Best 97 quotes in «reconciliation quotes» category

A forum where real stories can be told, in uncensored detail, and be truly heard. A forum that is not limited to dialogue alone but welcomes the consequences of asking the deep questions – where tears, outrage, embarrassment, anguish, shame, absurdity, forgiveness, compassion, healing, and spiritual grace can all come forth in their innate and flowing wisdom. A place where the heart can melt or soar as needed and the human spirit can triumph through the trials and tribulation of thousands of years of gender oppression and injustice.

Acknowledging that all our land was stolen from Native people feels like too great a burden, so we create an alternative reality that allows us to disengage emotionally from the truth.

Anyhow, why speak, I must act," he thought. He indicated his son to his wife with his eyes and said: "Take him away ... sorry ... for you, too ... " He also wanted to say "Forgive,", but said "Forgo," and, no longer able to correct himself, waved his hand, knowing that the one who had to would understand.

A little bit of affection goes a long way toward reconciling one with the world.

You cannot disown what is yours. Flung out, there is always the return, the reckoning, the revenge, perhaps the reconciliation. There is always the return.

And when Jesus declared, 'It is finished,' He meant it. God’s punishment for our sin was paid for, permanently settled, finished— 100 percent. If you have responded in faith to God’s free pardon through Jesus, then God will never punish you for your sin. It’s finished. No more. If you screw up today or tomorrow (which you will), it’s already been paid for through Jesus. 'There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,' Paul said (Rom. 8: 1). None. God will not and cannot condemn you after He has already condemned Jesus for you. It’s impossible. God will never be angry with you since His anger was poured out on Jesus. All of it. One hundred percent. Charis: God's Scandalous Grace for Us (p. 169).

As long as we share our stories, as long as our stories reveal our strengths and vulnerabilities to each other, we reinvigorte our understanding and tolerance for the little quirks of personality that in other circumstances would drive us apart. When we live in a family, a community, a country where we know each other's true stories, we remember our capacity to lean in and love each other into wholeness. I have read the story of a tribe in southern Africa called the Babemba in which a person doing something wrong, something that destroys this delicate social net, brings all work in the village to a halt. The people gather around the "offender," and one by one they begin to recite everything he has done right in his life: every good deed, thoughtful behavior, act of social responsibility. These things have to be true about the person, and spoken honestly, but the time-honored consequence of misbehavior is to appreciate that person back into the better part of himself. The person is given the chance to remember who he is and why he is important to the life of the village. I want to live under such a practice of compassion. When I forget my place, when I lash out with some private wounding in a public way, I want to be remembered back into alignment with my self and my purpose. I want to live with the opportunity for reconciliation. When someone around me is thoughtless or cruel, I want to be given the chance to respond with a ritual that creates the possibility of reconnection. I want to live in a neighborhood where people don't shoot first, don't sue first, where people are Storycatchers willing to discover in strangers the mirror of themselves.

As far as we know, Paul never made up with Barnabas.

Because evangelicals view their primary task as evangelism and discipleship,1 they tend to avoid issues that hinder these activities. Thus, they are generally not counter-cultural. With some significant exceptions, they avoid “rocking the boat,” and live within the confines of the larger culture. At times they have been able to call for and realize social change, but most typically their influence has been limited to alterations at the margins. So, despite having the subcultural tools to call for radical changes in race relations, they most consistently call for changes in persons that leave the dominant social structures, institutions, and culture intact. This avoidance of boat-rocking unwittingly leads to granting power to larger economic and social forces. It also means that evangelicals’ views to a considerable extent conform to the socioeconomic conditions of their time.

Distance from the troubled past is the product of economic and social change more than reflection or the mere passage of time, which may have little effect. To the extent that the basic circumstances of life remain unchanged, time becomes irrelevant; in fact, it may even deepen the hold of former attitudes, turning them into ancient truths. But as the foundations of social reality alter and the circumstances of daily life take on a new character, society can more easily accept hard truths and discard old controversies. It gains an ability to leave its past in the past and move into a different future. [...] The desire of a few individuals to “overcome the past,” to rise above enmity and engage a different future after a destructive war, is laudable but rarely is achievable for an entire society. Substantial numbers of people will defend old positions or insist on the validity of their grievances, and the next generation may revive propaganda or condemn efforts to “forget.” Eventually, however, the world moves on, and changed realities allow acceptance of bitter truths about a troubled past. As progressively greater numbers acknowledge the past, historical wounds close, even those of bloody civil war [192—93].

