After Empire, by Sharon D. Welch

I'm not done with this book yet, but before I leave for vacation I wanted to throw up this interesting quote:

What would it mean for political organizing if we began with the premise that our passion for justice is not our achievement, but a gift? What if we realized that caring about injustice is not the result of our astute sociopolitical analyses, our compassion, our courage, and our will but is, rather, the result of being loved, recognized, and seen by others? Longing for justice and mourning and raging in the face of injustice are the gift of the ancestors, the gift of "all our relations."

This recognition of our dependence calls us away from prophetic denunciations of other people's hard-heartedness and closed-mindedness. It calls us from any satisfaction in merely denouncing structures and peoples who exploit or ignore others. When we acknowledge the strength and dignity of others, when we empathize with the suffering of others, and when we cast our lot in acts of creating justice, our selves are enlarged by the blessings of openness, the blessings of an open heart, and the blessings of an enlivened imagination.

I met with my mom's boss for an hour yesterday -- he wanted to talk with me about my experiences at Georgetown this year and about my summer reading list. At the end, he started praising my mom and he said something to me that has been rolling around my mind for the past day: "Your mom is a peacemaker," he said to me. "I asked her once why she's able to work so well with so many different kinds of people, in so many different areas, and she said, 'It's because I don't have my own agenda. I leave my agenda at home so I'm able to work full time on yours."

Of course, there are values and goals that I want everything I do to reflect, broad ones like peace and justice and more narrow ones. But at the same time, even when I'm acting on those values, I have a personal agenda more often than I'd like to admit. How different would my life be if I were able to completely forget seeking my own agenda and focus instead on the agendas of the people around me?