Only a heart, only a soul, only one who loves hears.
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Perhaps the crucial feature of addiction is the progressive replacement of people by things.
Silence is not the absence of sound; it is the freedom to listen to God.
The great spiritual challenge is to discover, over time, that the limited, conditional, and temporal love we receive from parents, husbands, wives, children, teachers, colleagues and friends are reflections of the unlimited, unconditional and everlasting love of God.
Ever notice when someone says to you, “be careful,” they are really saying, “I love you”?
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.
A person is not who they are during the last conversation you had with them—they are who they have been throughout your whole relationship.
Infinite Distances
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
Only in the continuous encounter with another person does the person become and remain a person.
To Know
It is not speech which we should want to know:
we should know the speaker.
It is not things seen which we should want to know:
we should know the seer.
It is not sounds which we should want to know:
we should know the hearer.
It is not mind which we should want to know:
we should know the thinker.
The Wizard said to the Tin Man, “Remember my friend, love is not measured by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.”