Pope Francis: We are not alone

From Pope Francis' impromptu homily on Apostolic Journey to Sri Lanka and the Philippines 

                                                                                                                           (17 January 2015)
   
If today all of us are gathered here, fourteen months after the passage of Typhoon Yolanda, it is because we are certain that we will not be disappointed in our faith, for Jesus has gone before us. 

In his passion he took upon himself all of our sorrows, and ... let me tell you something personal – when I witnessed his disaster from Rome, I felt that I had to be here. That is when I decided to come here. I wanted to come to be with you. Maybe you will tell me that I came a little late; that is true, but here I am!

I am here to tell you that Jesus is Lord; that Jesus does not disappoint. 

“Father”, one of you may tell me, “he disappointed me because I lost my house, I lost my family, I lost everything I had, I am sick”. 

What you say is true and I respect your feelings, but I see him there, nailed to the cross, and from there he does not disappoint us. He was consecrated Lord on that throne, and there he experienced all the disasters we experience. Jesus is Lord! And he is Lord from the cross, from there he reigned. 

That is why, as we heard in the first reading, he can understand us: he became like us in every way. So we have a Lord who is able to weep with us, who can be at our side through life’s most difficult moments.

So many of you have lost everything. I do not know what to tell you. But surely he knows what to tell you! So many of you have lost members of your family. I can only be silent; I accompany you silently, with my heart…

Many of you looked to Christ and asked: Why, Lord? 

To each of you the Lord responds from his heart. I have no other words to say to you. Let us look to Christ: he is the Lord, and he understands us, for he experienced all the troubles we experience.

With him, beneath the cross, is his Mother. 

We are like that child who stands down there, who, in times of sorrow and pain, times when we understand nothing, times when we want to rebel, can only reach out and cling to her skirts and say to her: “Mother!” 

Like a little child who is frightened and says: “Mother”. Perhaps that is the only word which can express all the feelings we have in those dark moments: Mother!

Let us be still for a moment and look to the Lord. He can understand us, for he experienced all these things. And let us look to our Mother, and like that little child, let us reach out, cling to her skirts and say to her in our hearts: “Mother”. Let us make this prayer in silence; let everyone say it whatever way he or she feels…

We are not alone; we have a Mother; we have Jesus, our older brother.

We are not alone. And we also have many brothers and sisters who, when the disaster struck, came to our assistance. We too feel more like brothers and sisters whenever we help one another, whenever we help each other.

This is all that I feel I have to say to you. Forgive me if I have no other words. But be sure that Jesus does not disappoint us; be sure that the love and tenderness of our Mother does not disappoint us. Clinging to her as sons and daughters with the strength which Jesus our brother gives us, let us now move forward. As brothers and sisters, let us take up our journey. 

Thank you!

Wayne Dyer: what is truth?

My belief is that the truth is a truth until you organize it, and then becomes a lie. 

I don't think that Jesus was teaching Christianity, Jesus was teaching kindness, love, concern, and peace. What I tell people is don't be Christian, be Christ-like. Don't be Buddhist, be Buddha-like. 

As soon as you get into the orthodoxies you get into power plays, right or wrong, some people get into heaven and some people don't, my God is better than your God. No spiritual master who has ever walked among us has wanted that. 

To imagine Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed all sitting at the table trying to come up with a solution for the world's problems, building tanks and making somebody wrong and somebody right just wouldn't be their way. 

They were all about love, unconditional love for all things and all people.

... from an interview with Steve Ferrel


Religion is orthodoxy, rules and historical scriptures maintained by people over long periods of time. Generally people are raised to obey the customs and practices of that religion without question. These are customs and expectations from outside the person and do not fit my definition of spiritual.

There's A Spiritual Solution To Every Problem

Wayne Dyer: one last story

Today, Dr. Wayne Dyer died in Maui County, Hawaii. The self-help guru was 75 years old.

Wayne was known for teaching his ideas through metaphor.

The last lesson he posted on Facebook on the eve of his death used an orange as an example:

I was preparing to speak at an I Can Do It conference and I decided to bring an orange on stage with me as a prop for my lecture. I opened a conversation with a bright young fellow of about twelve who was sitting in the front row.

