Pope Francis Visits Iraq

 

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry's sermon during "Holding on to Hope" service

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s sermon during Holding on to Hope: A National Service for Healing and Wholeness at 

Washington National Cathedral.

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s sermon during Holding on to Hope: A National Service for Healing and Wholeness at Washington National Cathedral. This sermon was pre-recorded for inclusion in the live stream of this November 1, 2020 worship service.

The video of the sermon can be found here.
November 1, 2020
The Washington National Cathedral
The Most Rev. Michael B. Curry

Our Values Matter

And now in the name of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God, father, son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

“When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak and taught them.…” Matthew 5:1-2
I

The Beatitudes, just read in a variety of voices from around our country, are part of a compendium of some of the teachings of Jesus that tradition has called “The Sermon on the Mount.”  They are so named because the setting for these teachings of Jesus is on a mountaintop. That is not an incidental detail.

In 1939 the late Zora Neale Hurston published a novel that retold the biblical story of Moses and the Hebrew freedom movement recorded in the book of Exodus. She told it in the idiom of African slaves in America, but she wrote it as an ingenious critique of lynching and the immorality of Jim Crow segregation here at home, and a critique of the rising tide of fascism, authoritarianism, hatred, and bigotry around the world that would lead to the Second World War. She titled the book, Moses, Man of the Mountain.
“When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain and taught them.”

The mountain is not an incidental background detail. When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain and began to teach them. Matthew was deliberately and intentionally invoking the memory of Moses around what Jesus was doing in the sermon on the Mount.

It was on a mountain called Sinai that God confronted Moses and challenged him to live beyond mere self-interest and to give his life in the service of God’s cause of human freedom. “Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land, and tell ole Pharaoh, let my people go.”

Years later when the Israelites had won freedom, it was on that same mountain that Moses received the Ten Commandments; God’s law and principles for living with freedom.

And at the end of his life, it was on another mountain, Mt. Nebo, that God allowed Moses to, as the slaves use to say, look over yonder to behold a promised land.

Centuries after Moses, in Memphis, Tennessee, a follower of Jesus named Martin, on the night before he was martyred for freedom’s cause, spoke of hope in the biblical language of the mountain. “I’ve been to the mountaintop, and I’ve seen the promised land.” No, the mountain is not an incidental detail.

The mountaintop: That is where prophets and poets look over yonder, to behold not what is but what ought to be. To behold the promised land of God; a new heaven, a new earth, the kingdom of God, the reign of God’s love breaking in, the beckoning of the beloved community, a reconfiguration of the landscape of reality from the nightmare it often is into the promised land of God’s dream for the human family and all creation.
“When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain and taught them.”

What did he reveal from that mountaintop? He told them about the way to the promised land.

Blessed are you when you’re poor and broken-hearted. Here’s the way.
Blessed are you when you’re compassionate and merciful. This is the way.
Blessed are you when you’re humble and meek. This is the way.
Blessed are you peacemakers who will not cease from striving until human beings learn to lay down their swords and shields down by the riverside to study war no more.
This is the way to the promised land.

Blessed are you when you hunger and thirst that God’s righteous justice might prevail in every society, in every age, for all time.
This is the way.

Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.
Love God, your neighbor, yourself.
Love when they spit, shout and call you everything but a child of God.
Love!
This is the way. the way to the promised land.
When you live something like this, when you look something like this,
when we love like this, then we are on our way to the promised land.

You may be thinking, this sounds wonderful in church, but will it work in the world? Can such lofty ideals about hope, beloved community, and the reign of God be translated into human reality and society? Some years ago I was in the public library working on a sermon. I took a break and walked around the stacks looking at books. In the religion section I came upon a little book with an old black binding, published by St. Martin’s Press titled, The Great Sayings of Jesus.

The forward to the book was written by Richard Holloway, who once served as the Primus or presiding bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church. He said that in Gospels generally and, “In the Sermon on the Mount, in particular, we get from Jesus something of God’s dream for a transformed creation. But the epilogue [the rest of the Gospel story] reminds us that the dream is costly, that dreams are cruelly disposed of by the world as we know it. Yet the dream lives on, nothing can kill it for long; and Jesus goes on breaking out of the tombs into which we have consigned him.”

