{mostly on fiction, poetry, spirituality, biblical studies and theology}
Prayer should move us to action, even if it simply makes us want to be more compassionate and faithful. Entering into a relationship with God will change us, will make us more loving, and will move us to act.
James Martin, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life
The present moment holds infinite riches beyond your wildest dreams but you will only enjoy them to the extent of your faith and love. The more a soul loves, the more it longs, the more it hopes, the more it finds.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence, as quoted by James Martin, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life
Desire has a disreputable reputation in religious circles. When most people hear the term, they think of two things: sexual desire or material wants, both of which are often condemned by some religious leaders. The first is one of the greatest gifts from God to humanity; without it the human race would cease to exist. The second is part of our natural desire for a healthy life – for food, shelter, and clothing.
James Martin, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life
We tend to think that if we desire something, it is probably something we ought not to want or to have. But … without desire we would never get up in the morning. … We would never have read a book or learned something new. No desire means no life, no growth, no change. Desire is what makes two people create a third person. Desire is what makes crocuses push up through the late-winter soil. Desire is energy, the energy of creativity, the energy of life itself.
Margaret Silf, Wise Choices, as quoted by Martin, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything
… our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Non-recognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.
Thus Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism
Friendship is a basic and vital human relationship that forms the social fabric of our lives. It is in and through friendships that we discover our identity, gain our sense of value and place in the world, and learn what it means to participate in community. … friendships aid the development of our self-identity. Through friendships, we discover where we want to go in life and how we should relate with others and with God. Friends help us to recognize one another and the world.
John Swinton, Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to the Problem of Evil
Desmond Tutu, commenting on someone who has ubuntu, says:
This means they are generous, hospitable, friendly, caring, and compassionate. They share what they have. It also means my humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in theirs. … A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good; for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are … what dehumanizes you, inexorably dehumanizes me.
From No Future without Forgiveness
And my final quote from Sophie Divry’s The Library of Unrequited Love, this time on the Dewey decimal classification:
What a perverse invention, an instrument of torture. … Stupid, anarchic, mega-moronic. The Dewey system is a secret code invented by the Axis of Evil that binds books and librarians together in order to scare the reader off. It’s terrifying, the Dewey system. Totally inhibiting. Everything goes into it, like a mincer. Your holidays, your house, your tastes, your furniture, just everything. There’s even a classification for sexuality – and plenty of different shelfmarks for all the complications. … I’m telling you, if no-one stops them, the people on the ground floor will end up putting a shelfmark on all of us ….
Brief thoughts & quotes … 