Inclusive Love Quotes

People who love themselves come across as very loving, generous and kind; they express their self-confidence through humility, forgiveness and inclusiveness.

Love is omni-inclusive, progressively exquisite, understanding and compassionately attuned to other than self.

The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included in that community as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.

If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent. You burn with hunger for food that does not exist. A U. S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.

Our homes travel with us. They are wherever we feel loved and accepted.

Voidness is that which stands right in the middle between this and that. The void is all-inclusive, having no opposite--there is nothing which it excludes or opposes. It is living void, because all forms come out of it and whoever realizes the void is filled with life and power and the love of all beings.

Love is love, not to be defined or described by the mind as exclusive or inclusive. Love is its own eternity: it is the real, the supreme, the immeasurable.

There's no beauty without difference and diversity. Love unconditionally.

A black woman making art is a disruptive act. Every story that I tell as a woman is a political act, even if I want to tell a 'silly love story.' The fact it exists through my gaze is radical.

The world is getting too small for both an Us and a Them. Us and Them have become codependent, intertwined, fixed to one another. We have no separate fates, but are bound together in one. And our fear of one another is the only thing capable of our undoing.

Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little. We settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to an exquisite holiness. We settle for the fear-driven when love longs to be our engine. We settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any-life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all.

To this day I believe we are here on earth to live, grow, and do what we can to make this world a better place for all people to enjoy freedom.

Food-sharing is an innate way that we show our love for people we care about. Including others in times of celebration is an act of kindness.

Any type of violence is against God, against religion, against spirituality, against humanity, and against nature. Maturity comes only through non-violence, love, and all-inclusiveness.

Our culture is hostile only to the inauthentic living of the gospel. It sniffs out hypocrisy everywhere and knows when Christians aren’t taking seriously, what Jesus took seriously. It is, by and large, hostile to the right things. It actually longs to embrace the gospel of inclusion and nonviolence, of compassionate love and acceptance. Even atheists cherish such a prospect.

Compassion isn't just about feeling the pain of others; it's about bringing them in toward yourself. If we love what God loves, then, in compassion, margins get erased. 'Be compassionate as God is compassionate,' means the dismantling of barriers that exclude. In Scripture, Jesus is in a house so packed that no one can come through the door anymore. So the people open the roof and lower this paralytic down through it, so Jesus can heal him. The focus of the story is, understandably, the healing of the paralytic. But there is something more significant than that happening here. They're ripping the roof off the place, and those outside are being let in.

You compare yourself with somebody, compare yourself with an example, with the ultimate ideal. Comparative judgment makes the mind dull; it does not sharpen the mind, it does not make the mind comprehensive, inclusive, because, when you are all the time comparing, what has happened? You see the sunset, and you immediately compare that sunset with the previous sunset.

Make noise for justice. Make noise for inclusion. Make noise for empathy. Make noise for our planet. Make noise for civil rights. Make noise for women’s rights. Make noise for compassion. Make noise for LOVE.

There one exists not as an accumulation of memory and experience, not as an embodiment of love or compassion. There one simply exists in an intensity of inclusiveness.

Meaning springs from belonging.

When we foster appreciation for and love ourselves, we start to contribute to the world in a way that allows equality, inclusivity, and all forms of kindness.

The spirit of the Gospels is the all inclusive love of Jesus, which jumps off the pages.

A good sense of humour is the sign of a healthy perspective, which is why people who are uncomfortable around humour are either pompous (inflated) or neurotic (oversensitive). Pompous people mistrust humour because at some level they know their self-importance cannot survive very long in such an atmosphere, so they criticise it as “negative” or “subversive.” Neurotics, sensing that humour is always ultimately critical, view it as therefore unkind and destructive, a reductio ad absurdum which leads to political correctness. Not that laughter can’t be unkind and destructive. Like most manifestations of human behaviour it ranges from the loving to the hateful. The latter produces nasty racial jokes and savage teasing; the former, warm and affectionate banter, and the kind of inclusive humour that says, “Isn’t the human condition absurd, but we’re all in the same boat.

Perfect love is to feeling what perfect white is to color. Many think that white is the absence of color. It is not. It is the inclusion of all color. White is every other color that exists combined. So, too, is love not the absence of emotion (hatred, anger, lust, jealousy, covertness), but the summation of all feeling ? It is the sum total. The aggregate amount. The everything. Love is inclusive: it accepts the full range of human emotion—the emotions we hide, the emotions we fear. Jung once said, “I’d rather be whole than good.” How many of us have sold ourselves out in order to be good, to be liked, to be accepted?

I still see harsh comments online or receive them right to my face, comments on how we have fallen into the deep end, how we throw the word love around to too many people. And to that I’d say, “Oh, thank you, I’m trying to.

The new expanded spirituality is all inclusive. It is inclusive, because it comes from unconditional love. In the concept of unconditional love there is no exclusion. Everything and everyone is seen as a part of oneself. It is a beautiful spirituality as the one who lives by its principles cannot by definition be a part of any conflict.

They did normal things, but they did them with abnormal love and inclusiveness.

Sometimes folks need preaching. Sometimes the message of love, inclusion, and equality needs to be direct and clear.

those whose business it is to open doors, so often mistake and shut them

The greatest encouragement throughout the Bible is God's love for His lost race and the willingness of Christ, the eternal Son, to show forth that love in God's plan of redemption. The love of Jesus is so inclusive that it knows no boundaries. At the point where we stop caring and loving, Jesus is still there loving and caring

I remembered some of what I'd read in the past: the small group of the original Impressionists, including one woman-Berthe Morisot- who'd first banded together in 1874 to exhibit works in a style that the Paris Salon found too experimental for inclusion. We postmoderns take them for granted, or disdain them, or love them too easily.

Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful speech and failure to listen, I am committed to cultivating loving speech and compassionate listening to relieve suffering and promote reconciliation and peace in myself and among other people, ethnic and religious groups, and nations. Knowing that words can create happiness or suffering, I am committed to speaking truthfully using words that inspire confidence, joy, and hope. I am determined not to speak when anger manifests in me. I will practice mindful breathing and walking to recognize and look deeply into my anger. I know that the roots of anger can be found in my wrong perceptions and lack of understanding of the suffering in myself and the other person. I will speak and listen in such a way as to help myself and the other person to transform suffering and see the way out of difficult situations. I am determined not to spread news that I do not know to be certain and not to utter words that can cause division or discord. I will practice diligently with joy and skillfulness so as to nourish my capacity for understanding, love, and inclusiveness, gradually transforming the anger, violence, and fear that lie deep in my consciousness.

The beauty of God is in the wind, in the movement of the ocean, it is in the eyes of a woman gazing at her lover, pouring the deep red wine of love from her eyes like two crystal cups. There is a God who dances and who loves and who longs to sing of love...And I mean that God is music; all inclusive, benevolent and life-affirming, unashamed human emotion.

As a community, we should seek to create an environment that is inclusive of varying perspectives. Flat out, it makes us stronger. Diversity of thoughts and experiences opens us up to new ideas or to approaching old ideas in new ways.

We are so many selves. It’s not just the long-ago child within us who needs tenderness and inclusion, but the person we were last year, wanted to be yesterday, tried to become in one job or in one winter, in one love affair or in one house where even now, we can close our eyes and smell the rooms. What brings together these ever-shifting selves of infinite reactions and returnings is this: There is always one true inner voice. Trust it.

When you share love, you defeat hate.

When love awakens so will the world, for love is the seed of civilization.

Love is the supreme religion, love is the supreme law, love is the supreme science.

You must love in order to be loved. You must be inclusive in order to feel yourself among the included. You must give in order to receive.

Inclusivity has to be seen as a benefit to the community. The lack of diversity has to be seen as a detriment to that community.

Love is about cooperation, sharing and inclusion. It is about the elevation of each individual to a life neither suppressed nor exploited, but instead nourished to rise to its full potential--a life for its own sake and so that we may all benefit by the gift of that life.

I hope the exposure to other people and places shapes what the kids do, but even more I want it to shape who they are. I want them to see that in the universal human desire to be happy, to develop our gifts, to contribute to others, to love and be loved—we’re all the same. Nobody is any better than anybody else, and no one’s happiness or human dignity matters more than anyone else’s.

It is heartbreaking when the table of God is not set for all the people of God. It is heartbreaking when colonization and patriarchy take root over the truth, which manifests in inclusive love.

It is insufficient to only tell your children that racism and racists are bad. It is insufficient to simply explain “We love people of all colors.” It is lazy and near damaging to proclaim a love for all people but never make the leap of actually reaching out to people of color or adding tangible diversity to your life. In a world filled with empty rhetoric, our children don’t need to hear words from us without action. They need to see us embody the beliefs we claim to hold dear.

Most of all, I love graduations. They are individual and communal, an end and a beginning, more permanent than weddings, more inclusive than religions, and possibly the most moving ceremonies on earth.

Too many religious people make faith their aim. They think 'the greatest of these' is faith, and faith defined as all but infallible doctrine. These are the dogmatic, divisive Christians, more concerned with freezing the doctrine than warming the heart. If faith can be exclusive, love can only be inclusive.

The educational and therapeutic settings are all about achievement. But that isn't what a relationship with Jesus Christ is about. He loves us exactly as we are and He wants a relationship with us regardless of our performance.

Shout out to the noisemakers. Our world needs your voices. Make noise for justice. Make noise for inclusion. Make noise for empathy. Make noise for our planet. Make noise for civil rights. Make noise for women’s rights. Make noise for compassion. Make noise for LOVE.

The reality is that love of God is expressed fully as love of both friend and enemy.  It recognizes in everyone the image of God. Love is all-inclusive. Love knows no boundaries or limits. Love God, love your neighbor, love your enemy, this is the Greatest Commandment.

When we love our hate, we stop hating. Love always wins. To love hatred means to welcome it. It doesn’t mean that we should do what it tells us to do, but we shouldn’t suppress it either. When we love hatred we put ourselves out of the process of hatred, and love begins.

Sorvia o ar, farejando-lhe o almíscar virginal. E fazia de conta que não a procurava, escusando-se com fingida surpresa: - Pensei que fosse ... E, assim, confundiu-a, de cada vez, com todos os seres animados e inanimados do Marzagão, inclusive, distraidamente, com ela mesma: - Pensei que fosse você...

You don’t have to live your life tiptoeing around selfish, hidden-agenda-driven, crab-bucket, talk-behind-your-back, weasel people. You just don’t. At work, church, home or play — seek people who embody the future you want and surround yourself with loving influences. You deserve that circle of inclusion and influence, but it’s up to you to create it.

