Category Archives: humanity

If you have the courage.

humanity, poetry, , ,

To my granddaughters who visited the Holocaust Museum
on the day of the burial of Yitzak Rabin, November 6th 1995.

Now you know the worst
we humans have to know
about ourselves, and I am sorry,

for I know you will be afraid.
To those of our bodies given
without pity to be burned, I know

there is no answer
but loving one another
even our enemies, and this is hard.

But remember:
when a man of war becomes a man of peace,
he gives a light, divine

though it is also human.
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.

You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you have the courage for love,
you may walk in light. It will be

the light of those who have suffered
for peace. It will be
your light.

-Wendell Berry

Step back from that gangrenous edge.

history, humanity, quotes, , , , ,

To commemorate the death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, August 3, 2008, this year I give you a link to his essay, “Live Not by Lies,” with an introduction to it, and excerpt from it. The website of the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Center has a wealth of the author’s writings and speeches, a list of events and publications related to his legacy, his biography, and more. They have put up a new page dedicated to excerpts of his writings over the course of almost forty years on the topic of Ukraine, beginning with, “Russia and the Ukraine are united in my blood, my heart, my thoughts.” First the introduction to the essay:

On the day Solzhenitsyn was arrested, February, 12, 1974, he released the text of “Live Not by Lies.” The next day, he was exiled to the West, where he received a hero’s welcome. This moment marks the peak of his fame. Solzhenitsyn equates “lies” with ideology, the illusion that human nature and society can be reshaped to predetermined specifications. And his last word before leaving his homeland urges Soviet citizens as individuals to refrain from cooperating with the regime’s lies. Even the most timid can take this least demanding step toward spiritual independence. If many march together on this path of passive resistance, the whole inhuman system will totter and collapse.

— by Edward E. Ericson, Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney, The Solzhenitsyn Reader

Here is one short excerpt from the essay:

“Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world.”

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It won’t take long to read the whole essay here: “Live Not by Lies.”

We are meant to become beautiful.

beauty, humanity, quotes, , , , ,

One individual person is not a person.

…only a rich relational life – not an obsessively self-analytical one – will make us fully human. Furthermore, self-sacrifice is so important for our soul’s well-being that we can even say that we are meant to be priests, nothing more and nothing less. And finally, as persons and as a society we are meant to glorify God and to become beautiful.

-Timothy Patitsas in The Ethics of Beauty

Only by daring to leap.

humanity, love, quotes, , , , ,
Bright Monday

“No frail human morality can ever hope to contain the overflowing fullness of life with which Christ desires to rejuvenate the faithful.

“The world will not be saved by optimistic humanism that believes human progress and morality will eventually save the world. For Dostoevsky and the church fathers, man’s deepest problems are not moral, nor even psychological, but ultimately existential and ontological. It’s not about following the rules or feeling balanced. It is a matter of choice and it is a matter of human nature being touched by the hand of God Himself.

“Only by daring to leap towards God in spite of the good and evil that exist in the heart can the believer hope to get beyond the contradiction of the human condition. In order to avoid descending into nihilism, Dostoevsky offers his readers another path: the acceptance of suffering and affliction in the context of a relationship with God. It is only in this context that man is able to recognize a path out of his fallen condition. It is only this Love that is able to transform suffering into salvific joy.”

-Father Alexis Trader (Now Bishop Alexis of the Diocese of Sitka)

Read more here: Ancient Christian Wisdom blog