William Sloane Coffin: If a Heart Is Full of Love

I share this beautiful and profound wisdom of William Sloane Coffin with my Christian family and friends and with those of all religious and spiritual traditions. Whatever path we are on, may we all be engaged in the work of healing and opening our hearts ever more deeply. It is my belief that the ripples of the strong and sacred heart energy in us all is what will awaken and heal our world. — Molly

❤

Wisdom Quotes 

from William Sloane Coffin

The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.

If your heart is full of fear, you won't seek truth; you'll seek security. If a heart is full of love, it will have a limbering effect on the mind.

Love measures our stature: the more we love, the bigger we are. There is no smaller package in all the world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself.

In our time all it takes for evil to flourish is for a few good men to be a little wrong and have a great deal of power, and for the vast majority of their fellow citizens to remain indifferent.

Patriotism at the expense of another nation is as wicked as racism at the expense of another race... Let us resolve to be patriots always, nationalists never. Let us love our country, but pledge allegiance to the earth and to the flora and fauna and human life that it supports — one planet indivisible, with clean air, ... soil and water, with liberty, justice, and peace for all.

Learning, and especially unlearning, can take place only in the absence of defensiveness.... We can drop our defenses only when we love and are loved. 

The cause of violence is not ignorance. It is self-interest. Only reverence can restrain violence — reverence for human life and the environment.

We have sold our birthright of freedom and justice for a mess of national security.

The war against Iraq is as disastrous as it is unnecessary; perhaps in terms of its wisdom, purpose and motives, the worst war in American history... Our military men and women...were not called to defend America but rather to attack Iraq. They were not called to die for, but rather to kill for, their country. What more unpatriotic thing could we have asked of our sons and daughters...?

Nuclear weapons merit unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation. 

Prophets from Amos and Isaiah to Gandhi and King have shown how frequently compassion demands confrontation. Love without criticism is a kind of betrayal. Lying is done with silence as well as with words.

There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover's quarrel with their country.

The temptation to moralize is strong; it is emotionally satisfying to have enemies rather than problems, to seek out culprits rather than the flaws in the system. 

To be avoided at all costs is the solace of opinion without the pain of thought. 

I asked an 85 year old professor, "What makes you cry?" He said, "Whenever I see or hear the truth."

Truth is always in danger of being sacrificed on the altars of good taste and social stability. 

Human beings who blind themselves to human need make themselves less human. 

But what I am beginning to suspect is that most guilty people reject the possibility of forgiveness not because it is too good to believe, but because they fear the responsibility forgiveness entails. It's hell to be guilty, but its worse to be responsible.

The consequences of the past are always with us, and half the hostilities tearing the world apart could be resolved today were we to allow the forgiveness of sins to alter these consequences.... if we were to say of ourselves, "The hostility stops here.”  

I also was persuaded that the woman most in need of liberation was the woman in every man just as the man most in need of liberation was the man in every woman. 

To love is surely to support and to encourage — but not necessarily to approve. Quite the contrary! If we love one another we will help one another fight against our evil dreams. 

People who fear disorder more than injustice will only produce more of both.

Love is to make us more human, and that demands that we care so much for each other that we have not to be nice but to be honest. We have to be honest, for most real faults are hidden and therefore demand an outside revealer. 

A friend...risks her friendship for the sake of her friend. 

Fear destroys intimacy. It distances us from each other; or makes us cling to each other, which is the death of freedom.... Only love can create intimacy, and freedom too, for when all hearts are one, nothing else has to be one — neither clothes nor age; neither sex nor sexual preference; race nor mind-set.  

Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without.

Many of us overvalue autonomy, the strength to stand alone, the capacity to act independently. Far too few of us pay attention to the virtues of dependence and interdependence, and especially to the capacity to be vulnerable.

It is bad religion to deify doctrines and creeds.... Doctrines, let's not forget, supported slavery and apartheid.... Moreover, doctrines can divide while compassion can only unite. 

God provides minimum protection, maximum support — support to help us grow up, to stretch our minds and hearts until they are as wide as God's universe. 

Too many religious people make faith their aim. They think "the greatest of these" is faith, and faith defined as all but infallible doctrine. These are the dogmatic, divisive Christians, more concerned with freezing the doctrine than warming the heart. If faith can be exclusive, love can only be inclusive.

We put our best foot forward, but it's the other one that needs the attention. 

In life you can either follow your fears or be led by your values, by your passions. 

We are not slaves but children of our Father, free to do good, free to sin. So when in anguish over any human violence done to innocent victims, we ask of God, "How could you let that happen?" it's well to remember that God at that very moment is asking the exact same question of us. 

Love, and you are a success whether or not the world thinks so. The highest purpose of Christianity — which is primarily a way of life, not a system of belief — is to love one another.

Remember also that scars of all sorts are all right. Scars are wounds that have healed, not without a trace, but have healed nonetheless. Think of all the scar tissue around Christ's heart, Jesus our wounded healer. 

Faith handles the ultimate incongruities of life, humor handles the more immediate ones.

It is terribly important to realize that the leap of faith is not so much a leap of thought as of action. For while in many matters it is first we must see then we will act; in matters of faith it is first we must do then we will know, first we will be and then we will see. One must, in short, dare to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty.

Hope is a state of mind independent of the state of the world. If your heart's full of hope, you can be persistent when you can't be optimistic. You can keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing has the evidence any chance of changing. So while I'm not optimistic, I'm always very hopeful. 

Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.

Hope criticizes what is, hopelessness rationalizes it. Hope resists, hopelessness adapts.

Isn't that what growing up is all about - learning to outlast despair? 

What is faith? Faith is being grasped by the power of love.

Spirituality means to me living the ordinary life extraordinarily well. As the old-church father said, "The glory of God is a human being fully alive."

Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.  

No sermon on love can fail to mention love's most difficult problem in our time — how to find effective ways to alleviate the massive suffering of humanity at home and abroad. What we need to realize is that to love effectively we must act collectively.

We don't have to be "successful," only valuable. We don't have to make money, only a difference, and particularly in the lives society counts least and puts last.

To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.

Charity is only a waystation on the road to justice. 

Without love, violence will change the world; it will change it into a more violent one. 

Human unity is not something we are called on to create — only something we are called on to recognize.

A spiritual person tries less to be godly than to be deeply human. 

For finally, we are as we love. It is love that measures our stature.  

Love does have a reward. Just as the proper benefits of education are the opportunities of continuing education, so the rewards of loving are to become yet more vulnerable, more tender, more caring. 

All of life is the exercise of risk.

The one true freedom in life is to come to terms with death, and as early as possible, for death is an event that embraces all our lives. And the only way to have a good death is to lead a good life. The more we do God's will, the less unfinished business we leave behind when we die.