Do everything in mindfulness so you can really be there, so you can love.

From the isolated, individualistic perspective of most white evangelicals and many other Americans, there really is no race problem other than bad interpersonal relationships.

Gender is but a doorway to a vast inner universe of ultimate relationships between oneness and duality, manifest and divine, being and nonbeing, temporal and eternal.

Gender healing and reconciliation consciously invokes this universal love of the heart, which in the end has the capacity to overcome the very real and formidable challenges of gender oppression and injustice that have tormented human societies for literally thousands of years

Gender imbalance is, at its root, a collective spiritual crisis.

God wills our liberation, our exodus from Egypt. God wills our reconciliation, our return from exile. God wills our enlightenment, our seeing. God wills our forgiveness, our release from sin and guilt. God wills that we see ourselves as God’s beloved. God wills our resurrection, our passage from death to life. God wills for us food and drink that satisfy our hunger and thirst. God wills, comprehensively, our well-being—not just my well-being as an individual but the well-being of all of us and of the whole of creation. In short, God wills our salvation, our healing, here on earth. The Christian life is about participating in the salvation of God.

[Heaven] is not something other than this world; it is this world as it is perfectly offered now in the land of the Trinity. It is all the moments of time and all the conjunctions of space as Christ holds them reconciled for the praise of the glory of the Father's grace. And it is all of them held for our endless exploration of their depths - depths which we, even at our best, even at the moment of seeing the beloved's eyes, have only just begun to suspect.

How comfortable this was, she thought in wonder. How calm and safe she felt with him. "Why wasn't it like this before?" she asked dreamily. "If you'd been the way you are now, I would never have argued with you about anything." "I tried being nice to you, once or twice. It didn't go well." "Did you? I never noticed." Her skin, already pink from the bath, turned a deeper shade. "I was suspicious. Mistrustful. And you... were everything I feared." Leo's arms tightened at the admission. He looked down at her with a pensive gaze, as if he were untangling something in his mind, approaching a new realization. The blue eyes were warmer than she had ever seen them. "Let's make a bargain, Marks. From now on, instead of assuming the worst of each other, we'll try to assume the best. Agreed?" Catherine nodded, transfixed by his gentleness. Somehow those few simple sentences seemed to have wrought a greater change between them than everything that had gone before.

How can you love those who have stolen from you, assaulted or abused you, or tried to blow you up and completely destroy you? How can you forgive those who have kidnapped, tortured and killed someone you love? Yet this is where reconciliation has to begin.

If it will give you any satisfaction in the end, I still care for you. Either there is no such thing as love, or the word does not mean what I have thought it to mean on many different occasions. It is a feeling without a name, really—better to leave it at that. So take it and go away and have your fun with it. You know that we would both be at one another's throats again one day, as soon as we run out of common enemies. We had many fine reconciliations, but were they ever worth the pain that preceded them? Know that you have won and that you are the goddess I worship—for are not worship and religious awe a combination of love and hate, desire and fear?

Ignorance is in each cell of our body and our consciousness. It's like a drop of ink diffused in a glass of water.

I knew that to really minister to Rwanda's needs meant working toward reconciliation in the prisons, in the churches, and in the cities and villages throughout the country. It meant feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, caring for the young, but it also meant healing the wounded and forgiving the unforgivable. I knew I had to be committed to preaching a transforming message to the people of Rwanda. Jesus did not die for people to be religious. He died so that we might believe in Him and be transformed. I'm engaged in a purpose and strategy that Jesus came to Earth for. My life is set for that divine purpose in Jesus Christ. I was called to that--proclaiming the message of transformation through Jesus Christ.

