As you simplify your life,

the laws of the universe will be simpler;

solitude will not be solitude,

poverty will not be poverty,

nor weakness weakness.

*

Henry David Thoreau

Why community?

Life in community is no less than a necessity for us - it is an inescapable "must" that determines everything we do and think. Yet it is not our good intentions or efforts that have been decisive in our choosing this way of life. Rather, we have been overwhelmed by a certainty - a certainty that has its origin and power in the Source of everything that exists. We acknowledge God as this Source.

We must live in community because all life created by God exists in a communal order and works toward community.

why we must live in community, by Eberhard Arnold

...I came into this world,

free by nature,

in the image of God,

I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness,

in the image of the world into which I was born.

That world was the picture of Hell,

full of men like myself,

loving God and yet hating Him;

born to love Him,

living instead in fear and hopeless self-contradictory hungers...

--Thomas Merton

the piety of poverty

--william stringfellow

what sofisticates the suffering of the poor is only the proximity of their life to death every day...

social morality is just another term for piety. the proximity of the poor to death matures a radical and wonderful piety, constituted in the actual life of the poor and consisting of the intense humility of the poor about their own existence as human beings...

psalms 9: among the poor, men know that they are but men

We can bomb the world to pieces,
but we can't bomb it into peace.

--Michael Franti

a prayer

"When I'm lost, God help me get more lost. Help me lose me so completely that nothing remains but the primordial peace and originality that keep creating and sustaining this blood-, tear- and love-worthy world that's never lost for an instant save by an insufficiently lost me..."