Quotes About Community

Privatized salvation never accumulates into corporate change because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with.

The Universal Christ is trying to communicate at the deepest intuitive level that there is only One Life, One Death, and One Suffering on this earth. We are all invited to ride the one wave, which is the only wave there is. Call it Reality, if you wish. But we are all in this together.

but we are the Body of Christ. "Christ" is not Jesus

It is no longer about being correct. It is about being connected. Being in right relationship is much, much better than just trying to be "right.

The whole of creation—not just Jesus—is the beloved community, the partner in the divine dance. Everything is the "child of God." No exceptions. When you think of it, what else could anything be? All creatures must in some way carry the divine DNA of their Creator.

When people get together in solidarity and unity, not out of power but out of powerlessness, then Christ is in their midst.

Authentic Christianity is not so much a belief system as a life-and-death system that shows you how to give away your life, how to give away your love, and eventually how to give away your death. Basically, how to give away—and in doing so, to connect with the world, with all other creatures, and with God.

Mary is all of us both receiving and handing on the gift. We liked her precisely because she was one of us—and not God!

Whatever we are living through, we are in it together. It is not a contest between us. We are good by one another's goodness; we are sinners by one another's sin. In other words, both love and sin are highly contagious.

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.

Ordinary people in times of shame and doubt needed an anamchara, or a "soul friend." Soon

If you want to be important, serve others. And if you want to be at the top, then slave to help everyone else. The

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.

whatever that takes, and then has plenty left over for others. True heroism serves the common good, or it is not really heroism at all.

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 creating many para-church organizations, and some new studies claim that if we look at the statistics, we will see that Christians are not leaving Christianity as much as they are realigning with groups that live Christian values in the world, instead of just gathering to again hear the readings, recite the creed, and sing songs on Sunday.

God is gathering us out of all regions till he can make resurrection of our own hearts from the very earth [emphasis added], and teach us that we are all of one substance, and members of one another; for the one who loves his neighbor loves God, and the one who loves God, loves his own soul.

There is only one thing more dangerous than the individual ego and that is the group ego.

So long as we all cling to our prejudices and identify with our preconceived views and feelings, genuine human community is impossible. You have to get to the point where you can break free from your feelings. Otherwise in the end you won't have any feelings; they'll have you.

Human life is about more than building boundaries, protecting identities, creating tribes, and teaching impulse control.

Christianity, for some, is neither faith nor reason—just reactive tribalism hiding behind the skirts of Mother Church.

Live simply so that others may simply live.

Everybody looked at Sully suspiciously. A rumor that he had burned up in the blaze had been circulating, and people had quickly adjusted to the idea of profound human tragedy. They were reluctant to give it up, Sully could tell. He smiled apologetically at the crowd.

People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul.