The heart wants to hear, see, and know.
The human heart seeks to engage especially in three activities. It wants to hear and be heard, it wants to see and be seen, and it wants to know and be known.
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Only a heart, only a soul, only one who loves hears.
In Order To…
In order to arrive at having pleasure in everything,
Desire to have pleasure in nothing.
In order to arrive at possessing everything,
Desire to possess nothing.
In order to arrive at being everything,
Desire to be nothing.
In order to arrive at knowing everything,
Desire to know nothing.
In order to arrive at that point where you take no pleasure,
you must go by a way that gives no pleasure.
In order to arrive at that point where you know nothing,
you must go by a way you do not know.
In order to arrive at that point where you are free of possessing,
you must go by a way you do not possess.
In order to arrive at that point at which you are nothing,
you must go through that which you are not.
We cannot be sure whether we are loving God, although we may have good reasons for believing that we are. But we can know quite well whether we are loving our neighbor.
The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
He who wishes to learn must believe.
Real theology is always rather shocking to people who already think they know what they think.
A Question of Experience
To me, the God issue is a question of experience. For example, I want people I love not to die; I want friendships that are not betrayed; I want justice—desires that seem to make no sense, that appear in fact to be irrational…. There is, I admit, a certain uselessness to this, in terms of the fact that nothing in the world seems to correspond with or answer these desires. All that I ask of myself, and I think it is reasonable to ask everybody else, is to be faithful to that experience and to explore the implications of it. And if something is found that explains it, so that the question disappears, then fine, that’s the answer, and that’s that.
Antilibrary
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with ‘Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?’ and others—a very small minority—who get the point that a private library is not an ego boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call the collection of unread books an antilibrary.
My sense is that God likes artful coincidences since they bolster the faith of those already with faith without compelling or forcing it on those who don’t. (Then it wouldn’t be faith, after all, but knowledge.)
Ideas create idols; only wonder leads to knowing.
Because If You Can Convince Me
Because if you can convince me, then suddenly your beliefs become more real. Right? The more people you can get to jump on your … train, the more your mission is made. So until you get me to swallow your world and believe what you believe, you’ll never have the kind of faith you want to have. You’ll always have a little bit of doubt. You’ll never know if you’re quite right. You’ll always kind of be wondering if it’s real.