Grace

It is grace that forms the void inside of us and it is grace alone that can fill the void.
Simone Weil

God of ecstacy

“This ‘supreme’ and ‘surpassing’ reality by which the human being is transformed and given a new ultimate purpose is none other than the strange God who is powerful enough to become powerless, great enough to become small…. The Incarnation is the surest sign that God is best described as ecstacy.”
Robert Barron

The Best Things

The best things cannot be talked about.
The second best things are usually misunderstood because we are using images and metaphors to point towards the first.
So we spend most of our lives talking about the third best things because we need to talk and we long to be understood.
Richard Rohr

Busyness

In our culture, we suffer from, among other things, a glut of words, a glut of experiences, and, yes, a glut of tapes, books, and ideas. When we have too many words, we tend not to value them, even if they might contain life for us. We find it hard to be a disciple with a beginner’s mind because we’ve heard it all before, from many directions. We can’t absorb it all.”
Richard Rohr

Are we on Vacation?

“If we bring to a retreat all the baggage and mentality of business as usual, we aren’t really making a ‘retreat.’”
Richard Rohr

Change

“God does not love us if we change;
God loves us so that we can change.”
Richard Rohr

Incarnation

“… only a reality that is not a being in the world, even the supreme being, could ever become a creature while at the same time remaining true to itself.”
Robert Barron

Consequences of the Gospel of Life

[The Gospel of Life] also involves making clear all the consequences of this Gospel. These can be summed up as follows: human life, as a gift of God, is sacred and inviolable. For this reason procured abortion and euthanasia are absolutely unacceptable. Not only must human life not be taken, but it must be protected with loving concern. The meaning of life is found in giving and receiving love, and in this light human sexuality and procreation reach their true and full significance. Love also gives meaning to suffering and death; despite the mystery which surrounds them, they can become saving events. Respect for life requires that science and technology should always be at the service of man and his integral development. Society as a whole must respect, defend and promote the dignity of every human person, at every moment and in every condition of that person's life.
Pope John Paul II

Culture of Life

It is therefore a service of love which we are all committed to ensure to our neighbor, that his or her life may be always defended and promoted, especially when it is weak or threatened. It is not only a personal but a social concern which we must all foster: a concern to make unconditional respect for human life the foundation of a renewed society.
We are asked to love and honour the life of every man and woman and to work with perseverance and courage so that our time, marked by all too many signs of death, may at last witness the establishment of a new culture of life, the fruit of the culture of truth and of love.
Pope John Paul II

Suffering

Suffering always changes us, but it does not necessarily change us for the better.
John Ortberg

Why know Scripture?

The purpose of knowing Scripture is not to help us get a 100 score on the heavenly entrance exam. It is to help us become equipped for good works.
John Ortberg

Guidance

God’s purpose in guidance is not to get us to perform the right actions. His purpose is to help us become the right kind of people.
John Ortberg

Forgiveness

Many of us struggle, not so much with understanding the message of forgiveness, but with living in the reality of it.
John Ortberg

Community and Conversion

“The monks have come to know that their community is constituted by their commitment to conversion. And they know that conversion is turning from themselves to their brethren in community; and to Christ in prayer; and to God in Christ.”
John Main, O.S.B.

The Human Search

I think we can state the message like this: The search of all people in every age has been a search for some ultimate meaning perceptible among all the complexities and paradoxes of life. It is also a search for some ultimate authority in whom and on whom we can place complete reliance and certainty without losing our human self-respect or integrity. Idolatry and mere religiosity have only ever provided temporary satisfaction for this search. Our particular message which we have received by the manifold disclosure of God’s self-revelation that culminates in the person of Jesus is that these ultimate goals of meaning and authority are to be found within the depths of the human soul – within the mystery of our own personhood. It is the treasure buried in the field of our own hearts.
John Main, O.S.B.

Cloud of Unknowing

“The Cloud of Unknowing teaches that we can achieve communion with God only through the Grace of divine Love. To prepare ourselves to receive this gift, we must enter a state of quiet stillness, suspended between heaven and earth. Above – between us and God – lies a mysterious “cloud of unknowing”, which our understanding can never penetrate. Between us and the world, we must create a “cloud of forgetting”, leaving conscious thought and desire below. In this timeless place of forgetting and unknowing, we may begin to hear that for which we are listening.
John Luther Adams

Contemplation

“The essence of contemplative experience is voluntary surrender, purposeful immersion in the fullness of a presence far larger than ourselves.”
John Luther Adams

Perfection

“To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often. “
John Henry Cardinal Newman

Proof of God?

