The present is very precious; these are the days of salvation; now is the acceptable time.
··· Tags pointing to: gift ···
If you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he has been robbed.
The fact is that most putts don’t drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to be just people, most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration, and most jobs are more often dull than otherwise…
Life is like an old-time rail journey—delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.
The Greeks tell the story of the minotaur, the bull-headed flesh eating man who lived in the center of the labyrinth. He was a threatening beast, and yet his name was Asterion-Star. I often think of this paradox as I sit with someone with tears in her eyes, searching for some way to deal with a death, a divorce, or a depression. It is a beast, this thing that stirs in the core of her being, but it is also the star of her innermost nature.
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).
The first person asks, “What time is it?”
The second person looks at watch and replies, “Now.”
First person ponders for a moment and then says, “That’s a pretty boring answer.”
Second person retorts, “Is not. It’s the least boring answer imaginable.”
Use the talents you possess,
for the woods would be very silent
if no birds sang except the best.
The present moment, the now, is gift. You can choose to receive it or resist it. Receiving is being; resistance is pride.
Not in God’s wilds will you ever hear the sad moan, “All is vanity.” No, we are paid a thousand times for all our toil, and after a single day spent outdoors in their atmosphere of strength and beauty, one could still say, should death come—even without any hope of another life—“Thank you for this most glorious gift!” and pass on.
The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed identity. We have to be able to relax the psychic and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, vulnerable, helpless “I” that is all we know as ourselves.