Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Showing posts with label Freedom's Political Prisoners. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Freedom's Political Prisoners. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

In Noble Pursuit of Peace




The Noble Pursuit of Peace

Pursuing peace is a noble cause. And pursuing peace actively as a nation should always be its first and last effort. I have grown up in a culture committed to the principles of life, liberty and justice and understand the hypocrisies of my country's birth to the native American Indians who have suffered the loss of each of these pure-bred ideals. To the black Americans whose legacy of agony were still-borne historically until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. (All of which could've sadly been averted some 200 years ago in America's pre-Revolutionary days when certain segments of Christians actively strove for the black man, woman and child's release from slavery's horror and wretchedness, but failed in their efforts). Oppressive eras when we as Christians should have been speaking up for the culturally abandoned like today's modern day angst over our vilified gay societies seeking to be recognized as human beings.

Conversely, I live in a community of Bosnians, Hispanics, Vietnamese, Jews, Somalians and Haitians who have suffered the equal horrors of loss of life, liberty and justice at the hands of overseas governments committed to their own nationalistic purges. And to some degree America has taken up their struggles of oppression and attempted to restore those lost civil rights through cultural and commercial engagements, efforts at world justice, and even in acts of war. In hopes of protecting and delivering the persecuted, the neglected, the overlooked and disdained from any further acts of horror, tyranny, and callousness. Too often belatedly, too often ineffectively, and in the face of withdrawing popular will, once bravely begun, but to later stagger at the impossibility of Justice's many costs, demands, guilts, and ironies.

I am not a pacifist but nor do I push actively for war. My position like many, are to seek to defend the rights of the weak, pursue peace where it is possible, utilize strength when necessary, and overall to discern between pride and my own fallenness, sin and hate. To expect this of the nation I live in and love is infinitely harder and so I pray, I get involved in ministries and community services, vote my will and heart, legislate, debate, and do all that I can in business and in life to make my nation as democratic as it can be, as just as it can be, as worthy of its ideals as it can be.

And most importantly I try to teach and live that selfsame life by daily example, as meagerly and humbly as I can in my willful pride and sin with God's help and grace, patience and mercy. I can be obtuse, shortsighted, selfish, stubborn and less-than-giving to the daily demands of Justice and Grace. My human flesh can become irrational, emotional, moody, and graceless. My conscience marred by too many slights and cynicisms, too many perceived demands on time and energy, exhaustion, health, or ignorance. The reality is, is that we fight within us the same fight we would seek within mankind. A fight against the sinfulness, evil and harm we would do to ourselves as we would do to each another. It takes a Savior to remove our sinfulness, to redeem us from ourselves, to bring justice to our fallen worlds. Jesus is our hope and through him can we bring hope to the world as His promise-bearers.

And so, to that end, I must also recognize the rights of those men and women who feel strongly about my nation's lack of efforts in the area of pacifism. Who wish to remind America - and all nations committed to Justice - to redouble their efforts to live in peace with one another locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. And especially to their own populations over whom they govern. To not misuse or abuse the rights of rulership, taxation, armed forces, and goodwill. We are a global citizenship and share the same pains of both good and evil.

It is a sad fact of life that there are many nations and fiefdoms, rulers and warlords, which are not committed to the democratic ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of justice. Who are not committed to living peaceably with their neighbors. They would harm their citizenry; abuse humble families, husbands, wives and children; destroy lands and properties taking what is not theirs; aggressively visiting sin, wickedness, and evil upon their own peoples. Yes, America has its own problems of nation-building and statesmanship, but to be honest all nations do as well. There are no nations on earth that please the Lord. We have all fallen short of God's glory, grace and justice.

And though my feelings do not run towards pacifism but more probably towards a form of civil engagement that would encourage a country's citizenry towards legal and pragmatic activism in government, enterprise, school and church, I must not neglect that portion of our society who are as equally frustrated with society's sense of nationalism and justice. Who seek to re-engage us on a political level of pacifism. I applaud their efforts, their courage, their thoughts and words. A will that doesn't weaken in a war's progression but strengthens to show to us our nation's purest democratic ideals. Peace is an admirable ambition. A practical necessity. A impossible task. An ever constant reminder that Love and Justice are never satisfied. Thank you Sarah for your thoughts, your insights, your commitment to life, liberty and justice.

