Quotes About Inclusion

The only free positions in this world are at the bottom and at the edges of things.

Everything finally belongs, and you are a part of it. This knowing and this enjoying are a good description of salvation.

God is the ultimate nonviolent one, so we dare not accept any theory of salvation that is based on violence, exclusion, social pressure, or moral coercion.

The advantage of those on the further journey is that they can still remember and respect the first language and task. They have transcended but also included all that went before. In fact, if you cannot include and integrate the wisdom of the first half of life, I doubt if you have moved to the second. Never throw out the baby with the bathwater. People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place. They are not mere iconoclasts or rebels.

Authentic God experience always expands your seeing and never constricts it. What else would be worthy of God? In God you do not include less and less; you always see and love more and more. The more you transcend your small ego, the more you can include.

But God loves things by becoming them. God loves things by uniting with them, not by excluding them.

Just the existence of a single mentally challenged or mentally ill person should make us change any of our theories about the necessity of some kind of correct thinking as the definition of "salvation." Yet we have a history of excluding and torturing people who do not "think" right.

The only people that Jesus seemed to exclude were precisely those who refused to know they were ordinary sinners like everyone else. The only thing he excluded was exclusion itself.

Life is all about practicing for heaven. We practice by choosing union freely—ahead of time—and now. Heaven is the state of union both here and later. As now, so will it be then. No one is in heaven unless he or she wants to be, and all are in heaven as soon as they live in union. Everyone is in heaven when he or she has plenty of room for communion and no need for exclusion.

If you go to heaven alone, wrapped in your private worthiness, it is by definition not heaven. If your notion of heaven is based on exclusion of anybody else, then it is by definition not heaven. The more you exclude, the more hellish and lonely your existence always is. How could anyone enjoy the "perfect happiness" of any heaven if she knew her loved ones were not there, or were being tortured for all eternity? It would be impossible.

The more that we can put together, the more that we can "forgive" and allow, the more we can include and enjoy, the more we tend to be living in the Spirit.

Up to now we have been more in love with elitism than with any egalitarianism; we liked being the "one," but just did not know how to include the many in that very One.

We are driven, kicking and screaming, toward ever higher levels of union and ability to include (to forgive others for being "other"), it seems to me. "Everything that rises must converge," as Teilhard de Chardin put it.

Lest it seem that I was neglected, I should point out that once I became known to the Mohawk Grill crowd, it was like having about two dozen more or less negligent fathers whose slender attentions and vague goodwill nevertheless added up.

America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another.) Granny

Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man.

Sometimes the ones the world has no place for are best equipped to show us what it is to live fully and to be truly loved.

Everybody was patting Nico on the back, complimenting him on his fighting. Even the Ares kids thought he was pretty cool. Hey, show up with an army of undead warriors to save the day, and suddenly you're everybody's best friend.

Then she did something so unexpected Nico would later think he dreamed it. She walked up to Nico, who was standing to one side in the shadows, as usual. She grabbed his hand and pulled him gently into the firelight. 'We had one home,' she said. 'Now we have two.' She gave Nico a big hug and the crowd roared with approval. For once, Nico didn't feel like pulling away. He buried his face in Reyna's shoulder and blinked the tears out of his eyes.

The way to beat Luke, he said. If I'm right, it's the only way you'll stand a chance. I took a deep breath. Okay. I'm listening. Nico glanced inside my room. His eyebrows furrowed. Is that...is that blue birthday cake? He sounded hungry, maybe a little wistful. I wondered if the poor kid had ever had a birthday party, or if he'd ever even been invited to one. :Come inside for cake and ice cream, I said. It sounds like we've got a lot to talk about.

Coach Hedge grumbled as he tended their wounds. "How come I never get invited on these violent trips?

Yay!" Tyson went around the couches and gave everyone a big hug—even Octavian, who didn't look thrilled about it.

Fairness does not mean everyone gets the same. Fairness means everyone gets what they need.

People of Earth, I come in peace!