“The dream lives on.” Do not underestimate the power of a dream, a moral principle, eternal verities, virtues and values that lift us up and move us forward. For true and noble ideals and the dream of a promised land have their source in the God who the Bible says is love. And God, as my grandmother’s generation used to say, God is still on the throne!

Our ideals, values, principles and dreams of beloved community matter. They matter because they drive us beyond service of self alone, to commitment to the greater good of us all. They matter because they give us an actual picture of God’s reign of love, and a reason to struggle and make it real. They matter to our lives as people of faith. They matter to our life in civil society. They matter to our life as a nation and as a world. Our values matter!
II

They matter in some simple and yet significant ways. A number of years ago Robert Fulghum wrote a wonderful book titled, All I really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.
Here is a list of the things – the values – he learned:

• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don’t hit people.
• 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.
• When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.

Imagine a world in which these basic values don’t matter.

Share everything? Imagine a world in which the value of sharing is replaced by greed and selfishness.
Play fair? No, cheat, lie, steal. That would make for an interesting World Series, NBA Championship, Super Bowl, election, democracy.
Wash your hands before you eat. No, let’s spread the germs.
Flush. I rest my case.
“When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.”
No, it’s everyone for themselves.

Our values matter! A world, a society, a life devoid of values and ideals that ennoble, that lift up and liberate, is a world descending into the abyss, a world that is a dystopian vision of hell on earth.

Mahatma Gandhi knew something about the power of ideals, dreams, and values. He said it this way.

Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.

Our values matter!
III

The values and dreams we hold as a nation, our shared American values, they matter even more. We hold this prayer service in the midst of a national election, in the context of profound divisions that left unhealed could prove injurious to the fabric of democracy itself. The right to vote and to participate in the democratic process is a value of the highest order.

To be sure, no form of governance attains perfection. The preamble to the Constitution wisely reminds us that each generation must continue the evolving work of forming “a more perfect union.” No, our democracy is not perfect, but it offers the best hope yet devised for government that fosters human freedom, equal justice under the law, the dignity and the equality of every human being made, as the Bible says, in the image of God.

Reinhold Niebuhr said it well, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

Despite our flaws and failings, we have some shared values. One of them is the preservation and perfection of representative democracy itself, “that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

We don’t think of it this way very often but love for each other is a value on which our democracy depends.  On the Great Seal of the United States, above the bald eagle are banners on which the Latin words, e pluribus unum are written. Those words, e pluribus unum, literally mean, “one out of many.” One nation from many diverse people.

But do you know where those words come from? They come from the writings of Cicero who lived during the time of the Roman Republic. Cicero said, “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many.” Cicero who gave us those words said that love for each other is the way to make e pluribus unum real. Jesus of Nazareth taught us that. Moses taught us that. America listen to Cicero, Jesus, Moses. Love is the way to make e pluribus unum real. Love is the way to be America for real.

We have some shared values.

Thomas Jefferson gave voice to these shared values in the Declaration of Independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

We have shared national values. Abraham Lincoln gave voice to them when he said in the Gettysburg Address:

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

We have shared national values. Every one of us was taught these words as a child in school.
I pledge allegiance to the flag
of the United States of America
And to the republic for which it stands
One nation, Under God, Indivisible
With liberty, And justice, For all

We sing our shared values.
America. America.
God shed his grace on thee.
And crown thy good with brotherhood.
From sea to shining sea.

At a church picnic, many years ago when I was a parish priest, I happened to be sitting at a picnic table with parishioners, several of whom were veterans of World War II and Korea. One of the men sitting there, then well into his 80s, was one of the Tuskegee Airman, the first black air unit to fight.

He started talking about Eleanor Roosevelt, and he spoke of her with great reverence and respect. He went on to explain why. In the beginning the Tuskegee airmen were being trained to fly, yet they were prohibited from flying and fighting for their country because of the color of their skin.

