A Few Good Quotes

     I am amazed at times at the gems I come across.
    I found this in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees: “Really, her spirit is everywhere, Lily, just everywhere. Inside rocks and trees and even people, but sometimes it will get concentrated in certain places and just beam out at you in a special way” … “You can hear silent things on the other side of the everyday world that nobody else can.”
     And then, Annice Callahan, in Traditions of Spiritual Guidance, says “Rahner asserts that to speak of the human is to speak of the divine and vice versa. He describes God as the mystery in human experience. For him, then, God is the depth dimension in experiences such as solitude, friendship, community, death, hope and, as such, is the orientation toward the future. Rahner goes so far as to say that loneliness, disappointments and the ingratitude of others can be graced moments because they open us to the transcendent. The silence of God, the toughness of life and the darkness of death can be graced events. This mystery of grace discloses itself as a forgiving nearness, a hidden closeness, our real home, a love which shares itself, something familiar which we can turn to from the alienation of our own empty and perilous gives. When we are in touch with ourselves authentically, we experience God.”
     (Rabbi) Abraham Isaac Kook says, in Lights of Holiness, “Observe the harmony of the heavenly realm, how it pervades every aspect of life, the spiritual and the material, which are beforeyour eyes of flesh and your eyes of the spirit. Contemplate the wonders of creation, the divine dimension of their being, not as a dim configuration that is presented to you from the distance but as the reality in which you live. Know yourself, and your world, know the meditations of your heart, and of every thinker, find the source of  your own life, and of the life beyond you, around, you, the glorious spendor of the life in which you have your being.”
     Thomas R. Kelly, in Quaker Spirituality, says, “Eternity is at our hearts, pressing upon our time-torn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto itself.”

Make of them what you will.

                                              

Building a Future from the Grassrots up

    More and more the difference between struggles in the North and the South is evident.  For one thing, the peoples of the South, like Aboriginal peoples, struggle not only against what the neoliberal economy brings them, they also struggle, and to a very large extent, to defend the culture they have built over millennia. They defend their language, their traditional way of life, their values and future generations. In the North, the struggles have often been marked by a single-minded attack against what is seen as unjust. The weakness has often been that, once the particular difficulty has been overcome (work hours, pensions, salary gains, etc.), everyone settled down once again to their regular routine within the society that was theirs. And the manipulation and the corruption continued unabated.

Occupy the Heart of the Island, July 2012

     Perhaps, in some way that is why the case of Quebec (and various other minorities around the world) is somewhat different. The Francophone people in Quebec , like Aboriginal peoples, have something to defend (the beauty of their land, their language, the particular values that were entrenched in the Quiet Revolution of the 1970s). And yet, the majority in Quebec have been integrated into the values and lifestyle of the neoliberal economy and are all too willing to trust their social and political institutions to serve their needs -- much as is in the case for the Rest of Canada.
    There may now be a change at work. There is scepticism about the political machinery and its leaders; there is disgust at the way the financial world is functioning; there is a growing rejection of continuous cuts to social services; development plans erode the land itself; we witness a surrender of education to market interests; the French language is eroded in public places. These issues have drawn hundreds of thousands into the streets in recent month to defend what they have build and to demand accountability from their government. It remains to be seen whether that energy can get translated into a genuine cry for fundamental change.

Occupy the Place of the People, October, 2011

     The strength of the movement lies in its grassroots organizations, and here as elsewhere those organizations have tended to be dependent on financial support from various levels of government. What is needed is the creation of a broad grassroots economic and political life that is independent of government and not at all beholden to it. Here in Quebec we are at the beginning of this process.
    Very likely an election will be called within a month (to be held in early September). Already the pundits are saying that much depends on whether the students (who have led the charge since the beginning of the Maple Springtime this year) will translate their protest into political action by registering en masse and going out to vote. What is important is that, while no one thinks that a change of government will resolve the underlying issues, a more responsive government might be in a position to catalyze the grassroots energy into daring fundamental changes to our political and economic life.