··· Tags pointing to: mystery ···
Thus, the state of our whole life is estrangement from others and ourselves, because we are estranged from the Ground of our being, because we are estranged from the origin and aim of our life. And we do not know where we have come from, or where we are going. We are separated from the mystery, the depth, and the greatness of our existence.
We hear the voice of that depth: but our ears are closed. We feel that something radical, total, and unconditional is demanded of us: but we rebel against it, try to escape its urgency, or will not accept its promise.
— Paul Tillich, from “You are accepted†in The Essential Tillich (via)
Mystery isn’t something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.
— Flannery O’Connor (via)
Many lives have a mystical sense, but not everyone reads it aright. More often than not it is given to us in cryptic form, and when we fail to decipher it, we despair because our lives seem meaningless. The secret of a great life is often a man’s success in deciphering the mysterious symbols vouchsafed to him, understanding them and so learning to walk in the true path.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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.
— Thomas Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life
Grief Work
“Grief work” [is] holding the mystery of pain and looking right at it and learning deeply from it.
— Richard Rohr, Things Hidden
Mystify us, arouse and confuse us. Shatter our illusions and plans so that we lose our way, and see neither path nor light until we have found you, where you are to be found and in your true form—in the peace of solitude, in prayer, in submission, in suffering, in succour given to another, and in flight from idle talk and worldly affairs. And, having tried all the known ways and means of pleasing you and not finding you any longer in any of them, we remain at a loss until, finally, the futility of all our efforts leads us at last to leave all to find you henceforth, you, yourself, everywhere and in all things without discrimination or reflection.
For, how foolish it is, O Divine Love, not to see you in all that is good and in all creatures. Why, then, try to find you in what you are not.
— Jean Pierre de Caussade, The Sacrament of the Present Moment
I do not understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are, but does not leave us where it found us.
— Anne Lamott
That the world is, is the mystical.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
— Aart van der Leeuw
We are all too ready to believe that the self that we have created out of our more or less inauthentic efforts to be real in the eyes of others is a “real self.” We even take it for our identity. Fidelity to such a nonidentity is of course infidelity to our real person, which is hidden in mystery. Who will you find that has enough faith and self-respect to attend to this mystery and to begin by accepting himself as unknown?
— Thomas Merton
“Allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.”
“So what do we do?”
“Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. It’s a mystery.”
— from the movie, Shakespeare In Love (movie quote)
Gratitude is something very profound. It takes us to the edge of time and space and beyond. To be grateful for life as it truly is is also to be grateful for death as it truly is—not to underestimate life, not to underestimate death. Our complaining mind divides the mystery of life and death into two parts, one called life, and one called death. But in the light of gratitude, we know that things really aren’t like that.
— Norman Fischer, essay titled “Gratitude”