<Prev 1 | 2

We exist to be miracle workers for one another, and it is in community that we are called to grow. It’s in community that we come to see God in the other. It’s in community that we see our own emptiness filled up by the other. It’s community that calls me beyond the pinched horizons of my own life, my own country, my own race, and gives me the gifts I do not of myself have within me. ...

A Benedictine spirituality of community calls for more than togetherness. Togetherness is very cheap community. Benedictine community calls for the open mind and the open heart. Benedict called always for minds opened to the shattering implications of the Scriptures. The fact is that Jesus was an assault on every closed mind in Israel. To those who thought that illness was a punishment for sin, Jesus called for openness. To those who considered tax collectors incapable of salvation, Jesus called for openness. To those who believed that the Messiah to be real had to be a military figure, Jesus was the nonviolent call to openness. And so Benedict also calls us to open-heartedness. The Benedictine heart, the heart that saved Europe before us, is a place without boundaries. [It is] a place where the truth of the oneness of the human community shatters all barriers, opens all doors, refuses all prejudices, welcomes all strangers, listens to all voices, black and white, Arab and Jew, male and female. The data are in. The world is an electronic, commercial, political village. We cannot, you and I, go on much longer simply nodding to the neighbors in the parking lot after church, in the name of hospitality and community. We must begin to see the immorality of being socially, globally, unconscious. Socially, globally, narcissistic, and calling it the free market, democracy, and unipolarism. Individualism has not saved us. We need the wisdom of community now.
--Joan Chittister

Simone Weil in 1943, looking into the darkness of that time, said this: “Today it is not nearly enough to be a saint, but we must have a saintliness demanded by the present moment, a new saintliness, itself without precedent. A new type of sanctity is indeed a fresh spring for invention. If all is kept in proportion and if the order of each thing is preserved, it is almost equivalent to a new revelation of the universe and of human destiny. It is the exposure of a large portion of truth and beauty hitherto concealed under a thick layer of dust, the new holiness.” This amazing statement, this spiritual vision, is just what we need when we look into the black hole of our present predicament. It’s the hope we need for our own dark age. ...

So what about this new holiness? What is it? What’s new about it? Surely holiness is holiness, saints are saints. Not quite. For Simone Weil the specific characteristic of this new holiness is an explicit sense of universality. In the saints of the past, there was a sense of universality. It’s almost part of holiness to have this sense of interconnection, interdependence. But it was largely implicit. Even St. Francis, one of the most universally minded of saints, was bound by his culture, his time, his politics, his religion. Modern holiness, however, according to Simone Weil knows that the universe is a country, and that for the truly spiritual man or woman it is our only country here below. And it’s this vision of holiness with the explicit universality of the global consciousness that surely is our way towards peace, our way to a love of country that is not nationalistic, patriotism without nationalism, local identity without aggressive behavior towards your neighbor, and religious belief without intolerance or prejudice.
--Laurence Freeman

Mortality not only connects but unites us, and I can’t help but think, of course, of the World Trade Center as I say that. I lived in New York until 1974, and I watched the Towers go up. One of the few pieces of gratitude I can muster for that day is before they were coming down, all of the messages that came out from these people who knew they were going to die: “I love you, take care of yourself, take care of the children.” I think one of my favorites was “You’ve been a good friend.” These wonderful messages coming out from people who suddenly were faced with their common mortality in a way that none of them had expected. It seemed an ordinary day and it was anything but that. Remember, every day that you're going to die.
--Kathleen Norris

In the Buddhist view, wisdom and compassion are intrinsically linked together. One cannot be truly compassionate without wisdom. Wisdom--seeing the world as it really is--reveals the deep interrelatedness and impermanency of all things. When we genuinely recognize this, compassion is our natural response. When we have wisdom, we cannot help but feel compassion. By the same token, practicing compassion helps us to realize our fundamentally wise natures. Living compassionately means to think and act without putting ourselves at the center of the universe, without believing that "It's all about me." To recognize that the whole of existence does not revolve around these little entities we call our selves is the beginning of wisdom. Thus wisdom and compassion arise together. As we become more compassionate, we gain wisdom; as we become wiser, our compassionate natures are more fully revealed.

Wisdom and compassion are also innate. Our fundamental nature as persons is to be wise and compassionate, but years of social and self conditioning have obscured those qualities. We have learned to act and think in self-centered ways for so long that selfishness now seems natural. We need, think Buddhists, a practice, a discipline for reversing the effects of years of conditioning to return us to our true selves. Yet because our habits of self-centeredness are so deep and ingrained, the discipline needs to be gradual and gentle. We cannot expect radical transformation to happen overnight, nor can we expect to be the persons we wish to be simply by willing. Willing must be accompanied by acting. By acting compassionately and wisely, it becomes easier to will to be compassionate and wise. Buddhist spiritual practice, therefore, is a matter of training: learning and acting to be the persons we truly are.
--Mark Muesse,
“What Does It Mean to Lead a Spiritual Life? A Buddhist Perspective”