Confessions of an Itinerant Corps Member: May 2007

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

A message to Charleston and Sacramento:

This family from New Orleans East had it right.

The Cross He Bears. . .

We were working in Adullam Christian Fellowship over in St. Bernard Parish. Cleaning it up so they could rebuild. Inside, a giant cross. My team leader at the time was a devout Catholic. She refused to carry it out. Cole Kauffman didn't have any problem with it. Just threw it over his shoulder. As he carried it across the parking lot, people approached him. Blessed him. Thanked him for what he was doing. He came back in, didn't know what was going on, generally oblivious to the symbolism of his action. It was rather amusing.

Quotations

"I'm almost serene. I can celebrate life. Below my window there's an apple tree in blossom. It's white. And looking at it -- instead of saying, 'Oh, that's a nice blossom' -- now, looking at it through the window, I see the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be. The nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous. If you see the present tense -- boy, do you see it. And boy, do you celebrate it." - - Dennis Potter, shortly before his death
"If you observe a really happy man, you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his child, growing double dahlias or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that had rolled under the radiator, striving for it as a goal in itself. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of each day." - W. Beran Wolfe
"If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us." - Herman Hesse, Demian
"Author Tony Campolo, who makes a regular circuit as a chapel speaker on Christian college campuses, for a time used this provocation to make a point. 'The United Nations reports that over ten thousand people starve to death each day, and most of you don't give a shit. However, what is even more tragic is that most of you are more concerned about the fact that I just said a bad word than you are about the fact that ten thousand people are going to die today.' The responses proved his point: in nearly every case Tony got a letter from the chaplain or president of the college protesting his foul language. The letters never mentioned world hunger." - Philip Yancey
"The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it goes away. Puzzling." - Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
"All my teachers have been women. Though several men have taken me aside for an hour to tell me the things they know." - Don Paterson
"Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it." - M. Scott Peck
"The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it; nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of clouds." - Victor Hugo
"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." - Robert E. Howard
"Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened." - Thomas Hardy
"What is the path? There is no path. On into the unknown." - Goethe, Faust
"We must be the change we wish to see in the world." - Gandhi
"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." - Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
"If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing." - Anatole France
"The flowers have been growing thorns for millions of years. For millions of years the sheep have been eating them just the same. And is it not a matter of consequence to try to understand why the flowers go to so much trouble to grow thorns which are never of any use to them? Is the warfare between the sheep and the flowers not important?" - Antoine de St. Exupery, The Little Prince
"He made a mistake once. I don't even know if he knows it. He was standing on the banks of a river, listening to something on the other side, something he had never heard but had always known. But instead of crossing the river, he listened for as long as he could stand it and then turned his back and returned the way he had come. And he's never heard it again. He should have crossed that river." - Steven Erickson
"It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"It is never too late to be what you might have been." - George Eliot
"If we did all thing things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves." - Thomas Edison
"They lied to you. The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt." - Umberto Eco
"As a matter of fact, no man can be merry unless he is serious. Happiness is as grave and practical as sorrow, if not more so." -G. K. Chesterton
"It's not that I can't help these people. It's just-- I don't want to." -Volunteers

Confessions of an Itinerant Corps Member

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

A message to Charleston and Sacramento:

The Cross He Bears. . .

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