“If I were to squeeze this orange as hard as I could, what would come out?” I asked him.

He looked at me like I was a little crazy and said, “Juice, of course.”

“Do you think apple juice could come out of it?”

“No!” he laughed.

“What about grapefruit juice?”

“No!”

“What would come out of it?”

“Orange juice, of course.”

“Why? Why when you squeeze an orange does orange juice come out?”

He may have been getting a little exasperated with me at this point.

“Well, it’s an orange and that’s what’s inside.”

I nodded.

“Let’s assume that this orange isn’t an orange, but it’s you. And someone squeezes you, puts pressure on you, says something you don’t like, offends you. And out of you comes anger, hatred, bitterness, fear. Why? The answer, as our young friend has told us, is because that’s what’s inside.”

It’s one of the great lessons of life. What comes out when life squeezes you? When someone hurts or offends you? If anger, pain and fear come out of you, it’s because that’s what’s inside. It doesn’t matter who does the squeezing—your mother, your brother, your children, your boss, the government. If someone says something about you that you don’t like, what comes out of you is what’s inside. And what’s inside is up to you, it’s your choice.

When someone puts the pressure on you and out of you comes anything other than love, it’s because that’s what you’ve allowed to be inside. Once you take away all those negative things you don’t want in your life and replace them with love, you’ll find yourself living a highly functioning life.

Thanks, my young friend, and here’s an orange for you!

Mother Teresa: our hunger

The greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy; it is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. 

We can cure physical diseases with medicine, but the only cure for loneliness, despair, and hopelessness is love. There are many in the world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. 

The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty -- it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality. There's a hunger for love, as there is a hunger for God.
A Simple Path

Ron Rolheiser: our desire for the centre

There is within us a fundamental dis-ease, an unquenchable fire that renders us incapable, in this life, of ever coming to full peace. 

This desire lies at the centre of our lives, in the marrow of our bones, and in the deep recesses of the soul. At the heart of all great literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology, and religion lies the naming and analysing of this desire. 

Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality . . . 

Augustine says: ‘You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.’ Spirituality is about what we do with our unrest.

Matthew Fox: creation is all

Creation is all things and us. 

It is us in relationship with all things. 

All things, the ones we see and the ones we do not; the whirling galaxies and the wild suns, the black holes and the micro-organisms, the trees and the stars, the fish and the whales - the molten lava and the towering snow-capped mountains, the children we give birth to and their children, and theirs, and theirs, and theirs.

Carl Sagan: our Earth

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. 

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Thomas Merton: the path

When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. 

I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. 

Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. 

But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. 

And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. 

I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Thoughts in Solitude

Ron Rolheiser: who am I to judge?

If the Gospel of John is to be believed, then Jesus judges no one. God judges no one. But that needs to be put into context. It doesn't mean that there aren't any moral judgements and that our actions are indifferent to moral scrutiny. There is judgement; except it doesn't work the way it is fantasized inside the popular mind. According to what Jesus tells us in John’s Gospel, judgement works this way:

God’s light, God’s truth, and God’s spirit come into the world. We then judge ourselves according to how we live in the face of them: God’s light has come into the world, but we can choose to live in darkness. 

That’s our decision, our judgement. God’s truth has been revealed, but we can choose to live in falsehood, in lies. That’s our decision, our judgement to make.

And God’s spirit has come into the world, but we can prefer to live outside that spirit, in another spirit. That too is our decision, our judgement.

God judges no one. We judge ourselves. Hence we can also say that God condemns no one, though we can choose to condemn ourselves. And God punishes no one, but we can choose to punish ourselves. Negative moral judgement is self-inflicted. Perhaps this seems abstract, but it is not. 

We know this existentially, we feel the brand of our own actions inside us. To use just one example:  How we judge ourselves by the Holy Spirit.

God’s spirit, the Holy Spirit, is not something so abstract and slippery that it cannot be pinned down. St Paul, in the Epistle to the Galatians, describes the Holy Spirit in terms so clear that they can only be rendered abstract and ambiguous by some self-serving rationalization. How does he describe and define the Holy Spirit?

