love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star
··· Northwest ···
Boredom and Sloth
Habitual boredom, boredom not just with a specific task like chopping wood for ten hours a day but boredom that is like the sky spread over everything, not only leads to sin, but it is in itself a sin. The medievals called it sloth (acedia or akedia), one of the seven deadly sins.
Sloth is not simply laziness. In fact, it does not necessarily imply any physical laziness at all. It means the passivity and inactivity of the will and the passions even in the presence of the true good. In other word, it is the soul’s refusal to eat its food. As violence is spiritual junk food, boredom is spiritual anorexia.
When God Forgives Us
The literal truth is that when God forgives us he doesn’t change his mind about us. Out of his unconditional, unchanging, eternal love for us he changes our minds about him. It is God’s loving gift that we begin to think of repenting for our sin and of asking for his mercy. And that repentance does not earn his forgiveness. It is his forgiveness under another name. The gift, the grace, of contrition just is God’s forgiveness. The gift of contrition is, for example, the grace we celebrate in the sacrament of penance. If we go to confession, it is not to plead for forgiveness from God. It is to thank him for it. The gift of contrition is the gift of recognizing God’s unswerving love for us. It is the gift of having the confidence to confess our sins, to admit the truth. And if we do that, then, as Jesus told us, the truth will set us free (cf. John 8:32).
Fads, Trends, and Principles
When looking at the world, you can divide much of it into Fads, Trends or Principles. A little mantra for this is that we should Play with Fads, Work with Trends, and Live by Principles… in modern times, we are too often Seduced by Fads, Ignorant of Trends, and Resistant to Principles.
Hearing God pronounce our names in love is the core of mysticism.
— Ron Rolhheiser, from article “Mystic or Unbeliever” <link>
But if you don’t write of things deep in your own heart,
What’s the use of churning out so many words?
Is that a path or a rut? <link>
Did you feel you were tricked
By the future you picked?
You never had a rope around your neck. Well, I’m going to tell you something. When that rope starts to pull tight, you can feel the Devil bite your ass.
Sin made Hell, divine love made Purgatory.
Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.
All my life false and real, right and wrong tangled.
Playing with the moon, ridiculing the wind, listening to the birds…
Many years wasted seeing the mountain covered with snow.
This winter I suddenly realize snow makes a mountain.
Do not dwell in the problem, dwell in the solution; the solution is God.
For Whatever Reason
For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.
We must try not to compare our insides to other people’s outsides.
Only two classes of books are of universal appeal: the very best and the very worst.
It is a queer and fantastic world. Why can’t people have what they want? The things were all there to content everybody; yet everybody has got the wrong thing. Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is beyond me.
What the artist wishes to do—as far as you are concerned—is to take you out of yourself. As far as he is concerned, he wishes to express himself.
Experience is one thing you can’t get for nothing.
You can see only as far as your headlights…
Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
Work Is Love Made Visible
Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
Ideas result from the collision of metaphors inside the head.
There’s an old saying, “Life begins at forty.” That’s silly. Life begins every morning you wake up.
Presence does not happen in the mind.
Jesus was precisely the “once and for all” sacrifice given to reveal the lie and absurdity of the very notion and necessity of “sacrificial” religion itself.
Jesus Christ is both the medium and the message.
By Some Other Means Than Forgiveness
As long as you can deal with evil by some other means than forgiveness, you will never experience the real meaning of evil and sin.
Grief Work
“Grief work” [is] holding the mystery of pain and looking right at it and learning deeply from it.
Overexplanation separates us from astonishment.
Most people in my experience are still into fearing God and controlling God instead of loving God.
The Bible will not make transformation dependent on cleverness at all, but in one of God’s favorite and most effective hiding places—humility.
God comes to us disguised as our life.
If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
Do I Seek Relief of My Suffering or My Sin?
The way the world works is that the coin of the realm is relief of suffering: if someone does something that prevents me from suffering, even as minor as letting me in their lane of traffic, I am grateful. I feel the love. But if relief of suffering is the only thing I see as of value, then how can I truly celebrate Christ’s love, He who relieves our sins and not our sufferings? Until I truly see sin, and not suffering, as the supreme evil, can I be truly grateful to Christ?
In the world it is called Tolerance, but in Hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.
I need to put up with two or three caterpillars
if I want to get to know the butterflies.
The Mystery of Personality in God
The Feast of the Sacred Heart was for me a day of grace and seriousness. Twenty years ago I was uncomfortable with this concept. Now I see the real meaning of it (quite apart from the externals). It is the center, the “heart” of the whole Christian mystery.
There is one thing more—I may be interested in Oriental religions, etc., but there can be no obscuring the essential difference—this personal communion with Christ at the center and heart of all reality, as a source of grace and life. “God is love” may perhaps be clarified if one says that “God is void” and if the void one finds absolute indetermination and hence absolute freedom. (With freedom, the void becomes fulness and 0 = infinity). All that is “interesting” but none of it touches on the mystery of personality in God, and His personal love for me. Again, I am void too—and I have freedom, or am a kind of freedom, meaningless unless oriented to Him.
The flame of love
grows as it is divided
it increases by being shared
from one, then two, then three
and darkness is transformed into glory
and the walls reflect its light
Share your flame!
Share your flame!
We cannot have compassion without acknowledging the suffering of others.
Metaphor is the lifeblood of art, if it is not art itself. Metaphor is our vocabulary for connecting what we’re experiencing now with what we have experienced before.