{mostly on fiction, poetry, spirituality, biblical studies and theology}
Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two – love and controlling power over the other person – are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all of the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.
Rob Bell, Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality
They had been brought up in a tradition that told them in one way or another that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical; they had believed, without ever having really thought about it, that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other. That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them …
From Stoner by John Williams
Very sad – and, one suspects, all too often so very true.
And another quote by Pope Francis, again as quoted in Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots:
Let us never forget that authentic power is service.
.
Nobody who has opened up new paths leaves without scars on his body.
Pope Francis, as quoted in Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
A war doesn’t merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that’s left is the brute, the creature that we – you and I and others like us – have brought up from the slime.
John Williams, Stoner
Dialogue is born from a respectful attitude toward the other person, from a conviction that the other person has something good to say. It supposes that we can make room in our heart for their point of view, their opinion and their proposals. Dialogue entails a warm reception and not a pre-emptive condemnation. To dialogue, one must know how to lower the defences, to open the doors of one’s home and to offer warmth.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now also known as Pope Francis, as quoted in Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
Some quotes from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s wonderful and inspiring book The Sabbath, first published in 1951:
There is a realm of time where the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.
Things, when magnified, are forgeries of happiness, they are a threat to our very lives.
Commenting on the sanctification of time, Heschel notes:
Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.
Six days a week we wrestle with the world, … on the Sabbath we especially care for the seed of eternity planted in the soul.
… perfect rest is an art. It is the result of an accord of body, mind and imagination.
… the Sabbath is not dedicated exclusively to spiritual goals. It is a day of the soul as well as the body; comfort and pleasure are an integral part of the Sabbath observance.
The seventh day is the armistice of man’s cruel struggle for existence, a truce in all conflicts, personal and social, peace between man and man, man and nature, peace within man …. The seventh day is the exodus from tension, the liberation of man from his own muddiness, the installation of man as a sovereign in the world of time.
I found the following thought particularly remarkable:
One must abstain from toil and strain on the seventh day, even from strain in the service of God.
The Sabbath … is a profound conscious harmony of man and the world, a sympathy for all things and a participation in the spirit that unites what is below and what is above. All that is divine in the world is brought into union with God.
Heschel’s life- and creation-affirming theology is on display in these words as well:
Rabbi Shimeon’s doctrine was: There is only heaven and nothing else; but heaven contradicted him and said: There is heaven and everything else.
One must live and act as if the fate of all of time would depend on a single moment.
One good hour may be worth a lifetime; an instant of returning to God may restore what has been lost in years of escaping from him.
Brief thoughts & quotes … 