So as to make things clear he sets up a contrast by first telling us what the Holy Spirit is not. The spirit of God, he tells us is not the spirit of self-indulgence, sexual vice, jealousy, rivalry, antagonism, bad temper, quarrels, drunkenness, or factionalism. 

Anytime we are cultivating these qualities inside of our lives, we should not delude ourselves into thinking we are living in God’s spirit, no matter how frequent, sincere, or pious is our religious practice.  The Holy Spirit, he tells us, is the spirit of charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and chastity. Only when we are living inside of these virtues are we living inside God’s spirit.

So then, this is how judgement happens: God’s spirit (charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness, and chastity) has been revealed. We can choose to live inside the virtues of that spirit or we can choose to live instead inside their opposites (self-indulgence, sexual vice, rivalry, antagonism, bad temper, quarrels, drunkenness, and factionalism). 

One choice leads to a life with God, the other leads away from God. And that choice is ours to make; it doesn't come from the outside. We judge ourselves. God judges no one. God doesn’t need to.

When we view things inside this perspective it also clarifies a number of misunderstandings that cause confusion inside the minds of believers as well as inside the minds of their critics. How often, for instance, do we hear this criticism: If God is all-good, all-loving, and all-merciful, how can God condemn someone to hell for all eternity? A valid question, though not a particularly reflective one.  Why? Because God judges no one; God punishes no one. God condemns no one to hell. We do these things to ourselves: We judge ourselves, we punish ourselves, and we put ourselves in various forms of hell whenever we do choose not to live in the light, the truth, and inside God’s spirit. And that judgement is self-inflicted, that punishment is self-inflicted, and those fires of hell are self-inflicted.

There are a number of lessons in this. 

First, as we have just seen, the fact that God judges no one, helps clarify our theodicy, that is, it helps deflate all those misunderstandings surrounding God’s mercy and the accusation that an all-merciful God can condemn someone to eternal hellfire. 

Beyond this, it is a strong challenge to us to be less judgemental in our lives, to let the wheat and the darnel sort themselves out over time, to let light itself judge darkness, to let truth itself judge falsehood, and to, like Pope Francis, be less quick to offer judgements in God’s name and more prone to say: “Who am I to judge?”

Bob Marley: one love

Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that you’ve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you say and actually want to hear more. You share hopes for the future, dreams that will never come true, goals that were never achieved and the many disappointments life has thrown at you. 

When something wonderful happens, you can’t wait to tell them about it, knowing they will share in your excitement. They are not embarrassed to cry with you when you are hurting or laugh with you when you make a fool of yourself. 

Never do they hurt your feelings or make you feel like you are not good enough, but rather they build you up and show you the things about yourself that make you special and even beautiful. 

There is never any pressure, jealousy or competition but only a quiet calmness when they are around. You can be yourself and not worry about what they will think of you because they love you for who you are. 

The things that seem insignificant to most people such as a note, song or walk become invaluable treasures kept safe in your heart to cherish forever. Memories of your childhood come back and are so clear and vivid it’s like being young again. Colours seem brighter and more brilliant. Laughter seems part of daily life where before it was infrequent or didn’t exist at all. 

A phone call or two during the day helps to get you through a long day’s work and always brings a smile to your face. In their presence, there’s no need for continuous conversation, but you find you’re quite content in just having them nearby. Things that never interested you before become fascinating because you know they are important to this person who is so special to you. 

You think of this person on every occasion and in everything you do. Simple things bring them to mind like a pale blue sky, gentle wind or even a storm cloud on the horizon. You open your heart knowing that there’s a chance it may be broken one day and in opening your heart, you experience a love and joy that you never dreamed possible. 

You find that being vulnerable is the only way to allow your heart to feel true pleasure that’s so real it scares you. You find strength in knowing you have a true friend and possibly a soul mate who will remain loyal to the end. Life seems completely different, exciting and worthwhile. 

Your only hope and security is in knowing that they are a part of your life.

Alan Paton: live life

We do not know, we do not know. 

We shall live from day to day, and put more locks on the doors, and get a fine fierce dog when the fine fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold on to our handbags more tenaciously; and the beauty of the trees by night, and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things we shall forego. 