At the time there was a great debate in Congress and the country as to whether or not a black person had the lung capacity to handle altitude. And, if they had the brain capacity to handle the intellectual rigors of flying. Scientists were brought in to argue the case on both sides. Nothing changed. The Tuskegee Airmen kept training.

The tide turned when Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States, went to Tuskegee and brought the press with her. While the cameras flashed, she got in a plane piloted by a Tuskegee airman and flew for 45 minutes over the Alabama countryside. The picture of her in the plane with the black airmen went viral. And it changed the debate.

What led Eleanor Roosevelt to stand with them? In a spiritual biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ivan Smith said she “wanted her critics to join her in working toward a new America that lived out the Declaration of Independence and the Beatitudes of Jesus.” She was holding on to deep American ideals, the values of this country. And lifting up the values of God.

What led the Tuskegee Airmen to fly, fight, and even die for their country? Between 1943 and 1945 those airmen flew over 15,000 sorties. Recognitions included 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses, a Silver Star, 14 Bronze Stars, 744 Air Medals, and 8 Purple Hearts. In 2007 President George W. Bush awarded 300 Tuskegee Airmen the Congressional Gold Medal.

I was raised by folk like those guys sitting at that picnic table. In her living room, my grandma proudly displayed the pictures of her two sons who fought in World War II, serving in segregated units within the Army Air Corps. My wife has her grandfather’s discharge papers; he fought in a black unit in World War I. This I know: They loved America even when America didn’t love us. They believed in America because – even when America falls short – the values and ideals of America, the dream of America, stands tall and true and will one day see us through.

So whatever your politics, however you have or will cast your vote, however this election unfolds, wherever the course of racial reckoning and pandemic take us, whether we are in the valley or the mountaintop, hold on to the hope of America. Hold on hope grounded in our shared values and ideals. Hold on to God’s dream. Hold on and struggle and walk and pray for our nation, in the words of James Weldon Johnson…

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry's sermon during "Holding on to Hope" service

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s sermon during Holding on to Hope: A National Service for Healing and Wholeness at 

Washington National Cathedral.

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s sermon during Holding on to Hope: A National Service for Healing and Wholeness at Washington National Cathedral. This sermon was pre-recorded for inclusion in the live stream of this November 1, 2020 worship service.

The video of the sermon can be found here.
November 1, 2020
The Washington National Cathedral
The Most Rev. Michael B. Curry

Our Values Matter

And now in the name of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God, father, son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

“When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak and taught them.…” Matthew 5:1-2
I

The Beatitudes, just read in a variety of voices from around our country, are part of a compendium of some of the teachings of Jesus that tradition has called “The Sermon on the Mount.”  They are so named because the setting for these teachings of Jesus is on a mountaintop. That is not an incidental detail.

In 1939 the late Zora Neale Hurston published a novel that retold the biblical story of Moses and the Hebrew freedom movement recorded in the book of Exodus. She told it in the idiom of African slaves in America, but she wrote it as an ingenious critique of lynching and the immorality of Jim Crow segregation here at home, and a critique of the rising tide of fascism, authoritarianism, hatred, and bigotry around the world that would lead to the Second World War. She titled the book, Moses, Man of the Mountain.
“When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain and taught them.”

The mountain is not an incidental background detail. When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain and began to teach them. Matthew was deliberately and intentionally invoking the memory of Moses around what Jesus was doing in the sermon on the Mount.

It was on a mountain called Sinai that God confronted Moses and challenged him to live beyond mere self-interest and to give his life in the service of God’s cause of human freedom. “Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt land, and tell ole Pharaoh, let my people go.”

Years later when the Israelites had won freedom, it was on that same mountain that Moses received the Ten Commandments; God’s law and principles for living with freedom.

And at the end of his life, it was on another mountain, Mt. Nebo, that God allowed Moses to, as the slaves use to say, look over yonder to behold a promised land.

Centuries after Moses, in Memphis, Tennessee, a follower of Jesus named Martin, on the night before he was martyred for freedom’s cause, spoke of hope in the biblical language of the mountain. “I’ve been to the mountaintop, and I’ve seen the promised land.” No, the mountain is not an incidental detail.