In all societies, both women and men are powerfully conditioned to repress the daily realities of (sexual harassment and workplace glass ceilings) and to collude with the rest of society in keeping these dimensions of shared experiences hidden.

In gender reconciliation groups, we collectively reach for an unknown power or grace that has a healing potential far beyond our own capabilities or understanding. We invite this power and presence, knowing from experience that something transcendent and universal can and does work through us and it dwarfs our own mechanisms for healing, thinking, fixing, and/or reconstructing what needs to be healed.

In life, we make the best decisions we can with the information we have on hand.

It does not matter that the 'intentions' of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, 'intend' for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense - ignore the heat and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream. No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction. But a great number of educators spoke of 'personal responsibility' in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility.

It is particularly important for white Americans to approach this subject matter with the right goals in mind. Our goal must be sight, transformation, renewed consciousness.

It is then he realises that certain things loom larger than forgiveness and reconciliation: memory, for one, and history, bloody history.

I was once, I am, and I will always be my children’s father. As to those individuals who have tried so desperately to destroy the fact, I offer forgiveness and seek reconciliation. As to the institutions that have supported the effort to destroy the fact, I pray that: Lady Justice will seek the truth rather than excuse it; and that she will extol the American family rather than destroy it.

My gut feeling says he needs a second chance. Like we all do." WINTER'S PAST

No one escapes gender conditioning. Most of us unwittingly carry the cultural gender shadow into our important relationships, and we end up in struggles with our partners, family members, friends, and colleagues that aren’t really about us as individual. When women and men do gender reconciliation work in community, they begin to see the power of this cultural baggage in a new light. They realise the prevalence of overarching social patterns and conditioning in much of their experience – and comprehend that, in this larger context, they are not alone in what happened to them.

One thing we have learned is this: bringing compassionate, unflinching awareness to gender dynamics in groups and communities is a remarkably powerful place to begin. As in all spiritual practice, deepening awareness is itself transformative.

[On kneeling down at the Warsaw Ghetto Monument during his 1970 state visit to Poland:] "Es war eine ungewöhnliche Last, die ich auf meinem Weg nach Warschau mitnahm. Nirgends hatte das Volk, hatten die Menschen so gelitten wie in Polen. Die maschinelle Vernichtung der polnischen Judenheit stellte eine Steigerung der Mordlust dar, die niemand für möglich gehalten hatte. [...] Ich hatte nichts geplant, aber Schloß Wilanow, wo ich untergebracht war, in dem Gefühl verlassen, die Besonderheit des Gedenkens am Ghetto-Monument zum Ausdruck bringen zu müssen. Am Abgrund der deutschen Geschichte und unter der Last der Millionen Ermordeten tat ich, was Menschen tun, wenn die Sprache versagt. Ich weiß es auch nach zwanzig Jahren nicht besser als jener Berichterstatter, der festhielt: 'Dann kniet er, der das nicht nötig hat, für alle, die es nötig haben, aber nicht knien – weil sie es nicht wagen oder nicht können oder nicht wagen können.'" ("I took an extraordinary burden to Warsaw. Nowhere else had a people suffered as much as in Poland. The robotic mass annihilation of the Polish Jews had brought human blood lust to a climax which nobody had considered possible. [...] Although I had made no plans, I left my accommodations at Wilanow Castle feeling that I was called upon to mark in some way the special moment of commemoration at the Ghetto Monument. At the abyss of German history and burdened by millions of murdered humans, I acted in the way of those whom language fails. Even twenty years later, I wouldn't know better than the journalist who recorded the moment by saying, 'Then he, who would not need to do this, kneels down in lieu of all those who should, but who do not kneel down – because they do not dare, cannot kneel, or cannot dare to kneel.'") [Note: The quotation used by Brandt is from the article Ein Stück Heimkehr [A Partial Homecoming] (Hermann Schreiber/ Der Spiegel No. 51/1970, Dec. 14, 1970]

Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life - love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the firehorses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality.

