The path to peace

The fruit of silence is prayer,
The fruit of prayer is faith,
The fruit of faith is love,
The fruit of love is service,
The fruit of service is peace.
(Mother Teresa)

Sacred Otherness

in light of our reflections on those evil Pharisees in John 9, whom we are so very much like, perpetuating our own blindness, at least in part through our judging and categorizing people, with full confidence of who's in and who's out, who's good and who's evil; through our unwillingness to see God do a new thing, our fear to affirm God at work outside of our defined and limited vision... I pass this quote along posted today from Emergent Village:

Sacred otherness

Sometimes it's the very otherness of a stranger, someone who doesn't belong to our ethnic or ideological or religious group, an otherness that can repel us initially, but which can jerk us out of our habitual selfishness, and give us intonations of that sacred otherness, which is God.

Karen Armstrong