The mountaintop: That is where prophets and poets look over yonder, to behold not what is but what ought to be. To behold the promised land of God; a new heaven, a new earth, the kingdom of God, the reign of God’s love breaking in, the beckoning of the beloved community, a reconfiguration of the landscape of reality from the nightmare it often is into the promised land of God’s dream for the human family and all creation.
“When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain and taught them.”

What did he reveal from that mountaintop? He told them about the way to the promised land.

Blessed are you when you’re poor and broken-hearted. Here’s the way.
Blessed are you when you’re compassionate and merciful. This is the way.
Blessed are you when you’re humble and meek. This is the way.
Blessed are you peacemakers who will not cease from striving until human beings learn to lay down their swords and shields down by the riverside to study war no more.
This is the way to the promised land.

Blessed are you when you hunger and thirst that God’s righteous justice might prevail in every society, in every age, for all time.
This is the way.

Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.
Love God, your neighbor, yourself.
Love when they spit, shout and call you everything but a child of God.
Love!
This is the way. the way to the promised land.
When you live something like this, when you look something like this,
when we love like this, then we are on our way to the promised land.

You may be thinking, this sounds wonderful in church, but will it work in the world? Can such lofty ideals about hope, beloved community, and the reign of God be translated into human reality and society? Some years ago I was in the public library working on a sermon. I took a break and walked around the stacks looking at books. In the religion section I came upon a little book with an old black binding, published by St. Martin’s Press titled, The Great Sayings of Jesus.

The forward to the book was written by Richard Holloway, who once served as the Primus or presiding bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church. He said that in Gospels generally and, “In the Sermon on the Mount, in particular, we get from Jesus something of God’s dream for a transformed creation. But the epilogue [the rest of the Gospel story] reminds us that the dream is costly, that dreams are cruelly disposed of by the world as we know it. Yet the dream lives on, nothing can kill it for long; and Jesus goes on breaking out of the tombs into which we have consigned him.”

“The dream lives on.” Do not underestimate the power of a dream, a moral principle, eternal verities, virtues and values that lift us up and move us forward. For true and noble ideals and the dream of a promised land have their source in the God who the Bible says is love. And God, as my grandmother’s generation used to say, God is still on the throne!

Our ideals, values, principles and dreams of beloved community matter. They matter because they drive us beyond service of self alone, to commitment to the greater good of us all. They matter because they give us an actual picture of God’s reign of love, and a reason to struggle and make it real. They matter to our lives as people of faith. They matter to our life in civil society. They matter to our life as a nation and as a world. Our values matter!
II

They matter in some simple and yet significant ways. A number of years ago Robert Fulghum wrote a wonderful book titled, All I really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.
Here is a list of the things – the values – he learned:

• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don’t hit people.
• 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.
• When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.

Imagine a world in which these basic values don’t matter.

Share everything? Imagine a world in which the value of sharing is replaced by greed and selfishness.
Play fair? No, cheat, lie, steal. That would make for an interesting World Series, NBA Championship, Super Bowl, election, democracy.
Wash your hands before you eat. No, let’s spread the germs.
Flush. I rest my case.
“When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.”
No, it’s everyone for themselves.

Our values matter! A world, a society, a life devoid of values and ideals that ennoble, that lift up and liberate, is a world descending into the abyss, a world that is a dystopian vision of hell on earth.

Mahatma Gandhi knew something about the power of ideals, dreams, and values. He said it this way.

Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.

Our values matter!
III

The values and dreams we hold as a nation, our shared American values, they matter even more. We hold this prayer service in the midst of a national election, in the context of profound divisions that left unhealed could prove injurious to the fabric of democracy itself. The right to vote and to participate in the democratic process is a value of the highest order.

To be sure, no form of governance attains perfection. The preamble to the Constitution wisely reminds us that each generation must continue the evolving work of forming “a more perfect union.” No, our democracy is not perfect, but it offers the best hope yet devised for government that fosters human freedom, equal justice under the law, the dignity and the equality of every human being made, as the Bible says, in the image of God.