There is reason to fear that men love better to investigate how muslins, hay-rakes, and, above all and inclusive of all, money may be made, than how their own minds are constructed

Prayer, in this more inclusive sense, is the settled craving of a man's heart, good or bad, his inward love and determining desire.

There is no time, there is no space, there is only love.

You love doing your haters a favor by putting them out of their misery at close proximity with wide-barreled arms of inclusivity.

Ask what love would want

To be loved, accepted, supported, and included for exactly who you are, with no expectation of change? I think it’s the best privilege there is.

Love: always inclusive, never divisive

The Elusive neutrino is all-Inclusive. Now let's move on to the next topic. Dog and cat videos that are funny.

Acceptance of others is acceptance of yourself.

Step across the color of hate into the rainbow of love, and you shall find life, liberty and happiness.

Diversity is the mix. Inclusion is how work the mix

If your fundamental is a man dying on the cross for his enemies, if the very heart of your self-image and your religion is a man praying for his enemies as he died for them, sacrificing for them, loving them - if that sinks into your heart of hearts, it's going to produce the kind of life that the early Christians produced. The most inclusive possible life out of the most exclusive possible claim - and that is this is the truth. But what is the truth? The truth is a God become weak, loving and dying for the people who opposed him, dying forgiving them.

Love isn't made of a single color, love is a vivacious rainbow, spanning across and beyond the deepest and farthest horizons of the individual mind's ridiculously limited window of perception.

In Hawaii, family showed itself in the way that my siblings never dared to call one another "half" anything. We were fully brothers and sisters. Family appeared in the pile of rubber slippers and sandals that crowded the entrance to everyone's home; in the kisses we gave when we greeted one another and said good-bye; in the graceful choreography of Grandma hanging the laundry on the clothesline; in the inclusiveness of calling anyone older auntie or uncle whether or not they were relatives.

When I’m sitting by my gay friends in church, I hear everything through their ears. When I’m with my recently divorced friend, I hear it through hers. This is good practice. It helps uncenter us (which is, you know, the whole counsel of the New Testament) and sharpens our eye for our sisters and brothers. It trains us to think critically about community, language, felt needs, and inclusion, shaking off autopilot and setting a wider table. We must examine who is invited, who is asked to teach, who is asked to contribute, who is called into leadership. It is one thing to “feel nice feelings” toward the minority voice; it is something else entirely to challenge existing power structures to include the whole variety of God’s people. This is not hard or fancy work. It looks like diversifying small groups and leadership, not defaulting to homogeny as the standard operating procedure. Closer in, it looks like coffee dates, dinner invites, the warm hand of friendship extended to women or families outside your demographic. It means considering the stories around the table before launching into an assumed shared narrative. It includes the old biblical wisdom on being slow to speak and quick to listen, because as much as we love to talk, share, and talk-share some more, there is a special holiness reserved for the practice of listening and deferring.

The conundrum of the twenty-first (century) is that with the best intentions of color blindness, and laws passed in this spirit, we still carry instincts and reactions inherited from our environments and embedded in our being below the level of conscious decision. There is a color line in our heads, and while we could see its effects we couldn’t name it until now. But john powell is also steeped in a new science of “implicit bias,” which gives us a way, finally, even to address this head on. It reveals a challenge that is human in nature, though it can be supported and hastened by policies to create new experiences, which over time create new instincts and lay chemical and physical pathways. This is a helpfully unromantic way to think about what we mean when we aspire, longingly, to a lasting change of heart. And john powell and others are bringing training methodologies based on the new science to city governments and police forces and schools. What we’re finding now in the last 30 years is that much of the work, in terms of our cognitive and emotional response to the world, happens at the unconscious level.

Humanity is the highest form of love there is, and love needs no lobby, label or ideology, for love itself is everything that is human about us - we are either living in it, enveloped in its wholeness or we are analyzing it with intellect from outside while dying for a taste of it.

Venus and her pentacle became symbols of perfection, beauty, and the cyclic qualities of sexual love. As a tribute to the magic of Venus, the Greeks used her four-year cycle to organize their Olympiads. Nowadays, few people realized that the four-year schedule of modern Olympic Games still followed the cycles of Venus. Even fewer people knew that the five-pointed star had almost become the official Olympic seal but was modified at the last moment—its five points exchanged for five intersecting rings to better reflect the games’ spirit of inclusion and harmony.

Self-oriented people are inclusive only of those they believe will further their own motives and causes. More evolved people understand that inclusivity is the most productive and positive way to be. As such, their endeavours are life-enhancing, successful, and significantly contributory. Truly inclusive people do not gossip, listen to gossip, seek to pull other people down, view competition as a play of personal power, or try to gain benefit from someone else’s suffering. Instead, their eyes, mind, and talents are directed towards whatever is best for everyone in any given situation.

You want to prove that the Bible is right? It is not done by self-fulfilling prophecies or by pointing to world events as prophecy fulfillment. That is not how you prove that the Bible is right. We prove that the Bible is right by radical obedience to the teachings of Jesus and by validating that Jesus' teachings actually do work and can make our world better. Let us love our enemies, forgive those who sin against us, feed the poor, care for the needy and oppressed, walk the extra mile, be inclusive not exclusive, turn the other cheek, and maybe then the world will start taking us seriously and believe our Bible!