“a cable which is made up of a number of separate threads, each feeble, yet together as sufficient as an iron rod. An iron rod represents mathematical or strict demonstration; a cable represents moral demonstration, which is an assemblage of probablilities, separately insufficient for certainty, but when put together irrefragable.”
John Henry Newman

Liturgy and Justice

I note that while there are several places where God rejects liturgy for want of justice, I know of no biblical location where God rejects justice for want of liturgy. Liturgy is the symbolic celebration of divine justice so that in the latter's absence the former is empty.
John Dominic Crossan

Defining love

“God is love” (1 Jn. 4:16). But someone eager to define this is blindly striving to measure the sand in the ocean…
John Climacus

Wisdom

“The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know…. Do justly, Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough…. So questions and so answers your affectionate grandfather.”
John Adams

Virtue of War?

War necessarily brings with it some virtues, and great and heroic virtues too… What horrid creatures we men are, that we cannot be virtuous without murdering one another.”
John Adams

Public Service

“Public business, my son, must always be done by somebody. It will be done by somebody or other. If wise men refuse it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not. A young man should weigh well his plans. Integrity should be preserved in all events, as essential to his happiness, through every stage of his existence. His first maxim then should be to place his honor out of reach of all men. In order to do this he must make it a rule never to become dependent on public employments for subsistence. Let him have a trade, a profession, a farm, a shop, something where he can honestly live, and then he may engage in public affairs, if invited, upon independent principles. My advice to my children is to maintain an independent character.”
John Adams

Reading

“I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.”
John Adams

Community and Evil

“True community is different [than issue-oriented groups] because of the realization that the evil is inside – not just inside the community, but inside me.”
Jean Vanier

Community and Growth

“Frequently, a call of Jesus is revealed to us as we feel truly at home in a community and discover that the community for us is a place of growth in love and in total acceptance of the good news of Jesus. That is one of the signs that Jesus is saying to us: ‘Come and live with these brothers and sisters who may squabble together like the first of my disciples, but this is where I am calling you to be today. It might be difficult but it will be a place of growth in love for you. It is there that I will reveal to you my love.’”
Jean Vanier

Community

“We will only stay in community if we have gone through the passage from choosing community to knowing that we have been chosen for community.”
Jean Vanier

Self-knowledge

“[Living with disabled persons] I discovered something which I had never confronted before, that there were immense forces of darkness and hatred within my own heart. At particular moments of fatigue or stress, I saw forces of hate rising up inside me, and the capacity to hurt someone who was weak and was provoking me! That, I think, was what caused me the most pain: to discover who I really am, and to realize that maybe I did not want to know who I really was. I did not want to admit all the garbage inside me. And then I had to decide whether I would just continue to pretend that I was okay and throw myself into hyperactivity, projects where I could forget all the garbage and prove to others how good I was.”
Jean Vanier

Serving the Poor

“People may come to our communities [L’Arche] because they want to serve the poor; they will only stay once they have discovered that they themselves are the poor. And then they discover something extraordinary: that Jesus came to bring the good news to the poor, not to those who serve the poor!”
Jean Vanier

True love

“To love someone is not first of all to do things for them, but to reveal to them their beauty and value, to say to them through our attitude: ‘You are beautiful. You are important. I trust you. You can trust yourself.’”
Jean Vanier

Fruitful vs. Successful

We have been called to be fruitful--not successful, not productive, not accomplished. Success comes from strength, stress, and human effort. Fruitfulness comes from vulnerability and the admission of our own weakness.
Henri J. M. Nouwen

Patience

Patience is not waiting passively until someone else does something. Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are. When we are impatient, we try to get away from where we are. We behave as if the real thing will happen tomorrow, later, and somewhere else. Be patient and trust that the treasure you are looking for is hidden in the ground on which you stand.
Henri J.M. Nouwen

Religious Dialogue

No peace among the nations without peace among the religions.
No peace among the religions without dialogue between the religions.
No dialogue between the religions without investigation of the foundation of the religions.
Hans Kung

Religion

Religion is “a particular social realization of a relationship to an absolute ground of meaning, to an absolutely final concern, to something with which I am unconditionally involved.”
Hans Kung

Spiritual Birth

“Here [in the spiritual realm] birth is not the result of intervention from outside, as happens with bodily creatures who reproduce in an external way. Spiritual birth is the result of free choice and we are thus, in a sense, our own parents, creating ourselves as we want to be, freely fashioning ourselves according to the pattern of our choice.”
Gregory of Nyssa

Desire

“The language of souls is their desire.”
Gregory of Nyssa

Suffering

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.”
Gordon Allport

Gandhi on Jesus

“I tell the Hindus that their lives will be imperfect if they do not also study reverently the teaching of Jesus.”

