Lauren

“For centuries, African American leaders have been tenacious in pursuing a relationship with Yahweh. This fight has led to the spiritual maturity of many in spite of persecution, obstacles, oppression, racism, degradation, segregation, and disappointment.”
― Barbara L. Peacock, Soul Care in African American Practice

“The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.”
― Thomas Merton

“A sign hangs on the wall in a New Monastic Christian community house: “Everyone wants a revolution. No one wants to do the dishes.” I was, and remain, a Christian who longs for revolution, for things to be made new and whole in beautiful and big ways. But what I am slowly seeing is that you can’t get to the revolution without learning to do the dishes. The kind of spiritual life and disciplines needed to sustain the Christian life are quiet, repetitive, and ordinary. I often want to skip the boring, daily stuff to get to the thrill of an edgy faith. But it’s in the dailiness of the Christian faith—the making the bed, the doing the dishes, the praying for our enemies, the reading the Bible, the quiet, the small—that God’s transformation takes root and grows.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

“Responding well to others, especially survivors of wrongdoing, may require that we open ourselves to hearing something other than what we expect or want to hear, even when what we hear threatens our ideas about how the world is ordered—as listening to survivor testimony might do. Only a self capable of being jolted out of its mundane complacency is up to the task of both hearing what repair demands and helping to invent new responses to harms that no preexisting remedy fully comprehends.”
― Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard