ACT: MAKE AN IMPACT

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

“If we depend on seeing the positive results of our individual steps, we’ll avoid challenges that seem beyond what we can visibly influence.  Yet our actions take effect through such multiplicities of synergy that we can’t trace their causal chain.  Everything we do has ripples of influence extending far beyond what we can see.”

— Joanna Macy in Active Hope:  How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy

“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.”

— Mother Teresa

“Reusing something instead of immediately discarding it, when done for the right reasons, can be an act of love which expresses our own dignity.  We must not think that these efforts are not going to change the world.  They benefit society, often unbeknown to us, for they call forth a goodness which, albeit unseen, inevitably tends to spread.”

—Pope Francis in On Care for Our Common Home: Laudato Si

ACT: FIND JOY

“…to help others isn’t a heroic burden but a transcendent source of fulfillment in our busy, materialistic lives.”   

— Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn in A Path Appears:  Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity

“compassionate concern for others’ well-being is the source of happiness. The incredible thing is that when we think of alleviating other people’s suffering, our own suffering is reduced.”

— His Holiness the Dalai Lama in The Book of Joy, by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu with Douglas Abrams

“In the end generosity is the best way of becoming more, more and more joyful. We people who care must be attractive, must be filled with joy, so that others recognize that caring, that helping and being generous are not a burden, they are a joy.”

-        Archbishop Desmond Tutu in The Book of Joy, by the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu with Douglas Abrams

“These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

-        The Bible, John 15:  11 – 12