Resistance and Qualities of the Heart

The other night on one of our Elluminate sessions, a classmate asked me to share a couple of quotes that I have carried with me over many years. Together, they have offered me tremendous inspiration when I feel weary or dispirited about "making a difference."  The first is by Monseñor Oscar Romero, and the second one is from Wendell Berry.  Enjoy!

This is what we are about:

We plant seeds that will one day grow.

We water seeds already planted,

knowing that they hold future promise.

We lay foundations that will need

future development.

We provide yeast that produces

effects beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything and there is a

sense of liberation in realizing that.

This enables us to do something  and to

do it very well.

It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,

a step along the way,

an opportunity for God’s grace

to enter and do

the rest.

We may never see the end results,

but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders,

ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets

Of a future

not our

own.

                                --Monseñor Oscar Romero

The following is an excerpt from “A Poem of Difficult Hope,” an essay by Wendell Berry in his book, What are People For?

Much protest is naive  it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come.  Protesters who hold out longer have perhaps understood that success is not the proper goal. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success; namely the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.