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March 31, 2006

From The Book - "Kitchen Table Wisdom"

"When we haven't the time to listen to each other's stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live. The less time we spend at the kitchen table the more how-to books appear in the stores and on our bookshelves. But reading such books is a very different thing than listening to someone's lived experience."

"Because we have stopped listening to each other we may even have forgotten how to listen, stopped learning how to recognize meaning and fill ourselves from the ordinary events of our lives. We have become solitary; readers and watchers rather than sharers and participants."

"The kitchen table is a level playing field. Everyone's story matters. The wisdom in the story of the most educated and powerful person is often not greater than the wisdom in the story of a child, and the life of a child can teach us as much as the life of a sage."

"The stories at every kitchen table are about the same things, stories of owning, having and losing, stories of sex, of power, of pain, of wounding, of courage, hope and healing, of loneliness and the end of loneliness. Stories about God."

"So many of us do not know our own story. A story about who we are, not what we have done. About what we have faced to build what we have built, what we have drawn upon and risked to do it, what we have felt, thought, feared, and discovered through the events of our lives. The real story that belongs to us."

From the book - "Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal" by Rachel Naomi Remen

March 06, 2006

Dr. Martin Luther King - On Violence

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

Thanks to Pastor Kerry Nelson Covenant Luthran Church for the daily devotion that included this quote.