By Anne Lamott
“Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best possible conditions under which to pray.) Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up. The opposite may be true: We may not be able to get it together until after we show up in such miserable shape. Continue reading
Rabbi Hillel: “If not now, when?”
Rabbi Yaakov Meyer: “Even the seemingly insignificant act is significant when it is part of many cumulative acts. Great people aren’t made from one great action; rather they become great via consistently good ‘small acts.'”
Albert Einstein: “There are two ways to live. You can live as if nothing is a miracle. You can live as if everything is a miracle.”
Solomon Ibn Gabirol: “Man is wise only while in search of wisdom; when he imagines he has attained it, he is a fool.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement… Get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
By Sue Monk Kidd
When I was six years old someone asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” At that age, living in a small Georgia town in the 1950s, I could only think of four careers for women—they were the only stories I knew: teacher, nurse, secretary, and housewife. By some process of elimination, I picked nurse. From that moment on, I began to get little nurse kits for my birthdays.
“One amongst His Teachings is this, that love and good faith must so dominate the human heart that men will regard the stranger as a familiar friend, the malefactor as one of their own, the alien even as a loved one, the enemy as a companion dear and close.”
Derived from Parks, Big Questions, Worthy Dreams (Pages 34-35), Sharon Daloz
Reflecting on the political cynicism of American society and the ironic detachment that characterizes many in his generation, twenty-four-year-old Jedediah Purdy writes: “We doubt the possibility of being at home in the world, yet we desire that home above all else.”
Fr. Memo: “Spirituality is a place. It is a place of connection. It is a place of who we are and who we are to become. From a theological perspective, that ‘place’ is where the spirit is.”
Ronald Rolheiser:
“Whatever the expression, everyone is ultimately talking about the same thing – an unquenchable fire, a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, a hunger, a loneliness, a gnawing nostalgia, a wildness that cannot be tamed, a congenital all-embracing ache that lies at the center of human experience and is the ultimate force that drives everything else. This dis-ease is universal. Desire gives no exemptions.”
“What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality. Spirituality is what we do with the madness of life. It is what we do with the fire that burns within us. What shapes our actions is our spirituality. Spirituality concerns what we do with desire.”
The corporal works of mercy (flowing from the Gospel, especially Matthew 25: 31-46) are to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, cloth the naked, visit the imprisoned, shelter the homeless, visit the sick and bury the dead. The spiritual works of mercy, also rooted in the Christian scripture, are to counsel the doubtful, instruct the ignorant, admonish sinners, comfort the afflicted, forgive offenses, bear wrongs patiently, and pray for the living and dead. Continue reading
From Matthew 25:35-40 (Christian scripture)
“For I was hungry and you gave me food; I was thirsty and you gave me drink; I was a stranger and you made me welcome; naked and you clothed me; sick and you visited me; in prison and you came to see me. . . . I tell you solemnly, in so far as you did this to one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to me.”
From Dhammapada 1:5 (Collected sayings of the Buddha/Buddhist Scripture)
“In this world, hate never dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible.”