Gandhi

Suffering

“He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.”

Frederick Nietzche

Obedience

“We [parents] want virtuous obedience. We want to train the habit of control, doing what is right because it is right. Children need to learn to focus on God’s will, not their own and on a Spirit-inspired control, not on self-control. Remember, a mature adult will die to self and be controlled by the Lord. We are training our children to become mature adults.”

Elizabeth Foss

Analogy

The mystery that is beyond God himself,
The Ineffable,
That gives its name to everything,
Is complete affirmation, complete negation,
Beyond all affirmation and all negation.

Dionysius the Areopagite

Humanity

“When we proclaim that someone is subhuman, we not only remove for them the possibility of change and repentance, we also remove from them moral responsibility.”
Desmond Tutu

Healing

A friend of mine once remarked when I looked physically worn down, "Even God cannot play on a broken violin."
Francis MacNutt, Healing p. 59

Mark Twain on Choirs

"The congregation being fully assembled, now, the bell rang once more,
to warn laggards and stragglers, and then a solemn hush fell upon the
church which was only broken by the tittering and whispering of the
choir in the gallery. The choir always tittered and whispered all
through the service. There was once a church choir that was not
ill-bred, but I have forgotten where it was, now. It was a great many
years ago, and I can scarcely remember anything about it, but I think
it was in some foreign country."
Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer chapter 5

Elizabeth Ann Seton

"keep well to what you believe to be the grace of the moment... only
do your best and leave the rest to our dear God."

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, A Retreat With Elizabeth Seton p. 17

Being Chosen

“When we look into the Selectiveness which the Christians attribute to God we find in it none of that ‘favoritism’ which we were afraid of. The ‘chosen’ people are chosen not for their own sake (certainly not for their own honour or pleasure) but for the sake of the unchosen. Abraham is told that ‘in his seed’ (the chosen nation) ‘all nations shall be blest’. That nation has been chosen to bear a heavy burden. Their sufferings heal others. On the finally selected Woman falls the utmost depth of maternal anguish. Her Son, the incarnate God, is a ‘man of sorrows’; the one Man into whom Deity descended, the one Man who can be lawfully adored, is pre-eminent for suffering.”
C.S. Lewis

Faith

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
C.S. Lewis

Three Elements of Reason

Firstly, there is the reception of the facts to reason about. These facts are received either from our own senses, or from the report of other minds; that is, either experience or authority supplies us with our material…
Secondly, there is the direct, simple act of the mind perceiving self-evident truth, as when we see that if A and B both equal C, then they are equal to each other. This act I call Intuition.
Thirdly, there is an art or skill of arranging the facts so as to yield a series of such intuitions which linked together produce a proof of the truth or falsehood of the propositions we are considering.

C.S. Lewis

More on Conscience

[Conscience] can mean:
(a) the pressure a man feels upon his will to do what he thinks is right;
(b) his judgment as to what the content of right and wrong are.
In sense (a) conscience is always to be followed. It is the sovereign of the universe, which “if it had power as it has right, would absolutely rule the world.” It is not to be argued with, but obeyed, and even to question it is to incur guilt.
But in sense (b) it is a very different matter. People may be mistaken about wrong and right; most people in some degree are mistaken.

C.S. Lewis

Conscience

Conscience, then, means the whole man engaged in a particular subject matter.

C.S. Lewis

Human Beings

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.

C.S. Lewis

Charlotte Mason on Education

“Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.”
– Parents Motto

“I am, I can, I ought, I will.”
- Children’s motto

Charlotte Mason

True Discipline

“Discipline is not punishment – What is discipline? Look at the word; there is no hint of punishment in it. A disciple is a follower, and discipline is the state of the follower… He who would draw disciples does not trust to force; but to these three things:
To the attraction of his doctrine
To the persuasion of his presentation
To the enthusiasm of his disciples;
So the parent has teachings of the perfect life which he knows how to present continually with winning force until the children are quickened with such zeal for virtue and holiness as carries them forward with leaps and bounds.”

Source Unknown

Empathy

I experience an accurate, empathic understanding of the person’s world as my own, but without ever losing the “as if” quality. This is empathy. To understand the person’s feelings, never in doubt about what the person means; my remarks fit in just right with the person’s mood and content, and my tone of voice conveys the complete ability to share the person’s feelings.

Carl Rogers

Unconditional Positive Regard

An acceptance of and caring for the person as a separate person, with permission to have their own feelings and experiences.