R.E. Slater
October 18, 2011

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In which I'm an uneasy pacifist
http://www.emergingmummy.com/2011/10/in-which-im-uneasy-pacifist.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EmergingMummy+%28Emerging+Mummy%29

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

I call myself an "uneasy pacifist" and here's why:

Like many evangelicals, like most North Americans, I grew up in healthy respect and reverence for our veterans and our military. My own grandfather fought and was wounded in World War 2. I devoured novels set in war times and the spine is battered on my much-beloved copy of Rilla of Ingleside

I am a Canadian that does not like fighting in hockey. (Heretic!) I love hockey but, when the gloves dropped and everyone rose to their seat to pound the glass and holler their approval for the dance, I felt sick. Once that step toward abhorring violence was taken, it was hard not to find it everywhere. The glorification of violence as a means to solve conflict is everywhere in our culture and I was that lame person that couldn't stand mixed-martial-arts battles and railed against video games and movies that depicted war or crime as an adventure, even arguing we are "a generation of virtual sociopaths."

My pacifism began to grow legs when I lived in the United States for 8 years. When the war in Iraq began, the political climate in our area was strongly in flavour of military-based, unilateral action. The war was promoted as a "just war

The war in Iraq did not meet just war criteria for me - in retrospect, many would agree. As the political propaganda grew and war was equated with patriotism and, even more oddly, with spiritual practice or faithful following of Jesus, I struggled. I worked in a military-based bank, I loved and respected the Canadian and American military, I was proud of my own family's military history, developed an small understanding of their lives - and a deep respect for their honour and choices. But I grieved for what I suspected was ahead for the enlisted, the officers, the national guard, the country, the people of Iraq, the world as a whole. I grappled with the sentiment since 9-11 of robust, nationalistic, flag-waving patriotism and how many evangelicals believed Americanism (or American interests for those of us that are not American) and Christianity were somehow one and the same.

If you weren't for us, you were against us.

I began to read more about pacifism as the pamphlets filled my mailbox and news editorials became more and more passionate in favour of war. It deeply appealed to me.

At first, I grappled with war from a purely pragmatic standpoint. It was expensive. The military-industrial-complex that Eisenhower spoke of so warningly was in fearsome operation and I couldn't fathom how this was going to cost in human life, in political capital, in sheer dollars for the world. And then I was surprised - which is shocking itself - to discover a long history and tradition of Christian, faith-based pacifism. Apparently, there were whole groups of Christians throughout all of history that took a stand for peace and for active peacemaking precisely because of their faith. Despite the sometimes-bloodthirsty pages of Christian history, there has always been a remnant of believers that were convinced that Christ has modelled a path of non-violence for us to follow, not resisting even unto death.

And they were not lame or weak-willed. Think Martin Luther King Jr., St. Francis, Dorothy Day, the martyrs of our faith. I began to understand that peacemaking is not a hippie-thing, a sit-on-the-sidelines-of-history cop-out, letting someone else or someone else's kid do my dirty work. There wasn't any patchouli to my decision making process and despite my love of long dresses and flowers in my hair, I wasn't singing yet. The more I read, the more I prayed, the more that this seemed the path for me. Peace-making began to seem brave and active, it began to feel courageous to stand counter to our culture of war and violence and destruction.


I'm an pacifist for many reasons now - some pragmatic, some moral, almost all faith-based.

I believe life is sacred. The soldier is sacred, made in the image of God, and I cannot think what it does to a person to commit acts of war, to lift up arms against another, to kill another human being. My heart is ever with our soldiers and their beautiful families, even though I could not take that path myself in good conscience. Even the enemy is sacred, made in the image of God, loved. (I am one of those crazy people that think that God is love, that since my Father loves my enemy, that I, too, am called to an active love for them.) The "collateral damage" - that awful, cold term for those that are caught in the crossfire, the women, the children - is sacred, each life precious in the eyes of God. My pro-life ethic has become a lot more consistent as the years have gone by. War is never redemptive.

And I believe that love is stronger. Love will win in the end. Love will triumph, love is wider, deeper, more wild and generous and redemptive than we can fathom and I will choose the tough love.

My allegiance is first and always to God, to the ways of Jesus. And so, even though I am thankful for my country, even though I do appreciate it and work for the good of the city and the country in many ways, when the two are at odds - as in the choices of war or violence - my faith and the hope for peace wins every time.

But my pacifism is uneasy because I don't know how it looks all the time, how best to live an ethic of life, peace and love in a culture of violence and war. I know that pacifism is not total and absolute abhorrence of all violence - instead, to me, it's a policy of non-aggression and active peace-making.

