peripheral existence

Sacred centres produce margins, and the margin is a dangerous place to be, and much effort must be expended not to be among the losers, whether in terms of finance, health, reputation or whatever.  However, the extraordinarily powerful, benevolent, non-sacred, non-centre, which is Christ building the new Temple, is able to make it a pleasure to dwell with spaciousness among the weak and those of little account, because there is, after all, 'world enough and time'. So peripheral existence enables liking being among those who do not have anywhere to go, because they are neither competition, nor sign of scarcity, not threat of love, nor object of compassion, but sign of gift and shared story. There is all the spaciousness of eternal life with which to begin to build a story of the sort that has no end.

James Alison. On Being Liked. New York: Herder & Herder, 2003. 74.

conscious, consenting, responsible

When Jesus speaks of having life more abundantly, this, I think, is the life He means: a life that is not reducible by division, category, or degree, but is one thing, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material, divided only insofar as it is embodied in distinct creatures. He is talking about a finite world that is infinitely holy, a world of time that is filled with life that is eternal. His offer of more abundant life, then, is not an invitation to declare ourselves as certified "Christians," but rather to become conscious, consenting, and responsible participants in the one great life, a fulfillment hardly institutional at all.

Wendell Berry, "The Burden of the Gospels" in Blessed Are the Peacemakers; Christ's Teachings about Love, Compassion & Forgiveness. Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. 66-67

gifts keep giving

A commodity is truly "used up" when it is sold because nothing about the exchange assures its return. The visiting sea captain may pay handsomely for a Kula necklace, but because the sale removes it from the circle, it wastes it, no matter the price. Gifts that remain gifts can support an affluence of satisfaction, even without numerical abundance. The mythology of the rich in the overproducing nations that the poor are in on some secret about satisfaction—black "soul," gypsy duende, the noble savage, the simple farmer, the virile gamekeeper—obscures the harshness of modern capitalist poverty, but it does have a basis, for people who live in voluntary poverty or who are not capital-intensive do have more ready access to erotic forms of exchange that are neither exhausting nor exhaustible and whose use assures their plenty.

Lewis Hyde. The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. New York: Vintage, 2007. 29

given not taken

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions, 1961. 229.

the victim's logos

The Johannine Jesus said that once he was raised up on the Cross he would draw all humanity to himself, that gradually the sight of this innocent man on the gallows would become more compelling than all of conventional culture's techniques for making sanctioned violence morally respectable. by the time the biblical scholars finally succeed in disproving the "authenticity" of this saying and demonstrating beyond all scholarly doubt that it was never spoken by the historical Jesus, it will have been fulfilled in ways that the average ten-year-old will be able to recognize.

Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. New York: Crossroad, 1995. 227-228.

a puzzling God

The God whom Moses came to know in the wilderness was a God whose name is an emphatic form of the verb "to be." This was a God heedless of worldly power, who chose as agents in history the social underclass. The greatness and the tragedy of Moses consist, I feel, in the fact that he strove to put the elusive God who empathized with losers at the center of a culture that would have to win in order to survive. He gave the Hebrew people a God with an empathy for the lowly and the downtrodden, a God whose most defining feature was a refusal to be defined, a God openly hostile to the kind of cult idolatry that was synonymous with the conventional religious life of the age. Moses' God was a God wary of religion.

Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. New York: Crossroad, 1995. 146.

moral outrage

The gospel's insistence on forgiveness is both profound and pragmatic, but we cannot fully appreciate either until we realize how routinely moral indignation leads to a replication of the behavior that aroused the indignation. Moral outrage is morally ambiguous. The more outraged it is, the less likely it is to contribute to real moral improvements. Righteous indignation is often the first symptom of the metastasis of the cancer of violence.

Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. New York: Crossroad, 1995. 89.