Soul food is a weekly collection of verses, stories, and quotations from various traditions to meditate on. All verses from the Hebrew Bible, Deuterocanonical books, and New Testament, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). All verses from the Quran, unless otherwise noted, are from the MAS Abdel Haleem Translation.
Jewish
Torah
“Do not be afraid! Am I in the place of God? Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.”
-Joseph, Genesis 50:19-20
Talmud
“Let your home be a meeting place for the wise; dust yourself in the soil of their feet, and drink thirstily of their words.”
-Ethics Of The Fathers 1:4
Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha
“For only the wise and courageous are masters of their emotions”
-4 Maccabees 7:23
Other
“Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him…Therein lies true dialogue. Man asks and God replies. We cannot understand them. Because they dwell in the depths of our souls…”
-Moishe the Beadle, Night
Christian
New Testament
“For if you forgive others their failures and offenses, your heavenly father will also forgive yours, And if you don’t forgive the failures and mistakes of others, your father won’t forgive yours.”
-Jesus, The Gospel Of Matthew 6:14-15 SV
Church Fathers
“Let all things be done to the honor of God.”
-Ignatius, the Epistle of Ignatius to Polycarp 2:11
New Testament Apocrypha
“Faith is our earth, in which we take root; hope is the water through which we are nourished; love is the air through which we grow; gnosis is the light through which we become fully grown”
-Gospel of Philip 79:25-32
Other
“God speaks to us in three places: in scripture, in our deepest selves, and in the voice of the stranger.”
-Thomas Merton
Islamic
Quran
“The blind and the sighted are not equal, just as those who believe and do good works and those who do evil are not equal.”
-Quran 40:58
Hadith Al-Qudsi
Allah (mighty and sublime be He) said: Whosoever shows enmity to someone devoted to Me, I shall be at war with him. My servant draws not near to Me with anything more loved by Me than the religious duties I have enjoined upon him, and My servant continues to draw near to Me with supererogatory works so that I shall love him. When I love him I am his hearing with which he hears, his seeing with which he sees, his hand with which he strikes and his foot with which he walks. Were he to ask [something] of Me, I would surely give it to him, and were he to ask Me for refuge, I would surely grant him it. I do not hesitate about anything as much as I hesitate about [seizing] the soul of My faithful servant: he hates death and I hate hurting him.
-Hadith Al-Qudsi 25
Hadith
“He who believes in Allah and the Last Day let him not harm his neighbour; and he who believes in Allah and the Last Day let him show hospitality to his guest; and he who believes in Allah and the Last Day let him speak good or remain silent”.
-Bukhari and Muslim
Sufism
“Do you think that good character is simply for a person to be pleasant? One who honors people but tramples upon the rights of God does not have good character.”
-Ibn Ata’illah [Taken from Dr. Jackson’s Sufism for non-Sufis]
Other
“Sit with those who love God, for that enlightens the mind.”
-Umar bin Al Khattab
Other Wisdom
“The faithful do not speak many words, but their works are numerous.”
-The Sentences of Sextus 383
“The road of life twists and turns and no two directions are ever the same. Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination.”
-Don Williams, Jr. (American Novelist and Poet, b.1968)
Perspectives Of A Fellow Traveler 