We shall forego the coming home drunken through the midnight streets, and the evening walk over the star-lit veld. We shall be careful, and knock this off our lives, and knock that off our lives, and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution. 

And our lives will shrink, but they shall be the lives of superior beings; and we shall live with fear, but at least it will not be a fear of the unknown. 

And the conscience shall be thrust down; the light of life shall not be extinguished, but be put under a bushel, to be preserved for a generation that will live by it again, in some day not yet come; and how it will come, and when it will come, we shall not think about at all.

Cry, the Beloved Country

Sebastian of Optina: wasting time

A story from Optina monastery in the tradition of the desert fathers ...

What is more precious than anything in the world? 
Time! 
And what do we waste uselessly and without being sorry? Time! 
What do we not value and what do we disregard more than anything? Time! 
When we waste time, we lose ourselves… 
Time is given by God to use correctly for the salvation of the soul and the acquisition of the life to come … 
The Lord will call us to account for having stolen time for our own whims, and for not using it for God and our souls.

Sebastian of Optina 

The desert fathers: money

An important person came from abroad to Scetis bringing much gold with him, and he asked the priest to give some of it to the brothers.  The priest said, "The brothers do not need it," but as the other was very insistent, he put a basket filled with gold at the door of the church.  The priest said, "Let anyone who needs it take some."  But nobody came, and some did not even notice it was there.  So the priest said to the visitor, "God has seen your charity. Go, and give it to the poor."  Greatly edified, the man went away.

Julian of Norwich: all will be well

In my folly, before this time I often wondered why, by the great foreseeing wisdom of God, the onset of sin was not prevented: for then, I thought, all should have been well. 

This impulse [of thought] was much to be avoided, but nevertheless I mourned and sorrowed because of it, without reason and discretion.

But Jesus, who in this vision informed me of all that is needed by me, answered with these words and said: ‘It was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'

These words were said most tenderly, showing no manner of blame to me nor to any who shall be saved.

Julian of Norwich: God is in us all

Because of the great, infinite love which God has for all humankind, he makes no distinction in love between the blessed soul of Christ and the lowliest of the souls that are to be saved . . . . We should highly rejoice that God dwells in our soul and still more highly should we rejoice that our soul dwells in God. Our soul is made to be God's dwelling place, and the dwelling place of our soul is God who was never made. 

Thomas Merton: our vocation

Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny… 

This means to say that we should not passively exist, but actively participate in His creative freedom, in our own lives, and in the lives of others, by choosing the truth. To put it better, we are even called to share with God the work of creating the truth of our identity. 

We can evade this responsibility by playing with masks, and this pleases us because it can appear at times to be a free and creative way of living. It is quite easy, it seems, to please everyone. But in the long run the cost and the sorrow come very high. 

To work out our own identity in God, which the Bible calls “working out our salvation,” is a labour that requires sacrifice and anguish, risk and many tears. It demands close attention to reality at every moment, and great fidelity to God as He reveals Himself, obscurely, in the mystery of each new situation. 

Seeds

Dorothy Day: nothing we can do but love

The sense of futility is one of the greatest evils of the day…

People say, “What can one person do? What is the sense of our small effort?” They cannot see that we can only lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.

What we would like to do is change the world - make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute–the rights of the worthy and the unworthy poor, in other words - we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. 

We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbour, to love our enemy as our friend.

Thomas Merton: my inner self

There is a silent self within us whose presence is disturbing precisely because it is so silent: it can’t be spoken. It has to remain silent. To articulate it, to verbalize it, is to tamper with it, and in some ways to destroy it.

Now let us frankly face the fact that our culture is one which is geared in many ways to help us evade any need to face this inner, silent self.

We live in a state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, or the generalized noise of what goes on around us all the time. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half diluted: we are not quite ‘thinking,’ not entirely responding, but we are more or less there. 

We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn, yet not completely available. It cannot be said that we are really participating in anything and we may, in fact, be half conscious of our alienation and resentment. 

Yet we derive a certain comfort from the vague sense that we are ‘part of’ something – although we are not quite able to define what that something is – and probably wouldn't want to define it even if we could. We just float along in the general noise. 

Resigned and indifferent, we share semi-consciously in the mindless mind of Muzak and radio commercials which passes for ‘reality.’ 

