SOME HEADLINES FROM THE REAL WORLD

An estimated 7 million land mines are still hidden in unmarked minefields in Angola
4 years after the protracted civil war there.

Brazilian and Swiss police have broken up and international ring that lures
Brazilian women into prostitution.

Hunger will kill more than 300,000 children in West Africa this year
if donor countries don't come through with enough money to buy
food for them.

I am in the process of reading a book entitled, The Divided Ground: Indians and Settlersand the Nothern Borderland of the American Revolution. Author: Alan Taylor, a scholarly historian and ulizer Prize winner.

What struck me is his description of Native American lifestyles: They (Native Americans)cherished the collective security maintained by expecting generosity from the fortunate to the needy. Instead of storing up wealth, prospering chiefs gave gifts to the hungry and ragged. These values of hospitality and reciprocity spread resources through the season and across the village.

(I thought of Acts 2:44 "... and they held all things in common").


Taylor also writes, They (Native Americans) wondered that white people are striving so much to get rich and they heap up treasures in this world which they cannot carry with them to the next.

(Again I thought of Matthew 6:19 : Do not store up treasures for yourselves in this life...")

Here were these Indians in the Northeast, called barbarians and savages even by well meaning missionaries, who never heard of Jesus or his gospel, living the gospel values more demandingly than those calling them Christians, followers of Jesus, not only back then.
Not only Christians back in 1761, but even today.

Usually when we think of the horrendously cruel way our ancestors treated Native Americans, we zero in to the Wild West, but this book deals with Native Americans here in the Northeast.

Can you make a meditation out of these thoughts?

Some thoughts: (perhaps worth pondering)

Personal Aphorisms

People are not always evil; they are often misguided or jaded or confuse or misapprehensive or imperceptive or insensitive or prejudiced. They are responsible for their human weaknesses but they are not inheritently evil. Often they prefer personal comfort to disruptive involvement but they are not evil.

What is a saint? People who respond to God’s call more fully, more energetically more sensitively than others.

God is constantly calling us but we hear and follow other calls; God’s call is soft and persuasive. other calls are loud and forceful.

All the goodness God pours into the world, all the goodness the saints offer us are conditioned by our freedom to refuse, to choose a lesser good or even an evil eg God and the saints offer us the power to create peace but we are free to choose vindictiveness or warfare instead.

Courage is not standing up for your convictions. Courage is taking your convictions into the face of opposition. Anyone can stand up and salute the flag. Few are the number of courageous citizens who will live by the principle that that flag symbolizes especially when those principles oppose the expediencies of our government.

Many have the courage of their prejudices but not of their convictions. To have convictions they must think things through. Maintaining prejudices requires only that they are through with any thinking at all.

The problem with courage is not the lack of backbone but having too much backbone which ends up being stubbornness. Courage to be effective must be flexible enough to bend. Stubbornness can be backbreaking.