I'm currently reading a book titled "The Nonviolent Alternative." It's a collection of essays from Thomas Merton, written mostly in the 1960s, as a response to the Cold War and generally violent attitudes in the world at the time. Given the current political climate of our world, these essays speak today in the same way they did then. Here are a couple of great nuggets.
"Christ our Lord did not come to bring peace to the world as a kind of spiritual tranquilizer. he brought to his disciples a vocation and a task, to struggle in the world of violence to establish his peace not only in their own hearts but in society itself."
"The Christian is and must be by his very adoption as a son of God, in Christ, a peacemaker (Matthew 5:9). He is bound to imitate the Savior who, instead of defending himself with twelve legions of angels (Matthew 26:53) allowed himself to be nailed to the cross and died praying for his executioners. The Christian is one whose life has sprung from a particular spiritual seed: the blood of the martyrs who, without offering forcible resistance, laid down their lives rather than submit to the unjust laws that demanded an official religious cult of the Emperor as God. That is to say, the Christian is bound, like the martyrs, to obey God rather than the state whenever the state tries to usurp powers that do not and cannot belong to it. We have repeatedly seen Christians in our time fulfilling this obligation in a heroic manner by their resistance to dictatorships that strove to interfere with the rights of their conscience and of their religion."
1 comments:
I've been reading your posts. Good stuff, will add you to my google reader list. Thanks.
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