Americans are Americans and everyone else is sorry. Half the time we don't even know what we're sorry about, it just squeaks out of our sorry gaps before we've even clues into the conversation. Well, I'm sorry YOU'RE all so sorry. You have to know when to be sorry. You can't really be sorry for something you don't want to remember, can you? Selective memory, isn't it? Let's be honest, hell, you can't even apologize for the shit you did yesterday never mind fifty years ago. Indian residential schools, Japanese internment camps, hell, and this is just in your neighborhood. But it's all right... everybody's sorry these days. The politicians are sorry, the cops are sorry, the priests are sorry, the logging companies are sorry, mining companies, electric companies, water companies, wife beaters, serial rapists, child molesters, mommy and daddy. Everybody's sorry. Everybody's sorry they got caught sticking it to someone else... that's what they are sorry about... getting caught. They could give a rat's ass about you, or me, or the people they are saying sorry to. Think about it... Don't be a sorry ass, be sorry before you have to say you are sorry. Be sorry for even thinking about, bringing about something sorry-filled. And the next time someone says, "There is one law for everyone." Say, "I'm sorry, you're an idiot." Just kidding, now that was harsh.

Delving deeply in this [gender healing] work inevitably takes people on an inner journey, and, if they follow it far enough, they are ultimately let into an awakening of an expansive, all-encompassing love.

Forgiveness is the virtue of the courageous, the response of the forgiven, the mercy of the just.

For too long, many in the Church have argued that unity in the body of Christ across ethnic and class lines is a separate issue from the gospel. There has been the suggestion that we can be reconciled to God without being reconciled to our brothers and sisters in Christ. Scripture doesn’t bear that out. We only need to examine what happened when the Church was birthed to see exactly how God intends for this issue of reconciliation within the body of Christ to fall out (p. 33).

I am sure that if we can find reconciliation with our past – whether parents, partners or friends – we should try and do that. It won't be perfect, it will be a compromise . . . but it might mean acceptance and, the big word, forgiveness.

If our Fall was our re-cognition, our re-knowing of the good as evil, then our Reconciliation is our re-cognition in Christ - our re-knowing in the risen humanity of the Word - of evil as the good he has made it once more.

If the sun never set, we would have no perception of the vast depths of space, which become visible only at night when we are able to see what is obscured by the bright daylight

If, while we hold our times here in our own hands, all we have to do to be reconciled is believe he has them in his, how much less will we have to do there when we shall see they are in Christ's hand alone - that is, see them held for our eternal enjoyment as all right?

Moving beyond past wounds and hurts and building a culture of respect, dignity, and flowering love

My prayers for these stressful days Have become sharpened. Unadorned. A single word to the bereaved and Wailing Mother God - mercy. Two words to The infant child God, on trial in an unjust system-- Tender love. And for the God who is not a White, robed, bearded father, but a migrant laborer Daddy, with a red baseball cap, who only cries When he thinks no one can see, not a word, but A silent squeeze of his calloused hand to telegraph Reconciliation, wholeness. There was a time when More words brought comfort, but now my heart Wants most to be true. Ready for resistance by Unapologetic clarity and fueled by moving toward A future in which we have made all of us free. -Holy Quiet

Neither group working alone can create gender balance in society. The sexes must work together for this balance to be realized, collaborating in courageous new forms of experiential and transformative modalities.

Sadly, our society still perpetuates the false ideal that a real man should be all masculine, and a real woman all feminine. Neither is possible, nor desirable.

Sometimes,’ Brys ventured, ‘when nothing can be shared except regret, then regret must serve as the place to begin. Reconciliation does not demand that one side surrender to the other. The simple, mutual recognition that mistakes were made is in itself a closing of the divide.

Part of the irony of religion’s role is that in strengthening micro bonds between individuals, religion contributes to within-group homogeneity, heightens isolation from different groups, and reduces the opportunity for the formation of macro bonds—bonds between groups—that serve to integrate a society.

People may say . . . that all is made up and well again, but such breaches between great people are seldom or never so.

Remember, confrontation is about reconciliation and awareness, not judgement or anger.