Reinhold Niebuhr said it well, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

Despite our flaws and failings, we have some shared values. One of them is the preservation and perfection of representative democracy itself, “that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

We don’t think of it this way very often but love for each other is a value on which our democracy depends.  On the Great Seal of the United States, above the bald eagle are banners on which the Latin words, e pluribus unum are written. Those words, e pluribus unum, literally mean, “one out of many.” One nation from many diverse people.

But do you know where those words come from? They come from the writings of Cicero who lived during the time of the Roman Republic. Cicero said, “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many.” Cicero who gave us those words said that love for each other is the way to make e pluribus unum real. Jesus of Nazareth taught us that. Moses taught us that. America listen to Cicero, Jesus, Moses. Love is the way to make e pluribus unum real. Love is the way to be America for real.

We have some shared values.

Thomas Jefferson gave voice to these shared values in the Declaration of Independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

We have shared national values. Abraham Lincoln gave voice to them when he said in the Gettysburg Address:

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

We have shared national values. Every one of us was taught these words as a child in school.
I pledge allegiance to the flag
of the United States of America
And to the republic for which it stands
One nation, Under God, Indivisible
With liberty, And justice, For all

We sing our shared values.
America. America.
God shed his grace on thee.
And crown thy good with brotherhood.
From sea to shining sea.

At a church picnic, many years ago when I was a parish priest, I happened to be sitting at a picnic table with parishioners, several of whom were veterans of World War II and Korea. One of the men sitting there, then well into his 80s, was one of the Tuskegee Airman, the first black air unit to fight.

He started talking about Eleanor Roosevelt, and he spoke of her with great reverence and respect. He went on to explain why. In the beginning the Tuskegee airmen were being trained to fly, yet they were prohibited from flying and fighting for their country because of the color of their skin.

At the time there was a great debate in Congress and the country as to whether or not a black person had the lung capacity to handle altitude. And, if they had the brain capacity to handle the intellectual rigors of flying. Scientists were brought in to argue the case on both sides. Nothing changed. The Tuskegee Airmen kept training.

The tide turned when Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States, went to Tuskegee and brought the press with her. While the cameras flashed, she got in a plane piloted by a Tuskegee airman and flew for 45 minutes over the Alabama countryside. The picture of her in the plane with the black airmen went viral. And it changed the debate.

What led Eleanor Roosevelt to stand with them? In a spiritual biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ivan Smith said she “wanted her critics to join her in working toward a new America that lived out the Declaration of Independence and the Beatitudes of Jesus.” She was holding on to deep American ideals, the values of this country. And lifting up the values of God.

What led the Tuskegee Airmen to fly, fight, and even die for their country? Between 1943 and 1945 those airmen flew over 15,000 sorties. Recognitions included 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses, a Silver Star, 14 Bronze Stars, 744 Air Medals, and 8 Purple Hearts. In 2007 President George W. Bush awarded 300 Tuskegee Airmen the Congressional Gold Medal.

I was raised by folk like those guys sitting at that picnic table. In her living room, my grandma proudly displayed the pictures of her two sons who fought in World War II, serving in segregated units within the Army Air Corps. My wife has her grandfather’s discharge papers; he fought in a black unit in World War I. This I know: They loved America even when America didn’t love us. They believed in America because – even when America falls short – the values and ideals of America, the dream of America, stands tall and true and will one day see us through.

So whatever your politics, however you have or will cast your vote, however this election unfolds, wherever the course of racial reckoning and pandemic take us, whether we are in the valley or the mountaintop, hold on to the hope of America. Hold on hope grounded in our shared values and ideals. Hold on to God’s dream. Hold on and struggle and walk and pray for our nation, in the words of James Weldon Johnson…

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.

Gaudete: Joy!

Gaudete: Joy is a state of mind independent of the state of the world! 

God of Grace, I give thanks for your generous love.

From the Society of Saint John the Evangelist - "Brother Give us a Word"

Thanks

God of Grace, I give thanks for your generous love. All that I am and all that I have comes from you.

Teach me to give thanks in all circumstances, and to express my gratitude in worship and loving service, to the glory of your Name. 

Amen.

A new birth into a living hope!

1 Peter 1:3-9

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith-- being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire-- may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

Cast away the works of darkness

Collect for Advent 1

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Seek meaning

When we live superficially … we are always outside ourselves, never quite ‘with’ ourselves, always divided and pulled in many directions … we find ourselves doing many things that we do not really want to do, saying things we do not really mean, needing things we do not really need, exhausting ourselves for what we secretly realize to be worthless and without meaning in our lives.

—Thomas Merton

From Parabola Magazine

"Photograph by Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton. In his twenty-seventh year at Gethsemani Monastery, wrote to his friend novelist John Howard Griffin, in 1968, shortly after he received the gift of a camera: “It is fabulous. What a joy of a thing to work with.The camera is the most eager and helpful of all beings, all full of happy suggestions. Reminding me of things I have overlooked and cooperating in the creation of new worlds. So Simply. This is a Zen camera.”

Be present, O merciful God!

Be present, O merciful God, and protect us through the hours
of this night, so that we who are wearied by the changes and
chances of this life may rest in your eternal changelessness;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The source of your joy

"Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile,

but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy."

Thích Nhất Hạnh

“The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself”: FDR’s First Inaugural Address

What an amazing difference than our current political rhetoric! Take a read!

“The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself”: FDR’s First Inaugural Address

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

1933

I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impel. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

In such a spirit on my part and on yours we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.

More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

Yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply. Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now.

Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.

Hand in hand with this we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land. The task can be helped by definite efforts to raise the values of agricultural products and with this the power to purchase the output of our cities. It can be helped by preventing realistically the tragedy of the growing loss through foreclosure of our small homes and our farms. It can be helped by insistence that the Federal, State, and local governments act forthwith on the demand that their cost be drastically reduced. It can be helped by the unifying of relief activities which today are often scattered, uneconomical, and unequal. It can be helped by national planning for and supervision of all forms of transportation and of communications and other utilities which have a definitely public character. There are many ways in which it can be helped, but it can never be helped merely by talking about it. We must act and act quickly.

Finally, in our progress toward a resumption of work we require two safeguards against a return of the evils of the old order; there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people’s money, and there must be provision for an adequate but sound currency.

There are the lines of attack. I shall presently urge upon a new Congress in special session detailed measures for their fulfillment, and I shall seek the immediate assistance of the several States.

Through this program of action we address ourselves to putting our own national house in order and making income balance outgo. Our international trade relations, though vastly important, are in point of time and necessity secondary to the establishment of a sound national economy. I favor as a practical policy the putting of first things first. I shall spare no effort to restore world trade by international economic readjustment, but the emergency at home cannot wait on that accomplishment.

The basic thought that guides these specific means of national recovery is not narrowly nationalistic. It is the insistence, as a first consideration, upon the interdependence of the various elements in all parts of the United States—a recognition of the old and permanently important manifestation of the American spirit of the pioneer. It is the way to recovery. It is the immediate way. It is the strongest assurance that the recovery will endure.

In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others—the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a world of neighbors.

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.

With this pledge taken, I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.

Action in this image and to this end is feasible under the form of government which we have inherited from our ancestors. Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced. It has met every stress of vast expansion of territory, of foreign wars, of bitter internal strife, of world relations.

It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure.

I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.

But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

For the trust reposed in me I will return the courage and the devotion that befit the time. I can do no less.

We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of the national unity; with the clear consciousness of seeking old and precious moral values; with the clean satisfaction that comes from the stern performance of duty by old and young alike. We aim at the assurance of a rounded and permanent national life.

We do not distrust the future of essential democracy. The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it.

In this dedication of a Nation we humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one of us. May He guide me in the days to come.

Source: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933, as published in Samuel Rosenman, ed., The Public Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Volume Two: The Year of Crisis, 1933 (New York: Random House, 1938), 11–16.