This, the universal Christ who, in grace and love, holds all things and all people and all creatures in that grace, is what gives me hope in this world. The universal Christ, who is not a colonizer, who does not seek after profit or create empires to rule over the poor or to oppress people, is constantly asking us to see ourselves as we fit in this sacredly created world. It is what my Potawatomi ancestors saw when they prayed to Kche Mnedo, to Mamogosnan, and is what our relatives still see when they pray today, a sacred belonging that spans time and generations and is called by many names. Today, it is what I continue to see in my own faith—not a Christianity bound by a sinner’s prayer and an everyday existence ruled by gender-divided Bible studies and accountability meetings but a story of faith that’s always bigger, always more inclusive, always making room at a bigger and better table full of lavish food that has already been prepared for everyone and for every created thing.

The English word salvation has in it the root salve, which is a soothing ointment or balm applied to a wound, or in a larger meaning, a soothing application, influence, or agency. The loving parent we imagine God to be could not view His children as diseased with a terminal illness called sin and not apply a healing salve to all of them.

All of it pointed to a force stronger than the anxious formulas of religion: a radically inclusive love that accompanied people in the most ordinary of actions—eating, drinking, walking—and stayed with them, through fear, even past death. That love meant giving yourself away, embracing outsiders as family, emptying yourself to feed and live for others. The stories illuminated the holiness located in mortal human bodies, and the promise that people could see God by cherishing all those different bodies the way God did. They spoke of a communion so much vaster than any church could contain: one I had sensed all my life could be expressed in the sharing of food, particularly with strangers.

Defining freedom cannot amount to simply substituting it with inclusion. Countering the criminalization of Black girls requires fundamentally altering the relationship between Black girls and the institutions of power that have worked to reinforce their subjugation. History has taught us that civil rights are but one component of a larger movement for this type of social transformation. Civil rights may be at the core of equal justice movements, and they may elevate an equity agenda that protects our children from racial and gender discrimination, but they do not have the capacity to fully redistribute power and eradicate racial inequity. There is only one practice that can do that. Love.

Each leaf, each sunbeam of God, love it. Love the animals, love the plants, love every object. If you love each object you will also perceive the mystery of God that is in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin untiringly to be more conscious of it with each day that passes. And at last you will love the whole world with an all-inclusive, universal love.

Jesus’ ministry was not to the upper class, the educated, the elite or the most influential social figures. Jesus came and ministered among those who were poor, with the poor and as a poor man. His ministry was to the children, those who were begging, victims of leprosy, the woman at the well, the woman caught in the act of adultery, the tax collectors, the fishermen communities and those on the margins. Jesus came to the common people and lived alongside them. As a church, we must learn new ways to celebrate our faith inclusively so that those on the margins of society will feel welcome–and so that our love and acceptance of the other will aid in our paths to holiness. Jesus’ ministry was marked with a distinctive compassion for the oppressed poor.

At the risk of seeming like a Christian, or a Che Guevara poster, love is bigger, huger, more complex, and more ultimate than petty fucked-up desirability politics. We all deserve love. Love as an action verb. Love in full inclusion, in centrality, in not being forgotten. Being loved for our disabilities, our weirdness, not despite them. Love in action is when we strategize to create cross-disability access spaces. When we refuse to abandon each other. When we, as disabled people, fight for the access needs of sibling crips. I’ve seen able-bodied organizers be confused by this. Why am I fighting so hard for fragrance-free space or a ramp, if it’s not something I personally need? When disabled people get free, everyone gets free. More access makes everything more accessible for everybody.

The North London suburbs were a vacuum for identity. It was as beige as the plush carpets that adorned its every home. There was no art, no culture, no old buildings, no parks, no independent shops or restaurants...The only form of expression was through the spending of money on homogenized assets -- conservatories, kitchen extensions, cars with built in satnav, all-inclusive holidays to Majorca.

In their quest to be inclusive and tolerant and up-to-date, the accommodationists imitated his scandalously comprehensive love, while ignoring his scandalously comprehensive judgments. They used his friendship with prostitutes as an excuse to ignore his explicit condemnations of fornication and divorce. They turned his disdain for the religious authorities of his day and his fondness for tax collectors and Roman soldiers into a thin excuse for privileging the secular realm over the sacred. While recognizing his willingness to dine with outcasts and converse with nonbelievers, they deemphasized the crucial fact that he had done so in order to heal them and convert them—ridding the leper of his sickness, telling the Samaritans that soon they would worship in spirit and truth, urging the woman taken in adultery to go, and from now on sin no more.

We were brought together by God to serve the Plan of Awakening, to treat each other with dignity, respect, kindness, and holiness, and to Awaken to our Divine Love. We approach our Purpose for coming together with great reverence and devotion. It is the core of our Life in God. Our relationship is our Relationship with everything and everyone, for we live and love as God lives and loves, unconditionally, all-inclusively, and free of specialness.

As I released my anger more often and more consciously, the cycle of depression ended. I began to express the anger when my friend Betty and I got together and talked (she is good about letting me rant without interrupting). I pounded pillows. I poured the anger into my journals. I let it come. Yet anger needs not only to be recognized and allowed; like the grief, it eventually needs to be transformed into an energy that serves compassion. Maybe one reason I had avoided my anger was that like a lot of people I had thought there were only two responses to anger: to deny it or to strike out thoughtlessly. But other responses are possible. We can allow anger’s enormous energy to lead us to acts of resistance against patriarchy. Anger can fuel our ability to challenge, to defy injustice. It can lead to creative projects, constructive behavior, acts that work toward inclusion. In such ways anger becomes a dynamism of love.