And the everyday peacemaking can be hard. It was easy for me to look at the Iraq war and call it wrong. It's not so easy to pursue peace in my every day life, to choose a life of non-aggression, to release anger, rage, trespasses, to forgive, to actively advocate for peace and wholeness in the world around me, making space for God's ways. I don't know how it always looks to choose love in a way that exemplifies my commitment to the cultivation of the fruit of the spirit in my own life, such as peace, joy, goodness, love, faithfulness, gentleness and so on.

I am uneasy because sometimes I cry out for justice instead of mercy, failing to see that in Christ those two things are not separated. I can't always find the way of peace or love.

But I choose peace. I have set my feet on the path to find out how to live active peace-making, to identify boldly as a pacifist.

As Shane Claiborne wrote, "As a Christian, I am convinced in the power of non-violence by the greatest nonviolent act in human history: Jesus dying on the cross, even for his enemies."

Image sources via Pinterest

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Thursday, September 22, 2011

Freedom Isn't Free: U2 Tribute to Aung San Suu Kyi "Walk On"

Aung San Suu Kyi: A triumph of the spirit

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/aung-san-suu-kyi-a-triumph-of-the-spirit-2299748.html

June 19, 2011

A film of Aung San Suu Kyi, commissioned by U2 and smuggled out of Burma, has gone with them on a world tour which reaches Glastonbury on Friday. Martin Wroe had a clandestine meeting with her in Rangoon.

'We don't think we will fail, and we are not afraid of trying, the effort in itself is a triumph,' says Aung San Suu Kyi
GETTY IMAGES
'We don't think we will fail, and we are not afraid
of trying, the effort in itself is a triumph,'
says Aung San Suu Kyi
Behind the high fence on an anonymous Rangoon road, an old colonial house sits in slightly faded grandeur. Somewhere inside Aung San Suu Kyi is playing the piano. It is a daily ritual, developed while spending most of the past 21 years in detention as the leader of the movement to bring democracy to military-ruled Burma.

"During my years of house arrest I've often wished that I were a composer because then I could have spent my time composing," she says. "Music is much more universal than words."

It is also a way to assert her freedom in the face of her captors, who, despite making a great show of lifting her house arrest after widely discredited elections last November, continue to monitor her communications and travel, so that she rarely leaves the house except to visit the offices of her political party, the National League for Democracy (NLD).

"I don't feel any freer," she explains. "Because I never felt unfree. I never felt I was not free in all these years, so the fact that I am no longer under house arrest does not make me feel any freer." She adds, with a smile, "I am a lot busier."

Today she is busy because she has agreed to meet me and two colleagues commissioned by the rock band U2 to shoot a short film for their world tour. By the time U2, who headline the Glastonbury Festival this Friday, finish their 3600 Tour next month, seven million people will have seen them play in 30 countries. If any are unfamiliar with Burma or its Nobel laureate, by the time the band perform their hit song "Walk On", written for her, they will know who she is and what she stands for. Many will sign up to join Amnesty International or the Free Burma Campaign.

When Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest was lifted, it was Bono's idea secretly to shoot a film to promote the cause of the thousands of prisoners of conscience who remain in Burmese jails. Like something from a spy novel, a covert line of communication was set up, and after several false starts we flew into Thailand to fill our cameras with holiday shots for our "cover story". Securing tourist visas in Bangkok, we took off for Rangoon, where our mobiles no longer work, where emails are monitored and caution is advised in case "someone is watching".

The NLD, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, won 82 per cent of the seats in the 1990 elections, but the military has always refused to transfer power. After decades of dictatorship, the country has become the poorest in south-east Asia and also the most paranoid – there are countless stories of people being arrested for saying the wrong thing in the wrong place.

As Aung San Suu Kyi's communications are censored and often fail to arrive, it wasn't entirely surprising that at the gate to her house the duty team was not expecting us ... and were unfamiliar with the U2 back catalogue. Fortunately, our credentials were rapidly established and a makeshift studio set up in the living room, including a green bedsheet taped to the wall to create a "green screen", for post-production graphics.

"After many years, I am finally able to speak to you." Fluent, articulate and graceful, Daw Suu, as everyone calls her, is a natural and charismatic presence in front of the camera, retaining her striking good looks in her 66th year.

"You who across such distances sent support to Burma, we thank you. Students, teachers, workers, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, music fans – U2 fans like me. When you raise your voices we hear them, they are louder than any rock band, than any army."


