Quotes About Community

The greatest need for our time is for the church to become what it has seldom been: the body of Christ with its face to the world, loving others regardless of religion or culture, pouring itself out in a life of service, offering hope to a frightened world, and presenting itself as a real alternative to the existing arrangement.

He said you're going to be identified as His disciples, not because of your church-going, Bible-toting, or song-singing. No, you'll be identified as His by one sign only: the deep and delicate respect for one another, the cordial love impregnated with reverence for the sacred dimension of the human personality because of the mysterious substitution of Christ for the Christian.

Morton Kelsey wrote, "The church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners.

Any church that will not accept that it consists of sinful men and women, and exists for them, implicitly rejects the gospel of grace.

For Foucauld and the Little Brothers, life in the desert was not a flight from the world but rather a school of love and prayer to learn to enter more deeply into humanity. Their goal was to shout the gospel not so much with their mouths as with their lives.

In a futile attempt to erase our past, we deprive the community of our healing gift. If we conceal our wounds out of fear and shame, our inner darkness can neither be illuminated nor become a light for others.

the Church is a purely volunteer organization. No member has to do anything he or she doesn't choose to do.

It [the town] was experiencing a spasm of virtuous reaction, quite as lawless and ungovernable as any of the acts that had provoked it.

There was commotion in Roaring Camp. It could not have been a fight, for in 1850 that was not novel enough to have called together the entire settlement.

Whether Mr. Oakhurst had cached his cards with the whiskey as something debarred the free access of the community, I cannot say. It was certain that, in Mother Shipton's words, he "didn't say 'cards' once" during that evening.

I guess when you're not awake, you're not awake. Waking up to the suffering of people who are different from us is a long process, and has a whole lot to do with what community we belong to and whose consciousness and life experiences impact our own on a daily basis. I have a hunch I'm going to be waking up until the moment I die.

I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.

All ceremonial events such as initiation (baptism) and incorporation, signs of communal membership, signify in the final analysis the renunciation of the intimate sphere of the person, if not emotionally, as in the bond of a biological blood-based kinship, then nevertheless spiritually, ideationally, and symbolically.

All life with others carries the germ of the capacity of dissolution because souls are more than what they factually are.

Between the two poles of community - blood and ideal - stretches the enormous and, to a certain degree, indeterminate public sphere, which is not quite comprehensible in either political or economic terms and where the entire risk of the humiliation of human dignity is given.

It is always some consolation in sorrow to feel that it is shared, and any burden laid on several is carried more lightly or removed.

Nessuno dovrebbe mai restar solo, da vecchio.

He was like one of those elderly gentlemen in Central Park who go around feeding birds and squirrels. Their pockets are filled with everything these small creatures may like to eat. The birds and the squirrels sense this and they perch on the shoulders of their benefactors and climb all over them in quest of what they consider their legitimate belongings.

Our exile organizations have been our way of replacing the cities and villages we have lost.

This is what Sweden is - quiet people leaning over the newspapers and coffee cups, each one with his own thoughts and destiny.

The worker is a member of his community but the forces driving and changing society are wielded by others

Even a short-lived visit to the bottom level of society means that one is faced with one of the most important decisions one has to make in life: what type of society do you want to help to create? This is the question that has come to dominate my whole life.

Being a refugee meant being lonely. This was something that was true for them all, regardless of what country they had come from or what circumstances had forced them to flee.

Qué poco sabemos de nuestros vecinos», pensó.