We in America never knew the village commune. White Civilization struck our shores in a broad tide-sheet and swept over the country inclusively; among us was never seen the little commune growing up from a state of barbarism independently, out of primary industries, and maintaining itself within itself. There was no gradual change from the mode of life of the native people to our own; there was a wiping out and a complete transplantation of the latest form of European civilization.

Many progressive Christians aren’t particularly concerned about going to heaven after they die. In fact, many are openly agnostic about whether or not there is a heaven. Our concern is more upon living and loving in God’s Kingdom right now, and faithfully helping to manifest it all the more. We don’t really know if there is an actual heaven, but if there is, none of us know who will be there and who won’t be. Only God determines this, and God’s inclusive mercy and grace far exceed human capacities.

The word “Allah” can be seen as the same singular God that is referred to in the Torah in Hebrew as Elohim, or spoken by Jesus in Aramaic as the strikingly similar Allaha. Allah is neither female nor male, for He is beyond anything in creation and transcends all the limits that the human mind can create. Since in Arabic there is not a gender-neutral pronoun such as “it,” Allah uses huwa or “He” in reference to Himself because in Arabic the male gender form is inclusive of the female, not exclusive.

As a species, we have wasted a lot of our time on this planet holding on to the purely discriminatory and non-variant versions of our exclusively personal realities. Great many ages have passed this way – and it made us lose a lot – our sisters, our brothers, our loved ones – all because, while some of us were trying to hold on to our own “pure” “personal” world, others were doing the same. And all through history it has only led to death and destruction. And after all this, if we still can’t whole-heartedly embrace the beauty and the magnificence of diversity, then I am sad to say that we don’t deserve to call ourselves human.

We join with all in experiencing the all-inclusiveness of the family of God, where no brother or sister is seen as separate or apart from the Whole of God. Our hearts are filled with Love and gratitude for our Relationship in God. We are glad that this joy is not dependent on where bodies seem to be or whether or not they seem to be together. We are created by a Pure Idea, and we are like our Source. We are Spirit as God is Spirit, and we are overflowing with thankfulness that this truth is dawning as the Mind we share. Our walk together is for the Purpose of accepting our Divine Source and laying aside all thought of the world as the source of anything.

Love is Not A Christian Thing (The Sonnet) Love thy neighbor is not a christian thing, Love stuck in barriers stays love no more. Shalom, ahava, simcha are not jewish concepts, Peace, love and joy constitute life's core. There's no christianity, there's only love, There's no buddhism, there's only compassion, There's no naskarism, there's only humanity, There's no humanism, there's only assimilation. Faith that raises walls within the mind, Is faith of the prehistoric savages. Faith has a place in civilized society, Only if it helps break assumptions and barriers. Let us come together across faith and culture. Let us be companions in each other's adventure.

I hope I have now made it clear why I thought it best, in speaking of the dissonances between fiction and reality in our own time, to concentrate on Sartre. His hesitations, retractations, inconsistencies, all proceed from his consciousness of the problems: how do novelistic differ from existential fictions? How far is it inevitable that a novel give a novel-shaped account of the world? How can one control, and how make profitable, the dissonances between that account and the account given by the mind working independently of the novel? For Sartre it was ultimately, like most or all problems, one of freedom. For Miss Murdoch it is a problem of love, the power by which we apprehend the opacity of persons to the degree that we will not limit them by forcing them into selfish patterns. Both of them are talking, when they speak of freedom and love, about the imagination. The imagination, we recall, is a form-giving power, an esemplastic power; it may require, to use Simone Weil's words, to be preceded by a 'decreative' act, but it is certainly a maker of orders and concords. We apply it to all forces which satisfy the variety of human needs that are met by apparently gratuitous forms. These forms console; if they mitigate our existential anguish it is because we weakly collaborate with them, as we collaborate with language in order to communicate. Whether or no we are predisposed towards acceptance of them, we learn them as we learn a language. On one view they are 'the heroic children whom time breeds / Against the first idea,' but on another they destroy by falsehood the heroic anguish of our present loneliness. If they appear in shapes preposterously false we will reject them; but they change with us, and every act of reading or writing a novel is a tacit acceptance of them. If they ruin our innocence, we have to remember that the innocent eye sees nothing. If they make us guilty, they enable us, in a manner nothing else can duplicate, to submit, as we must, the show of things to the desires of the mind. I shall end by saying a little more about La Nausée, the book I chose because, although it is a novel, it reflects a philosophy it must, in so far as it possesses novel form, belie. Under one aspect it is what Philip Thody calls 'an extensive illustration' of the world's contingency and the absurdity of the human situation. Mr. Thody adds that it is the novelist's task to 'overcome contingency'; so that if the illustration were too extensive the novel would be a bad one. Sartre himself provides a more inclusive formula when he says that 'the final aim of art is to reclaim the world by revealing it as it is, but as if it had its source in human liberty.' This statement does two things. First, it links the fictions of art with those of living and choosing. Secondly, it means that the humanizing of the world's contingency cannot be achieved without a representation of that contingency. This representation must be such that it induces the proper sense of horror at the utter difference, the utter shapelessness, and the utter inhumanity of what must be humanized. And it has to occur simultaneously with the as if, the act of form, of humanization, which assuages the horror. This recognition, that form must not regress into myth, and that contingency must be formalized, makes La Nausée something of a model of the conflicts in the modern theory of the novel. How to do justice to a chaotic, viscously contingent reality, and yet redeem it? How to justify the fictive beginnings, crises, ends; the atavism of character, which we cannot prevent from growing, in Yeats's figure, like ash on a burning stick? The novel will end; a full close may be avoided, but there will be a close: a fake fullstop, an 'exhaustion of aspects,' as Ford calls it, an ironic return to the origin, as in Finnegans Wake and Comment c'est. Perhaps the book will end by saying that it has provided the clues for another, in which contingency will be defeated, ...

