For most of us, our lives are dominated with messages that reduce our worth to productivity, exhaust us with constant comparisons and competitions, and trap us in a ruthless cycle of praise and blame. This simple chant from the Buddhist tradition - ‘My very life is sustained through the gifts of others’ - invites us to reflect on how we relate to life, one another, and the earth with more gratitude, open-heartedness, and joy.

Whistle blowers are modern prophets. You don’t have to be a minister or a famous politician to do the work of a prophet, you just have to be willing to speak truth to power. Just don’t expect to have a statue raised in your honor. Most whistle blowers are shunned in public in their own time, if they are lucky enough to not be put in prison or murdered. Still, progress is made by being the unreasonable person in the mix who refuses to go along in silence in the face of great injustice.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the USA, and the violent response that has shaped so much of the world during the last twenty years. With outrage over the tragedies accompanying the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, we also take time to reflect on the world we have created during two decades of occupation and war. And we remember the words of Daniel Berrigan, who, along with countless others through the centuries, taught us to insist that another way is possible and to do the work to bring it into existence: “One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the U.S. around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.”

The owners of Purdue Pharma have been released from any liability in the deaths of a half a million people in the opioid crisis because they were willing to give a fraction of their ill-gotten gain to the victims of the opioid crisis that they helped to create. When did you ever hear of a drug dealer getting a suspended sentence for giving a donation to an addiction treatment program? We see billionaires spending the wealth earned by low waged employees for a joy ride in space while the wealth gap in America grows. On this Labor Day weekend we need a wakeup call, a reminder that the disproportionate amount of wealth going to the top of the income ladder is making more and more Americans poor for no good reason and eroding any claim we ever had to being a democracy.