Brother David Steindl-Rast was born in Austria in 1926. Fleeing the chaos of WW2, he moved to the US and earned a PhD in psychology, before joining a Benedictine monastery and becoming a monk. In 1966, the church commissioned him to pursue Buddhist-Christian dialogue under several Zen Buddhist teachers, including Shunryu Suzuki. You can learn more about Brother David his Gratefulness.org project here.
This video from Louie Schwartzberg and David Steindl-Rast is a gift. Watch it every day. Louie Schwartzberg is an award winning director, videographer, and producer who is widely recognized as an innovator in high definition time lapse cinematography.
Brother David Steindl-Rast was born in Austria in 1926. Fleeing the chaos of WW2, he moved to the US and earned a PhD in psychology, before joining a Benedictine monastery and becoming a monk. In 1966, the church commissioned him to pursue Buddhist-Christian dialogue under several Zen Buddhist teachers, including Shunryu Suzuki. You can learn more about Brother David his Gratefulness.org project here.
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"If your house is on fire, the most urgent thing to do is to go back and try to put out the fire, not to run after the person you believe to be the arsonist. If you run after the person you suspect has burned your house, your house will burn down while you are chasing him or her. That is not wise. You must go back and put out the fire. So when you are angry, if you continue to interact with or argue with the other person, if you try to punish her, you are acting exactly like someone who runs after the arsonist while everything goes up in flames."
From the book, Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames by Thic Nhat Hanh Last May, a Malian immigrant to France scaled the exterior of an apartment building to save a small child dangling from a porch (see video below). In response, he was granted French citizenship and given a job as a firefighter. In 2015, another Malian immigrant, Lassana Bathily, saved 7 French Jews during an attack on a kosher grocery.
As a reward, he was granted French citizenship. It is right for society to reward those who risk their lives for the sake of someone else. But what makes these stories unique is not the bravery of the rescuers, but the fact that they were immigrants. In the following piece, writer and photographer Teju Cole, himself the child of Nigerian immigrants to the US, challenges the congratulatory narrative that typically surrounds these stories and asks us to face larger questions about the way we conceptualize immigrants in our culture: "The extraordinary courage of Lassana Bathily, an immigrant from Mali, saved six lives during a terrorist attack at a kosher supermarket at the Porte de Vincennes in 2015. He was rewarded with French citizenship by the French president, François Hollande. But this is not a story about courage. The superhuman agility and bravery of Mamadou Gassama, an immigrant from Mali, saved a baby from death in the 18th Arrondissement in May 2018. He was rewarded with French citizenship by the French president, Emmanuel Macron. But this is not a story about bravery. The superhuman is rewarded with formal status as a human. The merely human, meanwhile, remains unhuman, quasi-human, subhuman. Gassama crossed the Mediterranean in a tiny boat — that was superhuman, but no one filmed that, he remained subhuman, and there was no reward. Such is Empire’s magnanimity. Merci, patron. Je suis tellement reconnaissant, patron. The hand that gives, it is said in Mali, is always above the hand that receives. Those who are hungry cannot reject food. Not only those who are hungry but those who have been deliberately starved. But soon come the day when the Hebrews will revolt and once and for all refuse Pharaoh’s capricious largesse. Hospitality." |
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-The Medici Effect If the medicine is good, the disease will be cured. It is not necessary to know who prepared it, or where it came from -Walpola Rahula When you water the root of the tree, that water naturally extends to every branch and every leaf and every flower on that tree. So when we actually find the origin of true pleasure, in feeling the infinite sweet love that God has for us, and in realizing our potential to love God, that love naturally extends to all living beings. -Radhanath Swami Archives
August 2020
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