“I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth… As human beings, we are part of the whole stream of life… Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.”
Rachel Carson, marine biologist and conservationist (1907 – 1964)
“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed.”
Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975), political theorist, born on this day
“I try to open up my heart as much as I can and keep a real keen eye out that I don’t get sentimental. I think we’re all afraid to reveal our hearts. It’s not at all in fashion.”
Paul Simon, singer-songwriter, born on this day in 1941
“The unseen walks with us from birth to death. To some of us it is closer than to others, and those to whom it is closer reveal it to the rest. But to the most earthy of this earth earthy, it is the unseen itself that speaks. It has many voices, many interpreters. The Heavens, the Earth, man join in testimony of that mysterious power, the fashioner of all things, the purifier of all things. The unseen is a presence in every human heart by reason of its humanity. . . . the presence of the unseen within us gives us an ideal of purity and justice, this energy in our pilgrimage comes to us, not because we imagine God sitting in the heavens approving of our work but because we have within us a never tiring undying spiritual energy creating for us dreams and visions of the days that are to be. It is the unseen revealing itself to us in a conviction that the world can be founded on righteousness.”
Ramsay MacDonald (1866 – 1937), British Prime Minister and Unitarian preacher, born on this day
Image from Scivias by Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 1179)
“I was told God wore robes and a frown. That He sat high and heavy on a golden throne with a finger forever poised over the red button of smite. I was taught that holiness was male, that mercy came with conditions, that my softness was sin and my wildness worse. They offered me judgement in a wine cup, shame dressed up as salvation, and I drank. For years, I drank. Until my soul grew thirsty for something truer than fear. And then one day, barefoot and broken on the forest floor, I met Her. Not in a church, but in a clearing. Not with a hymn, but with a howl. She came to me with moss on her knees and galaxies in her hips. She came with the scent of milk and blood and moonlight. She was no one’s Sunday School sweetheart. She was thunder and lullaby, she was claws dipped in honey, she was the war drum and the rocking chair. Holy Mother. Creatrix of All. The one who gathers what the world tries to scatter. She did not ask me to be quiet. She asked me to remember. That I was born from a sacred scream, and my softness is a weapon in a world that’s forgotten how to feel. She pressed her lioness forehead to mine and said: I was never your shame. I was your shelter. I was never your punishment. I was your passage. They gave you a God of thunder. I gave you a storm to dance in. Come home, daughter. Come home. And so I did. I turned away from pulpits that made me small and toward the altar inside my own chest. And there She was. The Holy of Holies. The God who bleeds and births and breaks open to bloom. Not a He to obey, but a She to embody. Not a cage. But a crown. And I? I am Her temple now.”
“vulnerability doesn’t mean telling others what happened to us from across a cafe table or from behind a microphone and then going home from the experience feeling just as alone as you did before vulnerability means allowing your human heart blanket to get sewn to other heart blankets it’s about connection we don’t share for status we do it for synergy we don’t confess for clout we do it to build community we tell our tale to invite others to tell theirs it’s the sacred cycle of storytelling we gather in a circle of trust and say “here is my journey” then we listen to the other journeys that are shared we take space then we give space we pour then we absorb we speak then we listen we are storytellers then we are witnesses vulnerability isn’t just about grave digging in our past to expose our skeletons it’s about sewing quilts here is my patch here is your patch here is their patch here is us here is our story”
“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
King Edward Street Chapel 