Questions for reflection:

Below are some of the questions from this talk. Spend some time reflecting on these as honestly as you can:

• Is my claimed love for God reflected in how I love my fellow human beings and other life forms?

• Are there any people whose humanity I tend to not fully recognise, and thus under-estimate or overlook them.

• Am I trying to maintain some kind of social status, or uphold some kind of image, at the cost of tending the wounds of those most in need?

Even just to see this is already a crack in the image, a moment of opportunity for liberation. This is the invitation to be freed of the husks of our social roles and identities, our safe contracts, our narrow belonging systems and prejudiced conditioning, so that the sweet kernel of our deepest most beautiful and boundlessly loving human beingness, sourced in God's Divine Being, can blossom and flourish. 

For further reflection:

Below are some of the quotes from the talk and additional quotes for further reflection:

1 Corinthians 13:2 

“...if I have not love I am nothing”

1 John 4:7-8 

“Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

Marcus Borg: 

"The effect of the purity system was to create a world with sharp social boundaries: between pure and impure, righteous and sinner, whole and not whole, male and female, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile." ... "In the message and activity of Jesus, we see an alternative social vision: a community shaped not by the ethos and politics of purity, but by the ethos and politics of compassion."

"...this beloved and often domesticated parable was originally a pointed attack on the purity system and an advocacy of another way: compassion."

Matthew 5:40-41 

"If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.  If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles." 

Attributed to Lilla Watson, although thought to be of Aboriginal origin:

"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up in mine, then let us work together."

Fr Gregory Boyle:

“Radical kinship is the only thing that mattered to Jesus"

“Unless there’s a connective tissue, born of tenderness, which is the highest level of spiritual maturity, otherwise love stays in the air or in our hearts or in our heads. Unless love becomes tender, there’s nothing that connects us to each other. And that’s God’s dream come true: that you may be one. How do you obliterate once and for all the illusion that we are separate?”

"Standing with the marginalized and getting to know them makes it impossible to demonize them. That means standing with the disposable so that the day will come that we stop throwing people away.”