involved with us as a participant in this special effort as well.

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On doing the "right" thing

People often ask me, "How did you know what to do as Central Dallas Ministries developed?" Or, "How did you decide what to do to realize the growth that CDM has experienced over the past 15 years?"

Good questions, I suppose.

With a very simple answer: we didn't!

I guess you'd have had to have been here pretty much full-time to understand.

One thing I've learned here is that at least 80% of everything related to progress is found in simply "showing up."

I like what Bernie Glassman says in his stimulating little book, Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master's Lessons in Living a Life that Matters. Consider his wisdom:

Many people won't take a step until they think that they know what the right thing is. There is an expression, "Do the right thing." But how do we know what the right thing is? We can't know for sure. Maybe we should just say, "Do the next thing." And if we do that--whatever it is--to the best of our ability, chances are it will turn out to be the right thing as well." (135)

My experience tells me that Bernie is right.

On to the next thing then, okay?

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"The Duty of Delight"

Dorothy Day, one of the founders of the Catholic Worker movement, kept personal diaries throughout her life. She left explicit instructions that her journals not be published or shared with the public until 25 years after her death. Day died in 1980. And now Marquette University Press has published her diaries. Edited by Robert Ellsberg, one of Day's followers from late in her life, the collection of personal reflections is titled The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day.

Fascinating reading that provides an unique look into the life and soul of Dorothy Day, activist and pilgrim.

Here's an excerpt from Ellsberg's Introduction to the collection:

If Dorothy Day is one day formally canonized, this diary will offer something quite unusual in the annals of the saints--an opportunity to follow, almost day by day, in the footsteps of a holy person. Through these writings we can trace the movements of her spirit and her quest for God. We can see her praying for wisdom and courage in meeting the challenges of her day. But we also join her as she watches television, devours mystery novels, goes to the movies, plays with her grandchildren, and listens to the opera.

Many people tend to think of saints as otherworldly heroes, close to God but not exactly human. These diaries confirm Thomas Merton's observation that sanctity is a matter of being more fully human: "This implies a greater capacity for concern, for suffering, for understanding, for sympathy, and also for humor, for joy, for appreciation for the good and beautiful things of life."

To be human is constantly to fall short of the ideals one sets for oneself. Dorothy Day was no exception. There are frequent reminders in these pages of her capacity for impatience, anger, judgment, and self-righteousness. We are reminded of these things because she herself points them out. ("Thinking gloomily of the sins and shortcomings of others," she writes, "it suddenly came to me to remember my own offenses, just as heinous as those of others. If I concern myself with my own sins and lament them, if I remember my own failures and lapses, I will not be resentful of others. This was most cheering and lifted the load of gloom from my mind. It makes one unhappy to judge people and happy to love them.") And so we are reminded too that holiness is not a state of perfection, but a faithful striving that lasts a lifetime. It is expressed primarily in small ways, day after day, through the practice of forgiveness, patience, self-sacrifice, and compassion.

This will be a good and inspiring read, I can tell already.

[Order a copy of The Duty of Delight by clicking on the Amazon.com thumbnail to the right and below. Your purchase will benefit Central Dallas Ministries!]

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Our Food Pantry is hurting. . .will you help us?

When you are poor, everything negative magnifies against you.

The rising cost of fuel is putting amazing pressure on the operations of food pantries across the United States.

I encourage you to read this story from the Chicago Tribune to gain a better understanding of what is happening right now. The online version of the report will also allow you to read the chart I've pasted in above. Read it here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-food-pantry-both-20-may20,0,3897882.story.

We have always considered our work in food distribution to be one part compassionate, emergency assistance and one part economic injector. Funds saved on grocery costs can be used to purchase medicine, pay rent, buy school clothes and figure out transportation needs. We have been putting over $1,000,000 of value back on the streets in retail grocery costs every year for the past 10 years.

Currently, the need is rising and so are our costs.

We need your help.

Contributions can be made online at http://www.centraldallasministries.org/ or mailed to my attention at Central Dallas Ministries, P. O. Box 710385, Dallas, Texas 753710-0385. Be sure and mark your donation for the "Food Pantry."

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Bread and faith

National Public Radio's "This I Believe" segments always seem to touch me, usually deeply.

My good friend, John Siburt made me aware of this piece--check it out: http://www.thisibelieve.org/dsp_ShowEssay.php?uid=44482&topessays=1.

Sara Miles really "gets it."