Essential Writings

Marianne Williamson: it's my choice

Happiness is the choice I make today. 

It does not rest on my circumstances, but on my frame of mind. I surrender to God any emotional habits that lead me down the path of unhappiness, and pray for guidance in shifting my thoughts. 

In cultivating the habits of happiness, I attract the people and situations that match its frequency. I smile more often, give praise more often, give thanks more often, and am glad more often. 

For such is my choice today.

Thomas Merton: born to love

Love is our true destiny. 

We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another. 

We do not discover the secret of our lives merely by study and calculation in our own isolated meditations. 

The meaning of our life is a secret that has to be revealed to us in love, by the one we love. 

And if this love is unreal, the secret will not be found, the meaning will never reveal itself, the message will never be decoded. At best, we will receive a scrambled and partial message, one that will deceive and confuse us. 

We will never be fully real until we let ourselves fall in love – either with another human person or with God.

Love and Living

Thomas Merton: we are one organism

Only when we see ourselves in our true human context, as members of a race which is intended to be one organism and ‘one body,’ will we begin to understand the positive importance not only of the successes but of the failures and accidents in our lives. 

My successes are not my own. The way to them was prepared by others. 

The fruit of my labours is not my own: for I am preparing the way for the achievements of another. 

Nor are my failures my own. They may spring from failure of another, but they are also compensated for by another’s achievement. 

Therefore the meaning of my life is not to be looked for merely in the sum total of my own achievements. It is seen only in the complete integration of my achievements and failures with the achievements and failures of my own generation, and society, and time.

No Man is an Island

Mohandas Gandhi: the kingdom of God is within you

The Kingdom of God is within us and that we can realise it not by saying, "Lord, Lord," but by doing God's will and work. Therefore if we wait for the Kingdom to come, as something coming from outside, we shall be sadly mistaken.

Do you know that there are thousands of villages where people are starving and which are on the brink of ruin? If we would listen to the voice of God, I assure you we would hear God say that we are taking God's name in vain if we do not think of the poor and help them. If you cannot render the help that they need, it is no use talking of service of God and service of the poor. Try to identify yourselves with the poor by actually helping them.

Thérèse de Lisieux: the kingdom is within you

I understand and I know from experience that: The kingdom of God is within you. 

Jesus has no need of books or teachers to instruct souls; He teaches without the noise of words. 

Never have I heard Him speak, but I feel that He is within me at each moment; He is guiding and inspiring me with what I must say and do. 

I find just when I need them certain lights that I had not seen until then, and it isn't most frequently during my hours of prayer that these are most abundant but rather in the midst of my daily occupations. 

The Story of a Soul

CS Lewis: longings

We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but it does not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see.

But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as an inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then we will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.

For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed into Nature. Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it is the symbol Scripture invites me to use. We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendour which she fitfully reflects.

Annie Dillard: are you really ready for Mass?

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?… It is madness to wear ladies hats straw hat and velvet hats to church; we should be wearing crash helmet! Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to the pews.

Teaching a Stone to Talk

Thérèse de Lisieux: little flowers

If a little flower could speak, it seems to me that it would tell us quite simply all that God has done for it, without hiding any of its gifts. It would not, under the pretext of humility, say that it was not pretty, or that it had not a sweet scent, that the sun had withered its petals, or the storm bruised its stem, if it knew that such were not the case.

... 

I understood that every flower created by Him is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would no longer be enamelled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord's living garden.

Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux

Marianne Williamson: you must shine

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. 

We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ 

Actually, who are you not to be? 

You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. 

We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. 

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

A Return to Love 

Henri Nouwen: chosen

First of all, you have to keep unmasking the world about you for what it is: manipulative, controlling, power-hungry, and, in the long run, destructive. The world tells you many lies about who you are, and you simply have to be realistic enough to remind yourself of this. 

Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: "These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God's eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe in an everlasting belief."

Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World

Bernadette Roberts: faith

Christianity is very mystical, and our most mystical gift, our most mystical experience is Faith. The truth is unbelievable, that is why we need faith.

Faith leads to understanding; understanding does not lead to faith."

