Elizabeth O'Connor

Imagining a New Reality

By Elizabeth O'Connor on 01-21-2012

When we are dissatisfied with things as they are, or suffer and know pain, we begin to imagine what the world would be like if things were different--if there were no hunger or thirst and all tears were wiped away (Rev. 7:14). Creative imagination reaches toward God, and glimpses a new heaven and new earth. The new reality has nothing to do with the present order. In fact, the one who responds to call seeks to put something more beautiful in the place of what she sees. This is where the friction and fight begin.

Martin Luther King was not killed because he had a dream. Dreamers are easily dismissed. He was killed because he sought to introduce into the political arena what he saw with his heart and mind. The same was true of Gandhi and of our Lord.

As Jesus made clear his solidarity with the poor and his vocation to engage them in a liberating process, he came into confrontation with entrenched political and religious powers. As suspicion of him turned to resistance and then to hatred and fury, he began to prepare his disciples for what he would have to suffer. Peter immediately took Jesus aside to protest his continuing on what was surely a collision course....

Those who say yes to the perilous vocation of implementing vision at each stage will find new resistances emerging in themselves as well as in the society. Opposition to the new is very natural and should not cause any of us to be taken by surprise. The best way to understand it in one's contemporaries is to have named and owned it in one's self. That process is also some protection against the self-righteousness that plagues too many reformers as well as the pious.

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Our Extraordinary Work

By Elizabeth O'Connor on 11-29-2011

Without a protected time of daily silence we have no possibility of doing the extraordinary inward work that each of us needs to do. More, we will not make any substantial or sustained commitment to the solitary life unless we ask and seek for ourselves a structure of accountability.

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Critical Contemplation

By Elizabeth O'Connor on 10-25-2011

We can too easily become identified with goodness--feel that we are 'the enlightened ones.' We cease to ask questions about what we are doing, how we are doing it, whether it might be done another way. Not only must we question ourselves; we must create the kind of atmosphere that invites others to question us and to give us feedback on how they perceive and hear and experience us.

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Committed to Reflection

By Elizabeth O'Connor on 10-18-2011

We will not be able to encourage reflection unless we have felt the sweeping, transforming, generating energy [of the Holy Spirit] in our own lives. We may be able to publish journals and newspapers, renovate slum apartments, even be good reformers, but unless we teach reflection we will never be among those who carry out radical transformations.

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Withholding Ourselves

By Elizabeth O'Connor on 09-29-2011

When remorse is real and not a whip, it has the possibility of giving us a whole new attitude. Actually, confession is made for the revealing of our light--gifts of love, faith and creativity. Understanding this, however, will not always make the resistance to confession less. If we exercise love, we become vulnerable. If we confess our gifts, we are apt to be asked to use them. In the end, the sin we must all come to look at is the sin of withholding ourselves. This is the sin that keeps us beggars in life.

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Praying for Rain

By Elizabeth O'Connor on 07-28-2011

A feeling of desperation had brought some of us to our knees. After that we found that we came together with a new capacity to understand and care for one another, confirming that prayer is the proper preparation for our gatherings. Unfortunately we do not usually make that discovery until we are anxious, or have a heart full of pain. There is a saying that a person's belief in praying for rain depends on how many days it has been since it last rained.

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Keeping Secrets

By Elizabeth O'Connor on 07-11-2011

Community will not exist unless we can learn to share our lives, but neither will there be any community where there is not a deep respect for privacy. One of the brighter discoveries of growing up is that one does not have to lie to keep a secret. There are questions addressed to us that we do not have to answer. We each have parts of our soul that need bear the prints of only our own footsteps.

But if there are secrets that we can safely keep from others, there are no secrets that we can safely keep from ourselves.

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The Only Task

By Elizabeth O'Connor on 06-27-2011

We have come to know that building up the church of Jesus Christ is the only task which has significance. In it we can find ultimate meaning. We are not looking for that thing which may happen next week, next month, or next year. We believe ourselves to be engaged this very moment in that which is the hope of the world. Our commitment is to the Lord of that redemptive community which has the task of pushing back its boundaries until it holds the world. There will be no peace or healing in our day unless little islands of koinonia can spring up everywhere--islands where Christ is, and because he is we can learn to live in a new way.

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Despair and Enthusiasm

By Elizabeth O'Connor on 06-23-2011

The flux between despair and enthusiasm seems to affect different [mission] groups at different times. Always at least one of them is somewhat down, if not completely buried in a pit of darkness. In time, even when seemingly going downhill, we learn to believe in the reality of God and to suspect that these down times may be when God is working out the new in our lives.

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Behold the New

By Elizabeth O'Connor on 06-13-2011

The church is not going to be different until someone in it is different. God waits for each of us to hear, "Behold, I do a new thing--through you!" The question is always: Can we open our lives so that the Holy Spirit may descend and new power break that we may be the kind of person around whom renewal begins?

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