You can hear her at the link above, but here are her words just in case you'd like to read. . .



Strangers Bring Us Closer to God

As heard on NPR's All Things Considered, May 5, 2008.

Until recently, I thought being a Christian was all about belief. I didn’t know any Christians, but I considered them people who believed in the virgin birth, for example, the way I believed in photosynthesis or germs.

But then, in an experience I still can’t logically explain, I walked into a church and a stranger handed me a chunk of bread. Suddenly, I knew that it was made out of real flour and water and yeast––yet I also knew that God, named Jesus, was alive and in my mouth.

That first communion knocked me upside-down. Faith turned out not to be abstract at all, but material and physical. I’d thought Christianity meant angels and trinities and being good. Instead, I discovered a religion rooted in the most ordinary yet subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the despised and outcasts are honored.

I came to believe that God is revealed not only in bread and wine during church services, but whenever we share food with others––particularly strangers. I came to believe that the fruits of creation are for everyone, without exception––not something to be doled out to insiders or the “deserving.”

So, over the objections of some of my fellow parishioners, I started a food pantry right in the church sanctuary, giving away literally tons of oranges and potatoes and Cheerios around the very same altar where I’d eaten the body of Christ. We gave food to anyone who showed up. I met thieves, child abusers, millionaires, day laborers, politicians, schizophrenics, gangsters, bishops—all blown into my life through the restless power of a call to feed people.

At the pantry, serving over 500 strangers a week, I confronted the same issues that had kept me from religion in the first place. Like church, the food pantry asked me to leave certainty behind, tangled me up with people I didn’t particularly want to know and scared me with its demand for more faith than I was ready to give.

Because my new vocation didn't turn out to be as simple as going to church on Sundays and declaring myself “saved.” I had to trudge in the rain through housing projects, sit on the curb wiping the runny nose of a psychotic man, take the firing pin out of a battered woman's Magnum and then stick the gun in a cookie tin in the trunk of my car. I had to struggle with my atheist family, my doubting friends, and the prejudices and traditions of my new-found church.

But I learned that hunger can lead to more life—that by sharing real food I’d find communion with the most unlikely people; that by eating a piece of bread I’d experience myself as part of one body. This I believe: that by opening ourselves to strangers, we will taste God.

Sara Miles is founder of The Food Pantry at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco. A former restaurant cook, Miles is a journalist who writes about military affairs, politics and culture, and is author of the memoir Take This Bread.

Independently produced for NPR by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick.
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Your feedback would be helpful. . .


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Brad Pitt. . .where to work most effectively

What follows is a letter from Andre F. Shashaty, Editor of Affordable Housing Finance, a trade journal of affordable housing developers and financeers. The catchy title got my attention. The essay is vastly more important, and the advice he gives Mr. Pitt is priceless.

No one can criticize Brad Pitt for what he has been doing in New Orleans. The only problem with his approach is that it simply isn't enough. While private, personal and group charity will always play an important role in community renewal, the scale of our problems in New Orleans and in every other urban center in the nation demand much, much more.

We need change in the worst way in terms of a national housing policy.

After you've read the letter, let me know your reactions.

______________________________________

Who needs Brad Pitt?
BY ANDRE F. SHASHATY
AFFORDABLE HOUSING FINANCE • MARCH 2008

NEW ORLEANS—Visiting this city for the first time since Katrina, I was not that shocked by what I saw. After all, I’m from Youngstown, Ohio, which suffered a storm of its own, only an economic one.

In the Lower Ninth Ward, where actor Brad Pitt says he plans to build 150 homes, I felt New Orleans had a slight advantage over my hometown. It had the Army Corps of Engineers on hand to tear down all the dangerous hulks that used to be homes.

The problems this city faces are not that different than those of Cleveland, Youngstown, Detroit, or other cities that have been facing decay and decline for years. And if the home mortgage foreclosure disaster keeps getting worse, as it appears it will, other recently healthy urban areas will soon join this unfortunate club.

Sure, presidential candidates and congressmen are playing at housing policy as they realize the economic impact of the housing market slump, but they are tossing out possible solutions like baseball mascots tossing Cracker Jacks into the bleacher seats.

A year or three ago, those of you in the tax credit business could stick to your knitting and ignore the huge gaps in American housing and urban policy. Many of you wrote off the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and stopped dealing with that hellhole years ago.

But guess what? Your comfort zone is no longer a safe hiding place. Tax credit deals have been getting harder to put together for a while, but now we are reaching a critical phase as equity repricing continues for a second year and costs and allocating agency mandates keep increasing.

It’s time to wake up and smell the formaldehyde. We are at a crisis point in housing and urban affairs in this country. It’s no longer about complaints that our progress is too slow. Rather, as former Enterprise Chairman Bart Harvey told me, we are at risk of watching much of the progress we have made over 20 years disappear.

In 10 months, a new president takes office, and he or she will have a thousand things to worry about. We all know the fundamental nature of the nation’s housing woes and how an effective housing policy could help the economy, our children’s health and education, our transportation systems, and on and on.

But we also know that the folks in Washington and the folks advising the president-to-be have no idea what to do about any of this. It’s our job to tell them.

You have fought on the front lines of housing development. You’ve confronted NIMBYism. Now it’s time to go out and fight on the political front lines to elevate housing to be a key election-year issue and a top priority for the first 100 days of the next president’s term.

I wish Mr. Pitt good luck in his venture, but if he really wants to help New Orleans, he’d be in Washington, not the Ninth Ward.

He’d recognize that what’s needed is a new national housing commitment, and he’d lead a march on Washington. Imagine what might happen if he traveled across the United States, stopping at troubled neighborhoods and highlighting the scope and breadth of our housing and community development problems, arriving in Washington just in time for the inauguration of the next president.

Maybe that is too much to hope for, but we have to think big and act boldly to make the need clear. There hasn’t been a chance like this since the Tax Reform Act of 1986, and it’s up to us to take advantage of it. Read our story on what the next president needs to do about housing on page 24. And then get out there and take political action.

The time you invest in the next 12 months will determine what happens to this industry and the people it serves for many years to come.

[For more, visit http://www.housingfinance.com/.]


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When atheists love Jesus. . .

I "lifted" this photo from the blog of a person of faith.

The gent on the left in the "Atheists for Jesus" T-shirt is best-selling author and atheist apologist, Richard Dawkins.

Hmmm.

Let's see now. An atheist, even a famous atheist, wearing an "advertisement" for Jesus even though he has no faith in God or the idea of a deity.

What's up with that?

I expect it has something to do with the radical, people-honoring values of Jesus. He can be irresistable in that regard.

Wonder what would happen if those who claim to follow Jesus resolved to act like him, especially in regard to other people on the planet?

Here's an idea: Christians shut up. . .er, excuse my harshness. . .stop talking.

No more words.

Just remember what Jesus did and go and do likewise!

Just a thought.

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Poverty and Racism

Catholic Charities, USA recently issued a convicting report entitled, Poverty and Racism: Overlapping Threats to the Common Good. If you care about poverty, its causes and faithful responses, you will defintely want to read it.

Here's a brief excerpt:

Part of what makes racism such a difficult issue to address in our nation’s public discourse is that most Americans lack an adequate understanding of how “persistent and destructive” this evil continues to be in contemporary society. Many believe that racism is a matter of the past, conveyed on the grainy images of black and white films. No one disputes that acts of blatant insensitivity still stain our social fabric. Most grant that occasional acts of callous bigotry still occur. But Americans tend to believe that these are isolated incidents and tragic exceptions to the climate of racial decency which now prevails among the majority of Americans in general,and white Americans in particular. At best, this thinking is naive. At worst, it is a delusion and an evasion of reality.

We do not dispute that much has changed in race relations since the abolition of slavery and the legal exclusion of persons of color, but we believe that in America we have too often confused the symptoms for the disease and focused on appearances rather than substance. We are convinced that what has happened all too often has been only a covering over, and not a fundamental change in, the racial dynamics of our society. Racism has never been solely or principally about insults, slurs, or exclusion, as demeaning and harmful as these are.

These are but the symptoms of a deeper malady. We believe that the United States, despite the undeniable changes in racism’s manifestations,still remains a “racialized society,” that is, “a society wherein race matters profoundly for differences in life experiences, life opportunities, and social relationships.” We are a nation “that allocates differential economic, political, social, and even psychological rewards to groups along racial lines; lines that are socially constructed.” At its core, racism is a system of racially conferred – and denied – privilege, advantage, benefits, and status. This inequality of status and benefit endures today. Thus, “racism today remains what it has always been: a defense of racial privilege.”