An hour later, filming done, she sits beneath a huge screen print of her father, General Aung San, the man who led Burma to independence before being assassinated in 1947, when she was just two years old. She is encouraged to hear news of the popular uprisings in North Africa. "When I see people in the Arab countries doing the same kind of things that our young people did in 1988, showing the same kind of needs and the same kind of courage and determination to change their lives, then I feel that we are all one, and this warms my heart."

It was in 1988 that she arrived back in Burma to visit her sick mother, leaving her British husband and two children in the UK. She never returned, realising she had to stand alongside the saffron-clad monks as they led thousands of ordinary people trying to overthrow the military. Three thousand protesters were killed and 10,000 imprisoned, and despite further popular uprisings, notably in 2007, the generals still retain their grip on power.

"We have to work for change all the time," she says. "There may be times when we feel that what we have done has not really achieved great results, sometimes there may be regressions, but that doesn't matter. The world is not a static place, it shouldn't be static.

"We should be moving all the time, moving to bring about better change, instead of just sitting there and letting things happen the way other people who are not so desirous of good change wish them to happen."

"Freedom Isn't Free"
9/11 Memorial, Naperville, Illinois

No one alive today is a more recognisable symbol of peaceful resistance in the face of obdurate tyranny, and her passion for non-violent revolution is the more remarkable given the suffering of the Burmese people and the imprisonment of so many pro-democracy leaders. But her luminous conviction that working for the common good is our best calling is undimmed by any passing doubts. She wishes younger people were more politically active, even if some consider it "rather boring".

"I don't think it's boring to work for other people. I don't think its boring to think about how you might improve the lives of other people. I don't think altruism is boring. I don't think faith in freedom is boring. I would like young people to understand that: that these things are not boring at all, that these are the things that make this world the kind of place where you can shape your own destiny.'

She shaped her own destiny most profoundly when she defiantly chose not to leave Burma, knowing she would not have been allowed to return if she did. It makes her uniquely qualified to talk about freedom, the subject of her two Reith Lectures, recorded by a BBC team on a subsequent clandestine mission. Broadcast later this month, they explore how freedom can be won in her own country and what it means for the Arab Spring. In conversation, it is evident that she chooses gracefully to evade the categories imposed upon her by her captors.
"I have tried to explain to people who ask about how very constrained we feel in Burma," she says. "I always say that we feel free, those of us who have followed our own conscience – that is the greatest freedom.

"We don't think we will fail and we are not afraid of trying. The effort in itself is a triumph, the fact that we've been going on for more than 20 years, that many of our people have gone through such terrible times and yet we are still doing it, we are continuing. That in itself is a triumph, a triumph of the spirit."

And freedom will not be long coming to Burma, she predicts, inviting U2 to visit and perform "a great big concert to celebrate democracy". Musicians and artists are powerful agents for social change, a point dramatically underlined when another NLD activist, Htin Kyaw, interrupts in halting English, to recall his own 14-year imprisonment. In 2004 his wife smuggled a copy of Time magazine to him, which featured a story about U2 and "Walk On". "I was so pleased and I shed my tears," he says, eyes welling up. "I asked my younger daughter to send the lyrics in writing, but I don't know the notes so I do not sing ... but still we are walking on!"

One of the sayings for which Aung San Suu Kyi is most famous is her exhortation to "use your freedom to promote ours". Struck by Htin Kyaw's story, her face lights up in explaining that those in the West who campaign for freedom rarely realise the power they wield.

"You don't know how much it means when [people] are cut off from the rest of the world, when they have this sense that really they are still remembered, that people know that they are there."

In her youth, she laughs, all celebrities had to do was "have themselves talked about in the gossip columns". Today, she senses they understand that they can harness their fame for good.

"Bono is one of the people who really started this movement of artists getting involved in human rights issues and political issues, which is very good. I really think that he is at the head of this movement, and that now more and more artists and singers are getting involved in humanitarian concerns. Music and art in general have the power to change people, and people have the power to change history. I think that's how it goes."

With multiple copies made of our recordings and various obscure hiding places identified to get them out of the house and then the country, we come to the end of our conversation. Our practical inconveniences are trivial next to the ongoing trials of the people of Burma, and she is keen to underline the solidarity she shares with all who work for freedom. She points to the other NLD members now returning her living room to its conventional use.

"Most of the people around here have spent time in prison," she says. "But, well, here they are. That in itself is a triumph."