{mostly on fiction, poetry, spirituality, biblical studies and theology}
Like two lovers who have become lost
In a winter blizzard
And find a cozy, empty hut
In the forest,
I now huddle everywhere
With the friend.
God and I have built an immense fire
Together.
We keep each other happy
And warm.
From: Hafiz, The Subject Tonight Is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. … The alternative is unconsciousness …
David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
You get to decide what you worship …. Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of … life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship … is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
If you think that the Truth can be known
From words,If you think that the Sun and the Ocean
Can pass through that tiny opening
Called the mouth,O someone should start laughing!
Someone should start wildly Laughing –
Now!
From ‘Someone Should Start Laughing’
Last night,
So many tears took flight because of Joy
That the sky got crowded and complained
When I discovered God hiding again in my heart
And I could not cease to celebrate.
From ‘Dance, Dervish Dance’
Both poems are from Hafiz, I Heard God Laughing: Poems of Hope and Joy. Renderings of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky
Transformed life can only be found through confusion, struggle, literal and metaphorical deaths because we understand only from within the constellation of our present suffering.
Mark Vernon in Third Way, October 2013
Those who remember and keep Sabbath find they are less driven, less coerced, less frantic to meet deadlines, free to be, rather than to do.
Sabbath is not simply a pause. It is an occasion for reimagining all of social life away from coercion and competition to compassionate solidarity.
Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to a Culture of Now
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 … 