This book took way to long to read, in fact, my borrowing privileges at the library have been suspended. Oops!
Once I sat down and just read it, I realized what a powerful writing and speaker Tutu really is.
I'll just write some powerful fragmented ideas that have stuck to the inside of my brain.
We make people inhumane when we remove their moral responsibility for some action.
All people are family.
Our fear of failure drives an ugly competitiveness which often leads to putting down other people.
"Love is more demanding than law. No law tells an exhausted mother who wants nothing more than to collapse in exhaustion that they must get up in the middle of the night to comfort their baby, walking for hours until their child calms down, but this is what she does, because this is what love commands" (p. 36).
Valuing strength over weakness is a philosophy which leads people to despise weakness and weakness in others. "We can love others, with their failures, when we stop despising ourselves, because of our failures" (p. 39).
Prejudice is ridiculous, no matter what it's based on.
"Theologically, biblically, socially, ecumenically, it is right to ordain women to the priesthood" (p. 48).
"Ending sexism and including women fully in every aspect of society not only ends its own great evil--the oppression of women--but also is part of the solution to the rest of the world's problems" (p. 49).
"Confession, forgiveness, and reparation, wherever feasible, form part of a continuum" (p. 57).
Change and growth almost always occur through some pain.
Love is an action, a choice of will, not a feeling, or at least not always a feeling.
I can be a center of love, an oasis of peace.
Children are small people.
Death is physical. The mental/spiritual part can be overcome.
The physical can be truly spiritual. It can be transformed from the profane into the sacred. All Hellenistic dualism has sought to refute this idea, making the physical principally antagonistic to and alien from the spiritual.
Tutu is on to some Quaker principles with his emphasis on stillness and contemplation and on all of us being able to hear God.
An authentic spirituality is subversive of injustice.
I am waiting for a leaders "who are willing to take risks and not just seeking to satisfy the often extreme feelings of their constituencies. They have to lead by leading and be ready to compromise, to accommodate, and not to be intransigent, not to assert that they have a bottom line. Intransigence and ultimatums only lead to more death" (p. 119).
"So remember you are a moral agent, capable of creating a particular kind of moral climate that is impatient with injustice and cruelty and indifference and lies and immorality" (p. 123).