I don’t like stories. I like moments. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than any sometime-later. I also like birds, mushrooms, the blues, peacock feathers, black cats, blue-eyed people, heraldry, astrology, criminal stories with lots of blood, and ancient epic poems where human heads can hold conversations with former friends and generally have a great time for years after they’ve been cut off. I like good food and good drink, sitting in a hot bath and lounging in a snowbank, wearing everything I own at once, and having everything I need close at hand. I like speed and that special ache in the pit of the stomach when you accelerate to the point of no return. I like to frighten and to be frightened, to amuse and to confound. I like writing on the walls so that no one can guess who did it, and drawing so that no one can guess what it is. I like doing my writing using a ladder or not using it, with a spray can or squeezing the paint from a tube. I like painting with a brush, with a sponge, and with my fingers. I like drawing the outline first and then filling it in completely, so that there’s no empty space left. I like letters as big as myself, but I like very small ones as well. I like directing those who read them here and there by means of arrows, to other places where I also wrote something, but I also like to leave false trails and false signs. I like to tell fortunes with runes, bones, beans, lentils, and I Ching. Hot climates I like in the books and movies; in real life, rain and wind. Generally rain is what I like most of all. Spring rain, summer rain, autumn rain. Any rain, anytime. I like rereading things I’ve read a hundred times over. I like the sound of the harmonica, provided I’m the one playing it. I like lots of pockets, and clothes so worn that they become a kind of second skin instead of something that can be taken off. I like guardian amulets, but specific ones, so that each is responsible for something separate, not the all-inclusive kind. I like drying nettles and garlic and then adding them to anything and everything. I like covering my fingers with rubber cement and then peeling it off in front of everybody. I like sunglasses. Masks, umbrellas, old carved furniture, copper basins, checkered tablecloths, walnut shells, walnuts themselves, wicker chairs, yellowed postcards, gramophones, beads, the faces on triceratopses, yellow dandelions that are orange in the middle, melting snowmen whose carrot noses have fallen off, secret passages, fire-evacuation-route placards; I like fretting when in line at the doctor’s office, and screaming all of a sudden so that everyone around feels bad, and putting my arm or leg on someone when asleep, and scratching mosquito bites, and predicting the weather, keeping small objects behind my ears, receiving letters, playing solitaire, smoking someone else’s cigarettes, and rummaging in old papers and photographs. I like finding something lost so long ago that I’ve forgotten why I needed it in the first place. I like being really loved and being everyone’s last hope, I like my own hands—they are beautiful, I like driving somewhere in the dark using a flashlight, and turning something into something completely different, gluing and attaching things to each other and then being amazed that it actually worked. I like preparing things both edible and not, mixing drinks, tastes, and scents, curing friends of the hiccups by scaring them. There’s an awful lot of stuff I like.

The only thing I can’t figure out is why you still eat the food your captors fed you. Why don’t you hate it as much as you hate them?” Fila glanced down at her plate. It contained a strange mixture of Afghan and Mexican dishes. She held up a flatbread. “This isn’t Taliban food—it’s Afghan food. It’s my mother’s food. I grew up eating it before I was ever captured. To me it means love and tenderness, not hate and violence.” “Taliban, Afghan—it’s all the same.” She waved the bread. “No, it’s not. Not one bit. Afghan culture is over two thousand years old. And it’s a conservative culture—it’s had to be—but it’s not a culture of monsters. Afghans are people like you, Holt. They’re born, they grow up, they live and love and they die just like we do. I didn’t study much history before I was taken, but I know this much. America’s story is that of the frontier—of always having room to grow. Afghanistan’s story is that of occupation. By the Russians, the British, the Mongols—even the ancient Greeks. On and on for century after century. Imagine all those wars being fought in Montana. Foreign armies living among us, taking over your ranch, stealing everything you own, killing your wife and children, over and over and over again.” She paused to catch her breath. “Death is right around the corner for them—all the time. Is it any wonder that a movement that turns men into warriors and codes everything else into rigid rules might seem like the answer?” She still wasn’t sure if Holt was following her. What analogy would make sense to him? She wracked her brain. “If a bunch of Californians overran Chance Creek and forced everyone to eat tofu, would you refuse to ever eat steak again?” He made a face. “Of course not!” “Then imagine the Taliban are the Californians, forcing everyone to eat tofu. And everyone does it because they don’t know what else to do. They still love steak, but they will be severely punished if they eat it—so will their families. That’s what it’s like for many Afghans living under Taliban control. It’s not their choice. They still love their country. They still love their heritage. That doesn’t mean they love the group of extremists who have taken over.” “Even if those Taliban people went away, they still wouldn’t be anything like you and me.” Holt crossed his arms. Fila suppressed a smile at his inclusion of her. That was a step in the right direction even if the greater message was lost on him. “They’re more like you than you think. Defensive. Angry. Always on the lookout for trouble.” Holt straightened. “I have four sons. Of course I’m on the lookout for trouble.” “They have sons, too.” She waited to see if he understood. Holt shook his head. “We’re going to see different on this one. But I understand about the food. Everyone likes their mother’s cooking best.” He surveyed her plate. “You got any more of that bread?” She’d take that as a victory.

