Quotes about Humanity

Beyond miracles, what has lasting significance is love. It wasn't that Jesus healed a leper, but that he touched a leper, because no one touched lepers.

When we begin enacting the new world, the nations will follow. Nations will not lead us to peace; it is people who will lead the nation to peace as they begin to humanize the nations.

Someday war and poverty will be crazy and we will wonder how the world allowed such things to exist.

Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, wrote, "Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ's compassion is to look out to the world; yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good; yours are the hands with which God is to bless people now.

Nevertheless, because of what is "written on their hearts," we are called to look for God in people and in places where we didn't expect to see God.

Today we can hear the whisper where we least expect it: in a baby refugee and in a homeless rabbi, in crack addicts and displaced children, in a groaning creation.

Sin, too, is real. All we have to do is look at the news or, if our vision is good enough, look in the mirror.

In our cultural value system, we have divided up human traits between the sexes and consequently have denied each sex a part of its humanity.

The tears we shed are not just for ourselves but for our world.

Over and over, the dying and the lepers would whisper the mystical word namaste in my ear. We really don't have a word like it in English (or even much of a Western conception of it). They explained to me that namaste means "I honor the Holy One who lives in you." I knew I could see God in their eyes. Was it possible that I was becoming a Christian, that in my eyes they could catch a glimpse of the image of my Lover?

As I left Calcutta, it occurred to me that I was returning to a land of lepers, a land of people who had forgotten how to feel, to laugh, to cry, a land haunted by numbness. Could we learn to feel again?

Desmond Tutu, a South African bishop and leader in the movement to end apartheid, said, "I don't preach a social gospel; I preach the gospel, period. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is concerned for the whole person. When people were hungry, Jesus didn't say, 'Now is that political or social?' He said, 'I feed you.' Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.