<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
<meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Exchange Server">
<!-- converted from rtf -->
<style><!-- .EmailQuote { margin-left: 1pt; padding-left: 4pt; border-left: #800000 2px solid; } --></style>
</head>
<body>
<font face="Century Schoolbook" size="3"><span style="font-size:12pt;">
<div>A few quotes for reflection</div>
<div><font face="Calibri" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div>David </div>
<div><font face="Calibri" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div style="text-indent:-7.1pt;margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;padding-left:7.1pt;">
“The Bible is one massive protest against the ancient domination system, which makes it a very political document. And we need to remember that Jesus didn't simply die, he was executed by the domination system that ruled his world. He was executed because he
had become a radical critic of the way that world was put together and he was beginning to attract a following. To be very blunt, it's difficult for me to imagine how anybody who has seen what the Bible and Jesus are about could vote for policies that actually
maintain or increase the wealth of those at the top in our day.</div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;padding-left:7.1pt;">For Christians, a major task is consciousness raising within our own congregations about the Bible. Not only about what it is, but also about the idea that God is passionate about our liberation
from oppressive systems.</div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;padding-left:7.1pt;">Part of the scandal of American Christianity is that statistically the U.S. is the most Christian country in the world and yet, as a country we have the greatest income inequality in the world.
And as a country we are uncritically committed, not simply to being the most powerful nation in the world militarily but to being as militarily powerful as the rest of the world combined.”<br>
<br>
<font face="Times New Roman"><b>Marcus Borg</b></font></div>
<div style="margin-top:5pt;margin-bottom:5pt;padding-left:36pt;"><font face="Times New Roman">___________________________________________________________________</font></div>
<div><font face="Verdana" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt;">“I plead guilty to a life-long passion, even an obsession with making sense of faith, especially for those for whom it makes little or no sense. This concern had a definite moment of birth when
I was 21 and spent a full year outside the then very Catholic Ireland at the University of Caen in the north of France. For the first time in my life I encountered widespread agnosticism among my French companions, most of them baptized Catholics. And a first
simple insight got born then, one that was strengthened in later years as a Jesuit, working always in different university contexts. <b>I became convinced that most blockages to faith were not on the level of truth but on the level of spiritual freedom.</b>
This was later confirmed when I did some more specialist work on Newman and discovered his special stress on people’s disposition. A second insight, born from a year in Latin America, was that our western lifestyle and culture have immense and often hidden
power over our spiritual freedom or lack of it. A third dimension entered when I began to understand that human imagination is a key cultural battleground where faith is either starved or nourished. So these three topics – freedom, culture, imagination – came
to be natural concerns for me, and in this spirit I tried to explore some of the so-called frontier areas of fundamental theology.<a name="x__GoBack"></a>”</span></font></div>
<div><font face="Roboto" size="2" color="#333333"><span style="font-size:11pt;">Jesuit theologian <b>Fr Michael Paul Gallagher</b></span></font></div>
<div><font face="Calibri" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Lucida Sans Unicode" size="2" color="#315376"><span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b>LUKE 17:20,21 (NIV) </b><font size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt;"><b>Jesus replied, "The kingdom of God does not come with careful observation, nor will people
say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you."</b></span></font></span></font></div>
<table width="780" style="width:468pt;margin-left:5.4pt;">
<col width="780" style="width:468pt;">
<tr>
<td>
<table width="40" style="width:24pt;margin-left:5.4pt;">
<col width="40" style="width:24pt;">
<tr>
<td style="text-align:center;"><font face="Lucida Sans Unicode" size="4" color="#315376"><span style="font-size:16pt;"><b>The True Voice of Love</b><font size="5"><span style="font-size:21pt;"><b> …</b></span></font><font size="4"><span style="font-size:14pt;"><b>
Henri Nouwen</b></span></font></span></font></td>
</tr>
<a name="_Hlk65264838"></a>
<tr height="626" style="height:375.7pt;">
<td><font face="Lucida Sans Unicode" color="#4C4C4C">Fear is the great enemy of intimacy. Fear makes us run away from each other or cling to each other, but does not create true intimacy. When Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, the disciples were
overcome by fear and they all “deserted him and ran away” (Matthew 26:56). . . . Fear makes us move away from each other to a “safe” distance, or move toward each other to a “safe” closeness, but fear does not create the space where true intimacy can exist.
.
<div><font face="Lucida Sans Unicode" color="#4C4C4C">To those who are tortured by inner or outer fear, and who desperately look for the house of love where they can find the intimacy their hearts desire, Jesus says: “You have a home . . . I am your home .
. . claim me as your home . . . you will find it to be the intimate place where I have found my home . . . it is right where you are . . . in your innermost being . . . in your heart.” The more attentive we are to such words the more we realize that we do not
have to go far to find what we are searching for. The tragedy is that we do not trust our innermost self as an intimate place but anxiously wander around hoping to find it where we are not. We try to find that intimate place in knowledge, competence, notoriety,
success, friends, sensations, pleasure, dreams, or artificially induced states of consciousness. Thus we become strangers to ourselves, people who have an address but are never home and hence cannot be addressed by the true voice of love.</font></div>
</font></td>
</tr>
</table>
<div><font face="Calibri" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt;"> </span></font></div>
<table width="40" style="width:24pt;margin-left:5.4pt;">
<col width="40" style="width:24pt;">
<tr>
<td><font face="Calibri" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt;"></span></font></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<table width="40" style="width:24pt;margin-left:5.4pt;">
<col width="40" style="width:24pt;">
<tr>
<td><font face="Calibri" size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt;"></span></font></td>
</tr>
</table>
<div><font face="Calibri" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt;"> </span></font></div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<div><font face="Calibri" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt;"> </span></font></div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<div><font face="Calibri" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Calibri" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Calibri" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt;"> </span></font></div>
<div><font face="Calibri" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt;"> </span></font></div>
</span></font>
</body>
</html>