Carl Rogers

Congruence (Humility?)

I am exactly who I am not a façade, or a role, or a pretense, but an accurate matching of experience with awareness in the moment.

Carl Rogers

St. Bonaventure on Contemplation

“If you wish to know how such things [contemplation] come about, consult grace, not doctrine; desire, not understanding; prayerful groaning, not studious reading; the spouse, not the teacher; God, not man; darkness, not clarity. Consult not light but the fire that completely inflames the mind and carries it over to God and transports a fervor and blaze of love. This fire is God…. Christ starts the flame with the fire and heat of his intense suffering…. Whoever loves this death may see God, for this is beyond doubt true: ‘No man sees me and still lives' [Ex. 33:20]. Let us die, then, and pass over into the darkness.”

St. Bonaventure

Prophets

The Word of God comes to a person and makes that person a prophet. The prophet in turn discloses the Word received. The prophet, under the power of the Word, names ways of living that must be changed. The prophet announces the particular behaviors that are required right now as a response to a new age that is promised. And the new age is proclaimed in fantasized images of considerable particularity.

Bernard J. Lee S.M. Jesus and the Metaphors… p. 116

Modes of Revelation

It is a scholastic dictum that “whatever is received is received according to the nature of the receiver.” If I want to address a friend at a great distance, and the friend has only a shortwave receiver, it does me no good to speak into the telephone. God’s initiatives are always incarnated in the operational modes of those for whom he cares. The caring of God is an actual event, and like all events, it has a structure. The caring of God is partly determined by God’s own free decisions about the ways in which God will bestow love. But it is also determined by the historical configurations of those who are to be the recipients of that love.

Bernard J. Lee S.M. Jesus and the Metaphors of God

Metaphor

… metaphor, far from being limited to a linguistic artifact, is characterized by its epistemological function of discovering new meanings. What is at stake is still knowing in process but considered in its nascent moment. In this sense, metaphor is a thought process before being a language process.

Paul Ricoeur

Myth

“[Myth] is the language of imaginative insight into ultimate reality, which not only reveals the truth under a symbol, but also enables those who receive the myth to participate in the experience of the poet or prophet who communicates it.”

Bede Griffiths

Like a drop of water

“It may be that in the state of union, as many mystics have testified, the soul no longer experiences a difference between itself and God, but the difference remains. The very purpose of creation was that other beings, both men and angels, and through them the whole creation, should participate each in its own unique way in the one being of God. The state of union is often illustrated by saying that it is like a drop of water merging in the ocean, but it can equally be said that it is like the ocean present in the drop. In the ultimate reality, the whole is present in every part and every part parcipates in the being of the whole.”

Bede Griffiths

Individuality?

“But the soul that enters into this state of bliss (saccidananda) does not lose its individual being. It participates in the state of universal being and consciousness, it enjoys perfect bliss, but that personal being which was conferred on it by creation, that unique mode of participation in the divine being, which constitutes it as a person, is eternal.”

Bede Griffiths

Saccidananda

“There are schools of Hindu thought which consider that when the spirit of man (the Jivatman) is thus united with the spirit of God (the paramatman), the individuality is lost. But this is not necessarily so. It is true that the individual soul ceases to exist as a separate being. It is transfigured by the light and participates in the very being and consciousness of God. This is the state of saccidananda, the state of being (sat) in pure consciousness (cit), in which is found absolute bliss (ananda).”

Bede Griffiths

Contemplation

“Contemplation is a habit of mind which enables the soul to keep in a state of recollection in the presence of God whatever may be the work with which we are occupied.”

Bede Griffiths

Marriage

“The whole of Christianity really centres on this transformation of human love which is brought about by the love of Christ. In Christian marriage man and woman can really love one another with an infinite love, because each gives himself to Christ in the other. This is the total sacrifice of love for which our nature craves. Like everything else in Christianity it is a sacramental love; it is a revelation of the Spirit in the flesh. In this relation sex becomes what it was always intended to be, a symbol or sacramental sign of love. The union of spirits is brought about by the union of flesh.”

Bede Griffiths

Disillusionment

“This was to give me one of the greatest lessons of my life. I had built up an ideal, which had very little relation to reality, and as soon as I arrived I realized that I had made a mistake. The life had none of the attraction which I had expected. It was not that there was anything wrong with the life itself, but simply that I had been beguiled by my imagination. I realized then that what I was seeking was a fantasy under which my own self-will was disguised. I realized then that the will of God was not to be found in following my own desires, however spiritual they might seem, but in seeking to adapt myself to those circumstances in which by divine providence I actually found myself.”

