During Chapel yesterday, I opened the Bible and found some old cards with poems and/or sayings that I liked.  The first is "The Partisan's Hymn" - the Jewish Resistance fighter's anthem:
"you must not say that now you walk the final way/Because the darkened heavens hide the blue of day/The time we've longed for will at last draw near/And our steps, as drums, will sound that WE ARE HERE."  
 
Sometime this past week I heard the presentation of Rachel Corrie's Journal.  It seems that "The Partisan's Hymn" can now apply to the Palestinians fighting for their rights and land.  

If you hear one side you feel empathy, but if you hear the other side you feel empathy for that side.  What if all grieving parties sat down together with empathetic observers and aired all their grievances and worries together.  But each side with the commitment and desire for justice and well being for all.     

From German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Fortune and Calamity":
   "Those they strike stand dumbfounded/staring at the rubble/of their everyday, inglorious existence..../they seem to come from some eternal source..../pronounce judgment/on earth's own entangled drama....Time alone decides...finally reveals what is meant by misery/This is when most turn away....This is loyalty's [last] hour...till it is transfigured/by a gentle, cosmic/...light."

From the book Men and Message, I copied this quote, "The emptiness and enigma of life afflicting one makes a leap of faith a necessity to escape the absolute darkness."

In his "The Inner Reaches of Outer Space," Joseph Campbell quoted the following text by T.S. Eliot:
"I can only say, there we have been: but I/cannot say where./And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time/The inner freedom from the practical desire/The release from action and suffering/release from the inner/And the outer complulsion, yet surrounded/By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving...."

n errands Wednesday, I caught political theorist Benjamin Barber on Alternative Radio.  He was talking about Capitalism having gone off the rails.  He traced early Capitalism that innovated new goods to rmeet real human needs, and now Capitalism manufacturing wants in order to expand profits.  Condemning this manufacturing of wants, Barber offered many ideas for entreprenuership in the third world - capitalsim meeting real needs, and in the process making reasonable profit.  He called this bringing together self-interst with altruism.  Some of his ideas were using a $6. pump to bring up clean water from 8 feet or below where it is clean and selling it for a small sum; cleansing water through clay which removes 90-95% of its impurities.  He made a point of how much Americans pay for bottled water when about 60% of it comes out of the tap.  He said that in America almost everywhere there is clean water.  What we should do is fill up a bottle and each time put $2. in a sleeve around the bottle.  When we get $20. we could then send it to someone who needs clean water in the third world.    I can't remember some of his other suggestions but since his last book is Consumerism I expect that he has made other suggestins there.  He also connected earlier Capitalism with religious values, hard work, and resilience.