By Mary Caroline Richards

We must ride our lives like natural beasts, like tempests, like the bounce of a ball or the slightest ambiguous hovering of ash, the drift of scent: let us stick to those currents that can carry us, membering them with our souls. Our world personifies us, we know ourselves by it…. I sense this, we must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration; to breathe with them, mobile and soft in the limberness of our bodies, in our agility, our ability, as it were, to dance, and yet to stand upright, to be intact, to be persons.

Source: Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person

By Karl Rahner, SJ

The Holy Spirit of the eternal God has come. The Spirit is here: living in us, sanctifying us, strengthening us, consoling us…. The center of all reality, the innermost heart of all infinity, the love of the all-holy God has become our center, our heart. True and absolute reality now lives in our nothingness; the strength of God vitalizes our weakness: eternal life lives in mortal human beings. The only thing that nightfall really means now is that we cannot grasp the meaning of the day that has dawned on us since Pentecost—the day that will see no sunset.

Source: The Eternal Year

By Annie Dillard

I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea of the power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flare; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may walk someday and take offense; or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.

Source: Teaching a Stone to Talk

By Patience Robbins

“Right now there are about two billion Christians on the planet. If a significant portion of them were to embrace the contemplative dimension of the Gospel, the emerging global society would experience a powerful surge toward enduring peace.” - Thomas Keating

I am a cosmic citizen, a planetary being who lives in the Americas in the United States. This was a line shared by a teacher I had this summer. It sure blows open any narrow attachment to a certain country or geographical place and calls forth a whole new perspective on who I am related to and where I belong. This ties in so well with what I have been learning (and thus teaching) in my own life—the interconnectedness of all.

For years I have been quoting a line from Thomas Merton: “We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. What we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.” As I grow in the contemplative life, I continue to notice and experience the truth of these words—unity with others and the earth. In fact, now I am praying the question: How do we live out of this interconnectedness, especially as I notice that I often act, think and live as though I am separate, independent and self-sufficient?

One of my favorite people is Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived in a redwood tree in California for two years in order to bring attention to the destruction of the forest. In her book, The Legacy of Luna (which is about her tree-sit at the age of 25), she records a very inspiring transformational experience in which she gave over her life to God. She was willing to surrender her life, for good, for Love, for this deeper call she knew within her being. During this transformative time, she started noticing and experiencing her oneness with the tree, the ants, the birds, the people who were attempting to force her to leave the tree so they could chop it down as well as all the people who were supporting her. It is a very moving story of what can happen when we live out of our deepest self, available to God and experiencing ourselves as part of one living organism.

It is out of this conviction and reflection on this oneness that I woke up one morning recently with an image of “prayer circles for peace.” These would be opportunities to gather in community, recognizing our interconnectedness, intentionally praying for peace, and encouraging one another to claim and live out this vision of peace in our hearts, our communities and our world. I was reminded of Gandhi’s line: “My greatest weapon is mute prayer.” Thus our deep desire and longing to embrace the gift of peace is what creates that possibility for ourselves and our world.

I have begun such a circle in my home Thursday evenings. As we gather weekly to sit for an hour of prayer, it may not feel or look like we are doing anything to aid the suffering and ease the hatred, violence, and destruction in our world, but there is a profound sense of holding the world and each other in a loving and compassionate way, of being love and peace for all that is.

So I continue to have hope and an ever deeper commitment to world peace along with a bubbling joy. I invite you to join me in acknowledging our oneness, being a loving presence for our world, and claiming and living into this vision of peace. Perhaps you, too, would like to start a “prayer circle for peace” in your neighborhood?

Patience Robbins wrote this piece for the newsletter of Shalem, an institute for spiritual formation in Bethesda, Maryland. She is a spiritual director and associate staff member of Shalem.

By Matilda Elena Lopez

I cry in the cocoon
for the wings of tomorrow
the future is a tortured today
that doesn’t yet have wings.

Source: Salvadoran poet of resistance

By Elizabeth O’Connor

The salient fact about the community we yearn for, and that calls us into wholeness, is that it cannot exist for itself. It exists only in relationship to the world. In recent years we have awakened to the fact that the people of this world are largely destitute—without food and clothing and shelter, and without structures that nourish an inward life. Unless a group of persons reach beyond themselves to touch and be touched by some of this need, its members will not know community.

Source: The New Community

By Leonardo Boff

Is it possible to live in peace and happiness when you know that two-thirds of human beings are suffering, hungry and poor? To be human we have to have compassion. This solidarity is really the defining factor of our humanity and is gradually being lost in a culture of material values. It’s not only the cry of the poor we must listen to but also the cry of the earth. The earth and human beings are both threatened. We must do something to change the situation….

There won’t be a Noah’s Ark to save only some of us. To meet people’s fundamental concerns, change is needed. The world as it is does not offer the majority of humanity life but rather hell. I believe that change is possible, because I cannot accept a God who could remain indifferent to this world, but only one who cares about the poor and the suffering.

Source: Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor

By Wendell Berry

It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one’s neighbor in order to borrow his tools.

Source: The Gift of Good Land

By St. Augustine

People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass themselves by without wondering.

Source: A.D. 354-430, Confessions

By Margaret J. Wheatley

There is a great deal of well-documented scientific evidence that we’re living in an era of unparalleled destruction of species, habitats, and natural resources. Many scientists refer to this time as the sixth great extinction. Cycles of destruction are natural to life, but this present destruction is different. It is something we humans created, and it is distinctly unnatural. We created it by using our own rules, rather than those of nature.

Instead of honoring nature’s principle of no waste, we decided we could accumulate huge amounts of garbage. We ignored life’s principle of restrained growth, where growth is related to available resources, and instead assumed that the more growth the better. We ignored life’s cyclical nature, where decay is the most essential element in a healthy system, and instead assumed we could always be improving, never resting, never ill, hoping to avoid even death. We ignored life’s mode of organizing in small, local systems, where small is beautiful, and instead took pride in building the biggest we could, creating gigantic urban sprawls and organizations so large they are unmanageable.

One of the biggest flaws in our approach to life is the belief that competition creates strong and healthy systems. Television screens are filled with images of animals locking horns in battle or ripping apart their prey. It is true that in any living system there are predators and prey, death and destruction. But competition among individuals and species is not the dominant way life works. It is always cooperation that increases over time in a living system. Life becomes stronger and more capable through systems of collaboration and partnering, not through competition.

Too many of us have forgotten that we live in a web of life. We have also forgotten that every species is essential to the entire web. Life will continue to teach us that we can’t make up our own rules. There’s only one way to run this planet, and life is pushing back forcefully right now, insisting that we learn this.

We need to learn how to be good neighbors. I believe the easiest way to become partners with life is to get outside, to be in nature and let her teach us. About half of us no longer have this option. I grieve for those of us who cannot know the feel of wild places, the sound of a small stream, the shade of a grove of trees. We need to feel the power of a storm against our faces, the fury of the wind, the cycles of destruction and creation that are always occurring. We need to experience sunlight shining off swamp grasses, to sit with the sunset, to rest under a tree, to go out in the dark and look up to the stars. If we can do these things, we will fall in love with life again. We will become serious about sustaining life rather than destroying it.

If we spent more time outside, letting life teach us, I know we would change our relationship to the earth. We would remember what it feels like to be part of life, rather than trying to play god with it.

Margaret Wheatley is a speaker, writer and consultant about new ways to organize so that people are valued. This excerpt is from her book called Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future.