“1st business of life, to love the Lord our God with heart and soul, and our neighbor as our self…

These two great commandments, and upon which rest all the Law and the prophets, cannot be narrowed down to suit us but we must go up and conform to them. They proscribe neither nation nor sex—our neighbor may be either the oriental heathen, the degraded European, or the enslaved colored American.

Neither must we prefer sex – the slave mother as well as the slave father. The oppressed, or nominally free woman of every nation or clime, in whose Soul is as evident by the image of God as in her more fortunate contemporary of the male sex, has a claim upon us by virtue of that irrevocable command equally as urgent. We cannot successfully evade duty because the suffering fellow woman be only a woman! She too is a neighbor.

The good Samaritan of this generation must not take for their exemplars the priest and the Levite when a fellow woman is among thieves—neither will they find their excuse in the custom.. they may be only females. The spirit of true philanthropy knows no sex.

The true christian will not seek to exhume from the grave of the past its half developed customs and insist upon them as a substitute for the plain teachings of Jesus Christ, and the evident deductions of a more enlightened humanity.”

From a sermon given in Canada in 1858 by Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823 – 1893), abolitionist, suffragist and first black woman to publish a newspaper in North America, born on this day

“I don’t really know why I care so much. I just have something inside me that tells me that there is a problem, and I have got to do something about it. I think that is what I would call the God in me. All of us have a God in us, and that God is the spirit that unites all life, everything that is on this planet. It must be this voice that is telling me to do something, and I am sure it’s the same voice that is speaking to everybody on this planet — at least everybody who seems to be concerned about the fate of the world, the fate of this planet.”

Wangari Maathai (1940 – 2011), first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, on this day in 2004

“I don’t preach a social gospel; I preach the Gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus didn’t say, “Now is that political or social?” He said, “I feed you.” Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.”

Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1931 – 2021), born on this day

Image: Feeding the Multitude – 6th century icon, Bibliothèque nationale de France

“Sometimes, too, we went out in the rubber boat to look at ourselves at night. Coal-black seas towered up on all sides, and a glittering myriad of tropical stars drew a faint reflection from plankton in the water. The world was simple – stars in the darkness. Whether it was 1947 B.C. or A.D. suddenly became of no significance. We lived, and that we felt with alert intensity. We realized that life had been full for men before the technical age also – in fact, fuller and richer in many ways than the life of modern man. Time and evolution somehow ceased to exist; all that was real and that mattered were the same today as they had always been and would always be. We were swallowed up in the absolute common measure of history – endless unbroken darkness under a swarm of stars.”

Thor Heyerdahl (1914 – 2002), ethnographer, born on this day

“I walk the unfrequented road
With open eye and ear;
I watch afield the farmer load
The bounty of the year.

I filch the fruit of no one’s toil,
no trespasser am I —
and yet I reap from every soil
and from the boundless sky.

I gather where I did not sow,
And bind the mystic sheaf,
The amber air, the river’s flow,
The rustle of the leaf.

A beauty springtime never knew
Haunts all the quiet ways,
And sweeter shines the landscape through
Its veil of autumn haze.

I face the hills, the streams, the wood,
And feel with all akin;
My heart expands: their fortitude
And peace and joy flow in.”

Frederick Lucian Hosmer (1840 – 1929)

“Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds — justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.”

From The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice (1941 – 2012), born on this day

“The mystical certainty that nothing can separate us from the love of God grows when we ourselves become one with love by placing ourselves, freely and without guarantee of success, on the side of love.”

Dorothee Sölle, quoted in Christian Mystics by Matthew Fox

“God is in us, and He is present everywhere. It is God’s all-encompassing love that manifests itself in us. When this happens, we see no difference between people: everyone is good, everyone is our brother, and we consider ourselves to be the servants of every created thing.”

Elder Thaddeus (1914 – 2003)

Artwork by Carl Larsson

“The noblest joy of the senses,
the holiest peace of the heart,
the most resplendent lustre of all good works
derives from this:
that the creature
puts his or her heart
wholly into what s/he does.”

Mechthild of Magdeburg, 13th century Beguine

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

Elie Wiesel (1928 – 2016), writer, holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, born on this day