Friday, July 21, 2006

Friday Quotes

Every week I come across interesting things in my reading. I thought I'd share a few of them here.

I came across this in some reading today. "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

The author of these words? Abraham Lincoln.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
G. K. Chesterton

The Baptist sage Will Campbell calls televangelists "electronic soul-molesters." I like the justified revulsion in this comment, but as a believer in the Vedantic atma I feel that the soul, though being capable of being smothered, is ultimately unmolestable. Televangelists remind me more of people who, on a cold dark night, when you're huddled up by a small, carefully tended, soulful little campfire, drag over thirteen plaster statues of Jesus and the Apostles and a fourteenth bronze statue of that fine old sexist, St. Paul, plus a three-ton titanium-covered edition of the Americanized and bowdlerized and reified Metallic Bible, and throw them all on your little fire, smothering the flames. As you huddle in the dark, freezing your ass off, the televangelist defends his effrontery by claiming it's the plastic statues and Metal Bible you need, not your life-giving fire. He then pulls out an offering plate and asks you to pay him for what he's done. David James Duncan

In organizations of the old story, plans and designs are constantly being imposed. People are told what to do all the time. As a final insult, we go outside the organization to look for answers, returning with benchmarks that we offer up as great gifts. Yet those in the organization can only see these packaged solutions as insults. Their creativity has been dismissed, their opportunity to discover something new for the organization has been denied. When we deny life's need to create, life pushes back. We label it resistance and invent strategies to overcome it. But we would do far better if we changed the story and learned how to invoke the resident creativity of those in our organization. We need to work with these insistent creative forces or they will be provoked to work against us. Margaret Wheatley

2 Comments:

Blogger Chad said...

Mike,
These are fabulous quotes. I especially like the first and last. I wonder if Lincoln were alive today if this would be the world he so feared. I also wonder whether we ever had a republic to begin with that measured up to his understanding of this continent. As Malcolm X once said, "Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research." If we did our research, I am not sure that our country ever existed as the kind of republic or democracy Lincoln thought we had. It was all an illusion. It continues to be an illusion. What stories we leave out of our history demonstrate the extent to which our character is willing to define us as a people. I would have to agree with Gore Vidal who renamed our country, "The United States of Amnesia." Anyhow, just some random thoughts.
Peace.
Chad

10:26 AM  
Blogger Mike Mather said...

Chad -- thanks for the quotes from Malcolm X and Gore Vidal to add to the quotes from the day. They are all a reminder that the things that people struggle with today are not new. Each age always seems to think it is the worst. I'm not sure that is necessarily true. What I am sure of is that it is not new -- and that we can do better.
Mike

7:15 PM  

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