Un-doing poverty

"We think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked and homeless. The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty."

--Mother Teresa


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Sadness

Sadness, like a smile, can creep across a face, seemingly unbidden.

Invest in BOY, the NZ movie.

BOY! The autobiographical NZ film that everyone should see.
http://www.boythefilm.com/

Become an investor!
Participate via Kickstarter
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Badminton on an ark

Noah:

Day 18
Note to self: next time I’m on a long cruise and I want to play badminton and I only have one birdie, play below deck. I’m so stupid.


From Wittenburg Door

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Turn of a phrase

I like a good turn of phrase; a sentence so well crafted that you can actually see, smell or taste the thing being described. Not many writers can do such a thing.  

 

Steve Toltz does so often in A Fraction of the Whole. Toltz is a newish writer on the scene, an Australian with an interesting perspective. An old timer who paints pictures with words too is Graham Greene. My book club is reading A Burnt Out Case right now.

"The pouches under his eyes were like purses that contained the smuggled memories of a disappointing life."

"There is a time in life when a man with a little acting ability is able to deceive even himself."

from  A Burnt Out Case, by Graham Greene 

 

The book is not a comedy, more a commentary on a disillusioned life, with some fascinating descriptive phrases I admire.

Hospitality & Vulnerability

"WE CANNOT SEPARATE THE GOODNESS AND THE BEAUTY of hospitality from its difficulty. In a paradoxical way, hospitality is simultaneously mundane and sturdy, mysterious and fragile.
As a practice it involves soup and bread, blankets and beds. But it always involves more than these, and certain tensions internal to hospitality make it fragile vulnerable to distortion and misuse."
Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Tradition
by CD Pohl & PJ Buck

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Compassion based on our commonalities

We have more organs in common with other humans than we have different.

Essentially we're all in the same waka, canoe or station wagon.

Why do we focus on the differences?

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What am I living for?

"If you want to identify me ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the things I want to live for. Between those two answers you can determine the identity of any person."

~ Thomas Merton, The Man in the Sycamore Tree