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Category: Being Moved

Arm Yourselves with Love Alone

ARM YOURSELVES WITH LOVE ALONE

No,  we will not all survive this. Some lives have already been lost.  Many more are at risk of losing health care, being “disappeared”, met with violence, or starvation. These risks are already at play.   No, not everyone will be okay.  That is a baseline we may have to accept.   

Practicing some level of acceptance allows us to concentrate our power and creativity on resisting what we refuse to accept, the places where we must have courage to change what we can.  

ÂĄResistance is never futile! Those who can only imagine creating a world by force will always be conquered eventually, sometime hoisted by their own petard, but they will always crumble.  The more tyrannical and ignorant the despot, the harder they fall.  The less they know of love the quicker they become dust. 

But the virtue and resilience of those who know to endure with integrity, even if it costs them their life, will sow the seeds of a beautiful future, a beloved community where character, insight, and wisdom matter. 

There have been peaceful, thriving communities throughout history that have furthered the evolution of the human race as God has desired and empowered us to do.  

We cannot guarantee what will happen to our own fate when tiny men driven by fear and inadequacy seize power.  

We can trust what their fate will be.

And we can shape the fate of the world to come. 

For no tyrant will determine history.  No coward controls our fate as the human race.

There is no greater power than love.  

There is no greater power than love. 

And those who rely on any other power to make their mark on history 

Will be forgotten and eclipsed by the courageous and powerful love we carry in our bodies at all times.  

In my tradition, the resurrection tells us no one can override God’s judgment and no one can kill God. God is love, and so no one can kill the love within you. Even if your body disappears.  

Don’t poison yourself with the power of violence they fetishize, the violence on which their hopes rely.   Instead, arm yourselves with love alone, start now, and you will be crafting the future of the human race.

Only love remains. Remains.  

From Resisting Arrest.  

. Douglas Harrison 

Being Moved

Good Strange: The Politics of Resurrection.

Good Strange: The Politics of Resurrection

 It is strange, even for my own conscience, to use a phrase like “the Politics of Resurrection” given how much damage and evil the wedding of false religion and the state has inflicted on vulnerable people lately.    

That is precisely why today I have to use it, why I have to write this.  I want to offer you something strange and  hopeful on this Easter Sunday in a not-strange-enough time of darkness  

Being Moved

How to Change a Life With Two Shoes, a Good Story, and Some Gravity

friendship-in-christSome time in the late nineties I was going through one of the worse depressions of my life. It wasn’t one of those depressive episodes where you try to hide what is going on. I had a resigned sort of exhibitionism. Why not spill all my beans? Beans just end up getting spilt eventually anyway
 It was dark. People would walk by and ask, “How are you today Doug?” and immediately regret it as I answered them honestly and talked them through the vast landscape of my existential angst. It was usually met with one of four responses, that were for me both a source of dark entertainment, my own gothic improv stage. Here are the four things people would most often do:

Being Moved

Being Moved: Why am I a Christian? The Gospel according to Doug.

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I suppose that it behooves a Christian man, from time to time, to give a plain and simple account of his faith.   I can’t tell you that I am feeling particularly inspired to do so in this moment. Frankly, I find myself a little short on inspiration in general this evening and feel there are (what do we call them?), “pressing matters,” to take care of,  but it seems as good a time as any to say a thing or two about why this Good Friday is such a big deal and why I choose to build my life around the drama we see unfolding this and every Easter weekend from today and through the next fifty days of Easter.  Tonight stands before me a simple and fair question to which I intend to give at least one good answer,  “Why, Doug, given all that Christianity seems to have evolved in to, do you bother calling yourself a Christian and carrying on like ya do?”

I plan to start with a short answer and then keep just keep writing till some of the pieces “Pull-to” as my Grandpa used to say.  I am not promising exhaustive answers to this question or even several.  I suppose that is why I keep a blog, There is a lot to be said about the life of faith that just takes time and more importantly, stories, to have light dawn of the whole life of faith in God.  But, I will start by simply trying to provide an answer that is as short and as honest of an answer that I can provide:

I am a Christian because this is simply the most beautiful story I have ever known, and I want more than anything to be a part of it.  

Being Moved

Being Moved: praying our resentment instead of harboring it

There are very few vices I have encountered as much in my own life – and in the lives of the people I have listened to and prayed with – as much as I have encountered resentment. What other of my own shortcomings have I nurtured and even protected like I do my grudges? Ever hear of anyone harboring gluttony or greed? Resentment seems to hold a very precious place in a lot of our lives and after a few years of trying to deal with it personally I think I have finally begun to understand why: It is delicious.

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