Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“This is a challenge I wish to place before the burgeoning fields of conflict transformation and peacebuilding… we need a dose of realism. Ours are professions afflicted with a proclivity toward the promise of great change. It is true. Our rhetoric comes easy. If constructive social change rolled forward as easily as our words and promises pour out, world justice and peace would have surely been attained by now.”

“If we take seriously this realizable potential and our incapacity to reach it, we are left with a singularly perplexing question that seems especially appropriate in the timeframe of the first decade of the new millennium: What collective and global legacy are we leaving for our great-great-grandchildren this century?”

“Do not remember the former things,
Or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
—Isaiah 43:18–19”

“It was not a particular religious tradition: the stories in fact cut across religions. It was not political, economic, or military power in any of the cases. What then, created a moment, a turning point, of such significance that it shifted whole aspects of a violent, protracted setting of conflict? I believe it was the serendipitous appearance of the moral imagination in human affairs.”

“The commander said to me, "If I put down my weapons and go to Dushanbe with you, can you guarantee my safety and life?" The Tajik storyteller paused… "My difficulty was that I could not guarantee his safety…So I told my philosopher warlord friend the truth, ‘I cannot guarantee your safety. … But I can guarantee this. I will go with you, side by side. And if you die, I will die.' " ”

“Stated simply, the moral imagination requires the capacity to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that includes our enemies; the ability to sustain a paradoxical curiosity that embraces complexity without reliance on dualistic polarity; the fundamental belief in and pursuit of the creative act; and the acceptance of the inherent risk of stepping into the mystery of the unknown…”

“While I have never been a big fan of problem stating, I have come to
appreciate the art of posing a good question. The question this book poses is simple and endlessly complex: How do we transcend the cycles of violence that bewitch our human community while still living in them?”

“"It took some time, but I found my voice. At some point, even though it is totally uncertain, you have to take the risk of following your own intuition, your own voice." [Akmal Mizshakarol]”

“No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city…"

“This leads me to end with a spectacular thought from St Augustine, which I hope can still resolve our many problems of unity and diversity and embolden all ecumenical and interfaith understanding into the distant future. Read and reread my paraphrase of Augustine's quote until you get it, and until it touches everything you once thought of as profane: "Christians, you are Christ... for there is but One Son of God"”

“Jesus Christ is a Sacrament of the Presence of God for the whole universe!”

“Maybe the Antichrist is much less a person than an attitude—and, unfortunately, an attitude that is quite common among many Christians! In my understanding, John is saying here that the Christ is the Universal Standing Symbol for what most people with their dualistic mind find hard to imagine or even appreciate—Matter and Spirit mirror one another and reveal the depths of one another.”

“You can tell the spirit that comes from God by this: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus the Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and any spirit which will not say this of Jesus Christ is not from God, but is the spirit of the Antichrist (1 John 4:2-3).”

“The call then becomes one toward universal solidarity with the full Christ journey rather than our usual habits of counting, weighing, or measuring individual worthiness or unworthiness. This is a very different message, which would create a very different notion of church and Gospel.”

“Rugged individualism has pretty much decimated the transformative power of the Gospel. The lone and fragile individual can do nothing but fear God in this world and the next, whereas the intent of the Gospel was to draw us together into a communion of saints and sinners in this world where we bear the burden of life together.”

“The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome.”

“You can take my word for it too that Greece, Egypt, ancient India and ancient China, the beauty of the world, the pure and authentic reflections of this beauty in art and science, what I have seen of the inner recesses of the human hearts where religious belief is unknown, all these things have done as much as the visibly Christian ones to deliver me into Christ's hands as his captive.” –Simone Weil

“The universe is relational at every level, and even between levels. Relationship is the core and foundational shape of Reality, Mirroring our Trinitarian God (Genesis 1:26-27). Every object serves as a mirror, another kind of presence. You can find such mirrors in all of nature, in animals. In your parents, lovers, children, books, pictures, movies.”

“If that mirror is withdrawn for any reason, It causes sadness, emptiness, or even anger. We are normally disoriented, even heartbroken for a while. We die in some way. But why? Because we only know ourselves in another's eyes. We receive our identity—all of it, good and bad—From another. The other both creates us and saves us. "No man is an island, entire of itself," says the poet John Donne.”

“In this resonance, we literally come to life.”

“When we learn to love anyone or anything, It is because they have somehow, if just for a moment, Mirrored us truthfully yet compassionately to ourselves.”

“The outer world is a sacrament of God.”

“I like this practice because it can become a very embodied experience of what we've been talking about in this whole book. Your own body–in its naked being, with no "doing" involved becomes the place of revelation and inner rest. Christ becomes "despiritualized."”

“"Don't focus on what you are, but simply that you are! How hopelessly stupid would a person have to be if he or she could not realize that he or she simply is. Hold…these loving words against your bodily self, bypass the mind and even the affections of the heart, and forgo any analysis of what you are, or are not.”

“All these practices have one thing in common: they are acted out, mimed, embodied expressions of spirit. The soul remembers them at an almost pre conscious level because they are lodged in our muscle memory and make a visual impact. The later forms of rational Protestantism had a hard time understanding this. ”

“These outer images serve as mirrors of the Absolute, which can often bypass the mind. Anything is a sacrament if it serves as a shortcut to the Infinite, but it will always be hidden in something that is very finite.”

“Before the age of literacy emerged, in the 16th century, things like pilgrimage, prayer beads, body prostrations, bows and genuflections, "blessing" oneself with the sign of the cross, statues, sprinkling things with holy water, theatrical plays and liturgies, incense, and candles all allowed the soul to know itself through the outer world, which we have in this book dared to call "Christ." ”

“The human need for physical, embodied practices is not new. Across Christian history, the "Sacraments," as Orthodox and Catholics call them, have always been with us.”