... from a talk given at the Essence of Christian Mysticism retreat

Daniel O'Leary: the grace of our lives

Theologian Karl Rahner hears God whispering to us on the night before Christmas. "I am your life. I am your time.Tell that to everything that exists, everything that you are. Say only that one thing, and then it is Christmas for you. Say only 'You are here'. That is enough."

And like metal to a magnet it is this sacramental vision that is already drawing the world to the world of Pope Francis. And why is this? It is because with confident hands he is once again parting the veils of  the Temple for us, and we glimpse the miracle of what reality is and who we ourselves are, flawed but immortal diamonds reflecting the beauty of God.

in Tui Motu December 2014

Anthony De Mello: unintended consequences

The Ministry of Agriculture decreed that sparrows were a menace to crops and should be exterminated.

When this was done, hoards of insects that the sparrows would have eaten descended on the harvest and began to ravage the crops, whereupon the Ministry of Agriculture came up with the idea of costly pesticides.

The pesticides made the food expensive. They also made it a hazard to health. Too late it was discovered that it was the sparrows who, through feeding on the crops, managed to keep the food wholesome and inexpensive.

Heart of the Enlightened

Bernadette Roberts: grace

The way it goes is that God takes something from us and then waits for our reaction.  Usually He takes something we never even knew we had to give and this is because God works at the unconscious level, while we can only work at the conscious level or with what we know about ourselves.  So God's work is really undercover, for which reason we need absolute faith and trust in what we do not know or cannot see - ourselves or God.   

This is what the doctrine of Grace is all about; it affirms God's continuous work in us, a work we cannot see with the conscious mind and rarely experience.  This is why what can be done on the conscious level is nothing compared to God's work (Grace) on a wholly unconscious level. 

Altogether this means that what we give is not of great consequence; it is what God takes or consumes that is important.  So we have to be content with where we are NOW.  When we realize that God wants to take something from us (first on the unconscious level), then we cooperate by surrendering it, by letting it go. 

A Passage Through Self

Auguste Renoir: beauty remains

Ever since he was young, the painter Henri Matisse used to visit the great Renoir at his atelier every week. When Renoir was crippled with arthritis, Matisse began to visit him daily, taking food, paintbrushes and paint, always trying to convince the master that he worked too hard. He needed to rest a little.

One day, noting that each brush stroke made Renoir groan of pain, Matisse couldn’t stay silent: “Great master, your work is already vast and important. Why continue to torture yourself that way?”

“Very simple,” Renoir answered. “Beauty remains; pain ends up passing.”

Bernadette Roberts: common sense

We must always keep a distance or some doubt regarding our belief systems, and even all our divine experiences. We do this by remaining absolutely true, scathingly true, to what we honestly know and experience ourselves. We have to walk totally alone and follow only the inner guide, which guide is akin to common sense. My own mother felt that common sense was man's most divine faculty.

The temptation is to see our experiences in the light of those who have gone before – those on top of the pile, of course – but in this way the same errors are just passed down from one generation to another.

Personal Letter, 1987

Fred McFeely Rogers: the helpers

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping,' she once said. To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers - so many caring people in this world.

Fred McFeely Rogers (Children's TV presenter "Mr. Rogers")

Paulo Coelho: do you feel useful?

Ask a flower in the field: ‘Do you feel useful? After all, you do nothing but produce the same flowers over and over?’
And the flower will answer: ‘I am beautiful, and beauty is my reason for living.’

Ask the river: ‘Do you feel useful, given that all you do is to keep flowing in the same direction?’
And the river will answer: ‘I’m not trying to be useful, I’m trying to be a river.’

Nothing in this world is useless in the eyes of God. Not a leaf from a tree falls, not a hair from your head, not even an insect dies because it was of no use. Everything has a reason to exist.

Even you, the person asking the question. ‘I’m useless’ is the answer you give yourself.

Soon that answer will poison you and you will die while still alive, even though you still walk, eat, sleep and try to have a little fun whenever possible.

Don’t try to be useful. Try to be yourself: that is enough, and that makes all the difference.

from Manuscript Found in Accra

Thomas Merton: at our center

At the centre of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. 

This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It is so to speak His name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely ... I have no programme for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander