What is your voice? I am hearing the music of the spheres and the sound of still hush and the humming of mother to infant as your true voice. I am seeing Jesus the babe and Jesus the crucified as being your true picture, Immanuel with us, immanent God, walking and hugging and calling us to walk and hug by you. With is more your name than many others I can think of. With.
:- Doug.
A question last night: Drama needs conflict. But does life? Is stretching closer to the truth? Is pressure a better word? Interesting that they have opposite pictures, accordion-like. Maybe we need both pressure and stretching. Conflict can be the conduit for them, but what we really need is to stretch and to be under pressure to stretch, to move. Let’s let this percolate a bit.
:- Doug.
The value of conflict in the cinema is it informs us that conflict can be survived—we can get to the other side, where there is life.
:- Doug.
Conflict is to drama as receiving love is to life.
:- Doug.
It is stretching and sharp relief and attention to what needs attention that is most important. Conflict is a dramatic way to get there, but there are other more effective ways.
:- Doug.
Some people like conflict, want to beat down other people. This kind of conflict, being meaningless, needs to be avoided. Or called out for what it is, but that is a different sort of conflict—it is conflict about conflict for fight’s sake.
:- Doug.
Conflict sometimes calls us to stand up for something. We should not shrink from this kind of conflict.
:- Doug.
Life sometimes does not tell us it is an emergency until we are into it.
:- Doug.
The failure of justice is the swelling of fear.
:- Doug.
We’re all by natural inclination conservative—expending as few resources and energy as possible to get what we want. And we are all at heart liberal—generous and loving of friend and stranger and those in need. This is psychological inertia: preserving what we want to own; keeping in motion all that life gives us.
:- Doug.
Just be present for: your self, your family, your friends, those near you, G*d.
:- Doug.
Whole-making gives us the answer to “Saved for what?” It tells us that whole people have a work to do, to make the world better. That is what we are saved for—for a work that is beyond our little selves. Saved is a word that easily pulls us away from the world, while Whole pulls us back in, for a greater good. If you are saved, you are on your way to whole and you make yourself more whole by making others and the world more whole.
:- Doug.
We can get tight in the little ball of Oh poor me, I sacrifice all day long and never get any thanks. Well, thanks is not the name of the work we are doing, nor is sacrifice. What it is is moving from our smaller to our larger, out into community, into meeting, into life itself. Thus, work in community disorganizing is precisely in the center of this work.
:- Doug.
Did Jesus die for our sins? Yes, for our separations, our fighting against love, our wanting to be just ourselves, little and tight within a wad, rather than as large as we can be.
:- Doug.
Estrangement is a word that fits very well what has been going on in our country politically in the last few years.
:- Doug.
In this sense, Jesus was dying for us all: to show us how far a human can go, aspirationally can go, in giving all for a larger humanity. We are all we can be when we give all we can possess for others.
:- Doug.
There is something more!
We don’t have to stay stuck in Dollars and Numbers and to do lists. There is beauty and truth and goodness; there is something which pulls us upward and toward others.
:- Doug.
I’m a lawyer-person who helps people extend their touch beyond the reach of their own hands and times. In truth I simply remind them they have this power and encourage them to use it.
:- Doug.
If these are things which excite you, you don’t seem very enthused.
:- Doug.
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