it appears various ancient Mystics had a hard time explaining with their archaic languages lacking the words for detailing “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost” the Trinity concept being misunderstood by a good host the Father is the immutable unmoving Godhead from whence the Holy Ghost flows to all widespread the Son, a physical expression in those whose self is dead God can't be received fully if the “me” occupies space the sense of individual selfhood disappears without a trace the higher nature of God is formless unmanifested from it, this changing world of form is emanated everything is God, in God, all-inclusively unending ungraspable by brain-mind and its inferior comprehending people wonder, “okay, but what created God?” contemplate “Eternal” or “Infinite” to see the query flawed All is the Mind of God without exception including your Mind prior to conception formless No-Thing, yet Infinitely Everything yet both, yet neither, for it's beyond expounding

Answer the Call to Shine Your Light Right now there may be just few individuals who balance duality in unconditional love, but their unifying perception is very integrative. They live their lives in “Trinity” after they have expanded their understanding of “Duality”. There is no moral value judgment applied in their perceptions. The moral value judgment continually creates an illusion of separation and disconnection. A balanced consciousness, with no dual perception is very integrative and all inclusive. It expands at an enormous speed assisting others to perceive a myriad of different perspectives as different yet equally valid. Those individuals shine their light in the world as a sign of unity, harmony, and emotional balance. They are living witnesses to the reality of love, compassion, ease and joy. By their example others can choose to understand that life can be easy to live in one's preferred way without devaluing others' choices. They are those who lightened up carrying their bright match lit in a darkened room filled with fear and drama.

Instead of concentrating on how we can include the “other,” too often in American Christianity the focus becomes on when, how, and finding the right justifications for excluding the “other.” When I truly begin to appreciate the inclusive nature of Jesus, my heart laments at all the exclusiveness I see and experience. I think of my female friends; women of wisdom, peace, discernment, and character who should be emulated by the rest of us. When I listen and learn from these women, I realize what an amazing leaders they would be in church—but many never will be leaders in that way because they are lacking one thing: male genitals. Wise and godly women have been excluded, not because of a lack of gifting, education, or ability, but because they were born with the wrong private parts. I also think of a man who attended my former church who has an intellectual disability. He was friendly, faithful, and could always be counted on for a good laugh because he had absolutely no filter— yelling out at least six times during each sermon. One time in church my daughter quietly leaned over to tell me she had to go to the bathroom—and, in true form so that everyone heard, he shouted out, “Hey! Pipe it down back there!” It was hilarious. However, our friend has been asked to leave several churches because of his “disruptiveness.” Instead of being loved and embraced for who he is, he has been repeatedly excluded from the people of God because of a disability. We find plenty of other reasons to exclude people. We exclude because people have been divorced, exclude them for not signing on to our 18-page statements of faith, exclude them because of their mode of baptism, exclude them because of their sexual orientation, exclude them for rejecting predestination…we have become a religious culture focused on exclusion of the “other,” instead of following the example of Jesus that focuses on finding ways for the radical inclusion of the “other.” Every day I drive by churches that proudly have “All Are Welcome” plastered across their signs; however, I rarely believe it—and I don’t think others believe it either. Far too often, instead of church being something that exists for the “other,” church becomes something that exists for the “like us” and the “willing to become like us.” And so, Christianity in America is dying.

Western medicine’s love of drawing people into diagnostic categories and applying disease names to small differences and minor bodily changes is not specific to functional disorders – it is a general trend. Pre-diabetes, polycystic ovaries, some cancers and many more conditions have all been subject to the problem of over-inclusive diagnosis. My biggest concern in this regard is the degree to which many people are wholly unaware of the subjective nature of the medical classification of disease. If a person is told they have this or that disorder, they assume it must be right. The Latin names we give to things and the shiny scanning machines make it look as if there is more authority than actually exists. To a certain extent, Sienna pursued each diagnosis she was given, but other people have diagnoses thrust upon them, having no idea that there might be anything controversial about it – and having no idea that they have a choice. Western medicine’s hold on people, and its sense of being systematic and accurate, makes it a powerful force in the transmission of cultural concepts of what constitutes wellness or ill health. But Western medicine is just as enslaved to fads and trends as any other tradition of medicine.

May I inquire about how to be a person’s lord?”9 I say: Make divisions and distributions according to ritual. Be evenhanded, inclusive, and not one-sided. “May I inquire about how to be a person’s minister?” I say: Serve (85) your lord according to ritual. Be loyal, compliant, and not lazy. “May I inquire about how to be a person’s father?” I say: Be broadminded, kind, and follow the dictates of ritual. “May I inquire about how to be a person’s son?” I say: Be respectful, loving, and have utmost good form. (90) “May I inquire about how to be a person’s elder brother?” I say: Be compassionate, loving, and display friendliness. “May I inquire about how to be a person’s younger brother?” I say: Be respectful, acquiescent, and do nothing improper. “May I inquire about how to be a person’s husband?” I say: Be (95) extremely hardworking and do not stray. Be extremely watchful and follow proper distinctions. “May I inquire about the proper way to be a person’s wife?” I say: If your husband follows the dictates of ritual, then compliantly obey him and wait upon him attentively. If your husband does not (100) follow the dictates of ritual, then be apprehensive but keep yourself respectful.10 If these ways are established in a one-sided manner,11 then there will be chaos, but if they are established in a comprehensive manner, there will be order, so this matter is worth keeping watch over.12

