Quotes About Community

Acudieron de setenta y cuatro naciones diferentes. Los dispersados, los exiliados, los repudiados se congregaban en el único rincón de la Tierra donde la palabra «judío» no era un insulto.

rule...." "Ours not

que todos los daneses leales procederán igual».

Our species had to engage in complex cooperative behavior in order to survive in the wild, and—as I keep reminding my teenage children—pointing and grunting get you only so far.

Collectivism is the theory that the group (the collective) has primacy over the individual. Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective—society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc.—is the unit of reality and the standard of value.

The children declared that they would never speak of 'I' but only of 'we.' "2

Power belongs to the whole. The individual serves it. The whole is sovereign. . . . Everyone is given his place. There are commands and obedience.

Dein Volk ist alles" ("Your people is everything") soon followed

Our own German language possesses a word which magnificently designates this kind of activity: Pflichterfüllung (fulfillment of duty); it means not to be self-sufficient but to serve the community." (Meln Kampf)

Each and every Indian, man or woman, child or Elder, is a spirit-warrior.

If there are 3 girls in a class with 11 boys those 3 girls may feel like they don't belong and no amount of preaching about gender equity is going to change that. But if the class is just girls you may get more girls to sign up and the girls will be more comfortable and will likely gain more competence.

Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don't take things that aren't yours. Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Live a balanced life—learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.

The church needs to be so clear about its identity as the body of Christ that everything it does generates a gravitational pull toward the heart.

We all need the pendulum swing of snatching spaces of solitude and serving tables of sociability. In fact, the more plugged in and connected we are, the more we need to unplug and disconnect. A world of presence needs a time of absence.

Have your breakfasts all alone. Share lunch with your best friends. Invite your enemy to dinner. Nelson Mandela

If we were to make the table the most sacred object of furniture in every home, in every church, in every community, our faith would quickly regain its power, and our world would quickly become a better place. The table is the place where identity is born—the place where the story of our lives is retold, re-minded, and relived.

Adam means "human." Eve means "life." A human needs another for "life" to come alive and become living. Identity can't grow ferally, only communally. We were meant to eat together, not solo. Eve's solitary eating is what got her in trouble.

The church doesn't lose its kids when they go to college. We start losing them in middle school. We lose children in the church when we send them out of worship to children's church or Sunday school. This is one reason why Jesus kept insisting, "Let the little children come to me."[222

What do you mean?" they asked Jesus. "I mean this," he replied; and he took the bread, gave thanks, broke it into fragments, and shared those broken pieces with his disciples. And that piece, and those broken pieces, have been shared in every conceivable setting and played in every known language ever since. Faith is the gift of reading the signs of the presence of God. The point of reading signs is not the signs themselves, but the Signifier, Jesus the Christ.

The more we are the Presence of Christ for others, the more present we are for Christ to speak to us.

Jesus didn't care about a "holy table" as the religious establishment defined "holy." For Jesus a holy table was one that was open to anyone, a table where all God's children were present.

You never get a blessing for yourself. You get a blessing to bless others. In the words of the black church, "a blessing can't get to you unless it first can go through you." We are blessed to bless.

It is more important that our churches have tables that are relationally correct than liturgically correct. Rules aren't "truth"; we don't follow out of slavish obedience to something absolute. We follow preestablished rules because we want to signal our love of community….

Align yourself with people that you can learn from, people who want more out of life, people who are stretching and searching and seeking some higher ground in life.