Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees, and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don't ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it.
Today if you have... ...plenty of water to drink and food to eat. ...a roof over your head. ...a bed to sleep in. ...facilities to shower or bathe. ...a private indoor toilet. ...a job to go to or a school to attend. ...no bombs, shooting, or shelling within earshot....
It is easy enough to tell the poor to accept their poverty as God's will when you yourself have warm clothes and plenty of food and medical care and a roof over your head and no worry about the rent. But if you want them to believe you - try to share some of their...
For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they...
Maybe more than ever before in my lifetime, my friends and I are aware of our brokenness and the deep crazy, the desperation for light, hope, food, and medicine for the poor. What helps is that we are not all crazy and hopeless on the same day.
Wholeness is relational as well as individual. We cannot separate our own health from the health of those around us... When we appropriately love other peoples' bodies by insuring that they have adequate food, shelter, health care, communal support, and political...
I am convinced that we all long for the presence of God with a deep, aching hunger, a hunger as sure as the hunger for food, but with this difference--we do not always know how to fill it. We do not always know what we are looking for. Saint Augustine observed that...
The gospels remind us that Jesus, before he taught the people, felt compassion for the multitudes that followed after him. Sometimes he felt it even to the point of forgetting to eat. How did he put his compassion into practice? He multiplied the loaves of bread and...