The Uses of Sorrow
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
Mary Oliver, Thirst
Author: Karl Möller
Hell
Hell is … a failure of openness, a failure of love and a consequent and dreadful entrapment within the self.
Thus Tony Milligan, in Love, who goes on to note that for Milton love of others and hell, defined as ‘hell within’, are mutually exclusive.
Divine spaciousness in all the tight places
Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God’s name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall.
Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
To help
To help lift a burden, to help light a path, to help heal a hurt, to help seek a truth – these struck me as the sorts of things that human beings were created to do for one another ….
Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith
Not a manipulated extension of myself
We cannot love God or our neighbour. We love both or neither. And what love means is rejoicing in the otherness of the other because the depth of this awareness is the depth of our communion with the other. … in the people we live with we find not objects to be cast in our own superficial likeness but, much more, we find in them our true selves, for our true selves only appear, only become realized, when we are wholly turned towards another.
[…]
In this recognition of the other person, a recognition that remakes my mind and expands my consciousness, the other person comes into being as they really are, in their real self, not as a manipulated extension of myself. People move and act out of their own integral reality and no longer as some image created by my imagination.
[…]
The essence of community … is a recognition of and deep reverence for the other.
John Main, Word into Silence
Reluctant
Very often we are reluctant to admit that we are the sick and sinful Jesus came to heal, and very often we prefer our self-protecting isolation to the risk of our face-to-face encounter with the Other [God] in the silence of our own vulnerability.
John Main, Word into Silence
The crumbs which clever minds tread underfoot
Those who have abandoned themselves to God always lead mysterious lives and receive from God exceptional and miraculous gifts by means of the most ordinary, natural and chance experiences in which there appears to be nothing unusual. The simplest sermon, the most banal conversations, the least erudite books become the source of knowledge and wisdom to these souls by virtue of God’s purpose. This is why they carefully pick up the crumbs which clever minds tread underfoot, for to them everything is precious and a source of enrichment.
This again is from Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s Abandonment to Divine Providence, as quoted by James Martin in The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life.
Brief thoughts & quotes … 