Racism entails more than conscious ill-will, more than deliberate acts of avoidance, exclusion,malice, and violence perpetrated by individuals. We acknowledge that members of any racial group can – and, in fact, do – act unjustly toward those they consider racially “different.” But such individual acts cannot alter the fact that in the United States, one racial group is socially advantaged, and the others endure social stigma. Racism describes the reality of unearned advantage, conferred dominance, and invisible privilege enjoyed by white Americans, to the detriment, burden, and disadvantage of people of color. This network of racially conferred advantages and benefits has been termed “white privilege.”

For the entire report go to:

http://www.catholiccharitiesusa.org/NetCommunity/Document.Doc?id=614.


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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and volunteering

Last Friday, The Dallas Morning News published a piece I originally intended to post here in its Op-Ed section.

Taking the advice of several friends, I'll post it here:

King’s True Legacy: Justice not Volunteering

Several years ago lots of people got the idea that the best way to celebrate the Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday was to organize a special day of community service.

You've likely heard it: "Not a day off, but a day on!" The idea being that the best way to honor Dr. King's memory and legacy would be discovered in organized volunteer efforts to extend compassion and aid to the less fortunate among us.

Here at Central Dallas Ministries we manage a rather large AmeriCorps program, so we received word from the Corporation for National Service that directed programs like ours all across the nation to orchestrate volunteer projects. Certainly nothing wrong with that.

I picked up on the same sentiment this week at the website of the White House Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Here's part of the post:

"President Bush marked the Martin Luther King Jr. King holiday by volunteering and calling on Americans to honor King’s legacy by showing compassion on the holiday and throughout the year.

"The President and First Lady Laura Bush joined dozens of volunteers at the Martin Luther King Jr. library as they repaired and shelved books and taught lessons about King’s life to children. More than a half million Americans are serving in 5,000 King Day of Service projects across the country.”

Here in Dallas, we enjoyed the commentary of popular Dallas Morning News columnist Steve Blow, who bemoaned the lack of organized community volunteer opportunities on this special day of national service ("Ready to go, nowhere to serve," January 20, 2008).

Don't get me wrong.

I'm all for seeing folks volunteer.

I believe in the value of community service.

Nothing beats genuine compassion and concern for others, especially those who are down and out, ill, mistreated, marginalized and neglected.

But, in my opinion, the continuing and growing effort to link the memory of Dr. King to a day of volunteering diminishes the real significance of his life, to say nothing of how badly it misses the mark in understanding his personal mission.

Dr. King didn't call folks to volunteer to help the poor. He wanted to know why so many people were poor in a nation of such opulence and wealth.

So far as I know, Dr. King never organized a food pantry or invited the rich to serve in soup kitchens. He asked hard questions about the meaning of hunger and homelessness to our collective, national soul.

He didn't call for mentors and volunteer projects in our public schools. No, Dr. King asked penetrating questions about the quality of education for all of our children.

Dr. King didn't just invite people to visit the hospitals where soldiers were returning home with severe injuries and lifelong disabilities caused by a terrible conflict in Southeast Asia. He asked why the war needed to continue at all.

He didn't wonder why more health care professionals weren't volunteering in indigent clinics. He challenged the nation to adopt a just universal health care policies to insure that every American received adequate and routine treatment.

The kinds of volunteer opportunities that Dr. King invited people to take part in often landed them in jail, not on the front page of the society section!

He asked people to march, to register to vote, to sit in, to resist and to confront systemic injustice and unfair laws. He asked people to lay down their very lives for the sorts of changes that made the American system better for everyone. His program didn't seek to simply meet needs. His vision called for the elimination of need.

Certainly, I see and often champion the value of community service. However, to redefine Dr. King's life and legacy in those terms limits his importance and drains his message of its power. And, frankly, such an emphasis lets us all off the hook when it comes to the fundamental and sweeping public policy changes still needing our attention and the full expression of our courage as a people.

[http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/
dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-james_25edi.ART.State.Edition1.37b7204.html]

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Dr. King, labor's hero

“So often we overlook the work and the significance of
those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in
the so-called big jobs. But let me say to you tonight that whenever
you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for
the building of humanity, it has dignity and it has worth.”


Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., AFSCME Memphis Sanitation Strike, April 3, 1968


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Barbara Brown Taylor

My good buddy, Mike Cope, posted this quote from Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith on his blog not long ago. A fitting entry for a Sunday morning.

If you are a church person, it's more than worth pondering.

“I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them. If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape.”

Check out Mike's site at: http://www.preachermike.com/.