Quotes About Community

For the evangelical church right now, membership is no longer based on color," Onishi notes. "It is also not really based in religion anymore, either. Your litmus test for religious belonging comes via your political beliefs.

Soul selects her own Society

I am connected to everyone and everything.

Human beings are not meant to live in isolation. We are here to have relationships.

Humans are designed to be with other humans, even those with mixed blood. They need each other's laughter. They require each other's sorrows.

Nosotros somos paisanos. We are fellow countrymen. We come from the same soil.

There's something to be said for visibility, something about being easier to love.

Sisterhood is powerful.

I would be a Christian, except for all the Christians.

Go out into the world and do well; but more importantly—go out into the world and do good.

Joy means so much more when shared with you.

To love a person or a place is to take responsibility for its well-being.

You go first," Joe told Tory. "Wait in the parking lot for the rest of us." Tory and Sweatshirt set off, threading their way around the tables and the silent customers. Davy grinned at her when she got to the door. She went out into the parking lot, and as the other customers filed out—there were perhaps thirty of them—they formed an orderly double line in front of her. She felt a little like the last baritone in a church choir.

Anything you want to be, you can come be that with us. Rain or shine, no problem

I stopped in the tiny garden that encloses the Tolsta war memorial. The bronze plaque lists too many names for this small place; the same surnames recur over and again. The memorial, in the shape of an open book, also remembers the many soldiers who were returning to Lewis from the Great War, only to be drowned when their ship, the Iolaire, struck rocks outside Stornoway Harbour, which is a difficult one to make sense of.

Women might be beaten senseless by their husbands in the house next door, but it was never mentioned.

Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you." Matthew 5:42

Good storytelling is one thing rural whites and Indians have in common. But native Americans have learned through harsh necessity that people who survive encroachment by another culture need story to survive. And a storytelling tradition is something Plains people share with both ancient and contemporary monks; we learn our ways of being and reinforce our values by telling tales about each other.

Cities remind us that the desire to escape from the problems of other people by fleeing to a suburb, small town, or a monastery, for that matter, is an unholy thing, and ultimately self-defeating. We can no more escape from other people than we can escape from ourselves.

To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay.

It is the community that suffers when it refuses to validate any outside standards, and won't allow even the legitimate exercise of authority by the professionals it has hired.

The land lives," is how one young rancher put it to me. But now that the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area contains more people than Montana and the Dakotas combined, I fear that his attitude will prove incomprehensible to modern, urban Americans who live as if they have outgrown the land that feeds them, as incomprehensible as a similar reverence for the land among Native Americans was to the railroad barons, merchants, and immigrant farmers of a century ago.

conversion is no more spectacular than learning to love the people we live with and work among.

If monks are crazy to live the way they do, maybe the world needs more such craziness, what Matthew Kelty has termed 'the madness of great love.' My narrow world had just opened wide, and I had glimpsed such a love.