Bede Griffiths

Poetry

“… poetry is the means by which the feelings and the imagination are educated and their powers developed.”

Bede Griffiths

Resurrection

“A community which trusts in God rather than in the righteousness of its “cause” can always be crushed, but from that crushing will come resurrection. There is a hidden strength in being vulnerable, open, and non-violent, in being a people of the resurrection, knowing that we are loved and that God is guiding us, in all our fragility and littleness.”
Jean Vanier

Sexuality

“[D. H. Lawrence] taught me what I believe is the only true solution to the problem [of sexuality], namely that sex is essentially a ‘holy’ instinct. It is not merely good in itself… but it is something ‘sacred.’ The evil of immorality in sex is not merely that of self-indulgence, but the profanation of something sacred, the desecration of a holy instinct which arises from the depths of our unconscious being and is the bearer of life or death. I think that Lawrence first made me begin to see that the evil of our civilization lay in this, that it had desecrated the sources of life. Primitive man might often be immoral and cruel and superstitious, but he retained a sense of ‘holy’; he was still in contact with the inner sources of life, and therefore there were beauty and dignity in his life. We, with all our science and reason and morality had lost this sense of the ‘holy’ and therefore all our works were ugly and our minds were sterile.”

Bede Griffiths

Kinds of Truth

“There was, of course, something one-sided in all this. [The Priority of imagination over reason.] I was oblivious of every aspect of truth except that which appealed to me. But at the same time I grasped a truth of great importance. I had realized the danger of abstract thought when it loses touch with the concrete realities of life, and I had discovered the truth of experience, which is mediated through the imagination, and which often gives a deeper insight into reality than abstract thought.”

Bede Griffiths

The Human Vocation

“The human being is an animal who has received the vocation to become God.”

Basil the Great

Desire

Desire for vision: Faith.
Desire for Possesion: Hope.
Desire for love: Charity.
By expectation, God increases desire.
By desire, he empties out souls.
In emptying them out, he makes them more capable of receiving him.”

Augustine, Commentary on 1 John

Eucharist

What you see...is bread and a cup. This is what your eyes report to you. But your faith has need to be taught that the bread is the body of Christ, the cup the blood of Christ.... If, then, you wish to understand the body of Christ, listen to the Apostle as he says to the faithful “You are the body of Christ and His members”.... You reply “Amen” to that which you are, and by replying you consent. For you hear “The body of Christ,” and you reply “Amen.” Be a member of the body of Christ so that your “Amen” may be true.... Be what you see, and receive what you are.

(Augustine, Sermon 272)

Freedom and Religion

On my arrival in the United States it was the religious aspect of the country that first struck my eye. As I prolonged my stay, I perceived the great political consequences that flowed from these new facts. Among us, I had seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom almost always move in contrary directions. Here I found them united intimately with one another: they reigned together on the same soil.

Alexis de Tocqueville quoted in Noll, American God p. 6

Imagination

“Through the five senses the soul feels, knows, and understands, coordinating their deliverances as a unity. The wonderful conjunction of body and soul has its closest bond in the imagination (the image forming faculty) which is not more of soul than it is of body and vice versa.

Aidan Nichols, Epiphany Ch. 1

Responsibility for Creation

The world was not made by man.
The earth is the Lord’s,
Not a derelict.
What we own, we owe.
“How shall I ever repay to the Lord
All his bounties to me!” (Psalm 116:12)

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Living

Living is not a private affair of the individual.
Living is what man does with God’s time, what man does with God’s world.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Holiness

Just to be is a blessing.
Just to live is holy.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Trust

The great problem in the life of man is whether to trust, to have faith in God. The great problem in the life of God is whether to trust, to have faith in man.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Worship

Worship
Is a way of seeing the world
In the light of God.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

Sin

Man’s sin is a failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is servant of God.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

To pray
Is to know how to stand still
And to dwell upon a word.

Abraham Joshua Heschel 1907-1972

What do most of us know about the substance of words? Estranged from the soil of the soul, our words do not grow as fruits of insights, but are found as sapless clichés, refuse in the backyard of intelligence. To the man of our age nothing is as familiar and nothing as trite as words… We all live in them, feel in them, think in them, but failing to uphold their independent dignity, to respect their power and weight, they turn waif, elusive – a mouthful of dust…

Abraham Joshua Heschel 1907-1972

Quotes and Snippets

I've realized that my "Exploring the Kingdom - Reflections" blog isn't too interesting for anyone but me. I've decided to use this blog to record quotes and other snippets I find interesting with minimal comment.