Let’s find out where your shame came from by taking a look at your past. But before we do that, I want to address a common misconception people have about looking at their past. I have heard many people misinterpret the apostle Paul’s words: I am focusing all my energies on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead…Philippians 3:13 People use this verse to teach that a person should never reflect on their past to resolve their present problems. They think looking to your past is a sign of doubt and weak faith. “Good Christians” should forget about their past, they say, and focus on who they are as a believer in Jesus. That might sound good, but I couldn't disagree more. That kind of thinking is both unbiblical and illogical. It is unbiblical because Paul wasn’t telling people to forget past problems. He was simply referring to his former life when he sought to please God through religious works like praying, giving money, or fasting. He boasted about these religious habits as if they got him closer to God. But he stopped that kind of foolish thinking when he came to learn what Jesus had done for him. Paul wasn’t making an all-inclusive statement telling people to forget everything about their past. He was simply telling his personal story and encouraging people to find their acceptance from God based on his love, not on their good works. To read more into his words is to twist the meaning.

In other words, when you feel love, that means that the way you are seeing the object of your attention matches the way the Inner You sees it. When you feel hate, you are seeing it without that Inner Connection. You intuitively knew all of this, especially when you were younger, but gradually most of you were worn down by the insistence of those older and self-described “wiser” others who surrounded you as they worked hard to convince you that you could not trust your own impulses. And so, most of you physical Beings do not trust yourselves, which is amazing to us, for that which comes forth from within you is all that you may trust. But instead, you are spending most of your physical lifetimes seeking a set of rules or a group of people (a religious or political group, if you will) who will tell you what is right and wrong. And then you spend the rest of your physical experience trying to hammer your “square peg” into someone else’s “round hole,” trying to make those old rules—usually those that were written thousands of years before your time—fit into this new life experience. And, as a result, what we see, for the most part, is your frustration, and at best, your confusion. And, we also have noticed that every year there are many of you who are dying, as you are arguing about whose set of rules is most appropriate. We say to you: That overall, all-inclusive, never-changing set of rules does not exist—for you are ever-changing, growth-seeking Beings.

It happens that in our phase of civility, the novel is the central form of literary art. It lends itself to explanations borrowed from any intellectual system of the universe which seems at the time satisfactory. Its history is an attempt to evade the laws of what Scott called 'the land of fiction'-the stereotypes which ignore reality, and whose remoteness from it we identify as absurd. From Cervantes forward it has been, when it has satisfied us, the poetry which is 'capable,' in the words of Ortega, 'of coping with present reality.' But it is a 'realistic poetry' and its theme is, bluntly, 'the collapse of the poetic' because it has to do with 'the barbarous, brutal, mute, meaningless reality of things.' It cannot work with the old hero, or with the old laws of the land of romance; moreover, such new laws and customs as it creates have themselves to be repeatedly broken under the demands of a changed and no less brutal reality. 'Reality has such a violent temper that it does not tolerate the ideal even when reality itself is idealized.' Nevertheless, the effort continues to be made. The extremest revolt against the customs or laws of fiction--the antinovels of Fielding or Jane Austen or Flaubert or Natalie Sarraute--creates its new laws, in their turn to be broken. Even when there is a profession of complete narrative anarchy, as in some of the works I discussed last week, or in a poem such as Paterson, which rejects as spurious whatever most of us understand as form, it seems that time will always reveal some congruence with a paradigm--provided always that there is in the work that necessary element of the customary which enables it to communicate at all. I shall not spend much time on matters so familiar to you. Whether, with Lukács, you think of the novel as peculiarly the resolution of the problem of the individual in an open society--or as relating to that problem in respect of an utterly contingent world; or express this in terms of the modern French theorists and call its progress a necessary and 'unceasing movement from the known to the unknown'; or simply see the novel as resembling the other arts in that it cannot avoid creating new possibilities for its own future--however you put it, the history of the novel is the history of forms rejected or modified, by parody, manifesto, neglect, as absurd. Nowhere else, perhaps, are we so conscious of the dissidence between inherited forms and our own reality. There is at present some good discussion of the issue not only in French but in English. Here I have in mind Iris Murdoch, a writer whose persistent and radical thinking about the form has not as yet been fully reflected in her own fiction. She contrasts what she calls 'crystalline form' with narrative of the shapeless, quasi-documentary kind, rejecting the first as uncharacteristic of the novel because it does not contain free characters, and the second because it cannot satisfy that need of form which it is easier to assert than to describe; we are at least sure that it exists, and that it is not always illicit. Her argument is important and subtle, and this is not an attempt to restate it; it is enough to say that Miss Murdoch, as a novelist, finds much difficulty in resisting what she calls 'the consolations of form' and in that degree damages the 'opacity,' as she calls it, of character. A novel has this (and more) in common with love, that it is, so to speak, delighted with its own inventions of character, but must respect their uniqueness and their freedom. It must do so without losing the formal qualities that make it a novel. But the truly imaginative novelist has an unshakable 'respect for the contingent'; without it he sinks into fantasy, which is a way of deforming reality. 'Since reality is incomplete, art must not be too afraid of incompleteness,' says Miss Murdoch. We must not falsify it with patterns too neat, too inclusive; there must be dissonance.