In everything one must consider the end.
Compassion leads to freedom of discovering your voice, your gifts, and your purpose.
If there is a time of judgment, instead of theological or institutional litmus tests, the only question asked about our life and spirituality will be "Did you love with abandonment?"
Secure in whom we are, rooted in one particular tradition or none at all, we have no reason to fear discovering God in the truth and wisdom of many traditions. Love casts out fear inviting us into happiness for all people and Creation.
Courage to be who you are is the cousin of loving the Divine, yourself and others.
The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them that the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which “God is satisfied," and after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men.
The first book by an African American I read was Carl T. Rowan's memoir, Go South to Sorrow. I found it on the bookshelf at the back of my fifth-grade classroom, an adult book. I can remember the quality of the morning on which I read. It was a sunlit morning in January, a Saturday morning, cold, high, empty. I sat in a rectangle of sunlight, near the grate of the floor heater in the yellow bedroom. And as I read, I became aware of warmth and comfort and optimism. I was made aware of my comfort by the knowledge that others were not, are not, comforted. Carl Rowan at my age was not comforted.
I shall, of course, die with nonviolence on my lips.
The spirit of Texas seems to pervade our everyday existence. Our desire is to be superlative, not only the largest, but also the best in the United States.