Quotations

The time in between my clapping is ma [Japanese word for "emptiness"]. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, but if you take a moment, then the tension building...can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension...all the time, you just get numb.

Awaken me, O Mighty One,
in your holy mercy,
that I might be free of fear...

With boundless confidence,
I abandon myself to You...
For You deliver me from illusion,
and through Love,
my heart opens to Wisdom.

To create the world that exemplifies our values, we need to liberate ourselves from enemy images — the thinking that says there is something wrong with the people whose actions or values we don't agree with... Now, that's not easy to do. Why? Because it's hard to believe that those who are doing things far outside of our value system are human beings like the rest of us. It's very challenging.

... we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

If we work for peace out of anger, we will never succeed. Peace is not an end. It can never come about through non-peaceful means.

If you have resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or thing that you resent, you will be free. If you will ask in prayer for everything you want for yourself to be given to them, you will be free.

Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

In the summer
at day's end
we notice our salted skin
(how it clings and crusts as silt deposits)
touch lightly the tomato-red sheen in that space just below the eyes.

Wearied bodies. Sticking flesh. Warmed and weighted eyes. The smell of ourselves.
We are caked with the soil that draws up seeds to plants
and the dampnesses that quench them.
The water runs off us, coffee rich against the porcelain sink.

Who was it that likened sin to dirt? Who declared purity a vast white void?
Who never noticed the gospel of a body
in the summer
at day's end?

Raimundo Panikkar ... said the future will not be a new, big tower of power. Our hope in the future is the hope into well-trodden paths from house to house, these well-trodden paths from house to house. That is the image that holds a lot of promise for our future.

When all the good in you
Starts arguing with all the bad in you
About who you really are,
Never let the bad in you
Make the better case

It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena ... It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

The world existed.

Before anything else, it was all fire: Golden, molten, radiating, relentlessly bright flame.

Nothing was hidden. But nothing could be seen either, because it would melt the eyes. Even God was nervous to approach the world.

God longed for the dark things. Ash meant everything had burned, but it also meant substance had cooled. God could gaze upon charcoal and see all the folds and tunnels that ran through it, marking a flame's path. God could hold it in the hand, stick it in the pocket, carry it elsewhere.

God said, “Let there be shadows, where I can hide from the light, rest from the day, and cool my sweat." A shadow descended over the place God now sat resting.

God imagined the heat itself could rest. God laughed and clapped. “Yes! I do not want to kill the heat forever, just offer it relief from its relentless work. Let it take on another personality from time to time." God filled a tub with silver movement, with blue sploshing. God called the magic “water," and it was good.

Gently, curiously, slowly, God upturned the tub over the flames whose pulsing screams snuffed into a hissing whimper, a relief, another way to exist.

God stopped and looked around the world as it stood. True, many corners still pulsed with energy and heat, but the harshness of it dimmed because there were ashes to replenish the ground. And there was water to offer to the ashes (imagine what magic might now sprout there!). And there were cool, shadowy corners to nap in. Or, God now considered, where one could invite someone else to sit, too.

Now God longed for “Someone Else." It was a desire even stronger than when God had wanted ashes, or shadows, or water. Out of this great desire — this love — God conjured all the bacteria, the fungi, the plants, the animals, the humans. And the world now hummed: with the pulses, the hisses, the sploshes, the snores, the chatter of it all.

That your world is in agony is no reason to turn your back on it, or to try to escape into private “spiritual" pursuits. Rilke reminded me that I had the strength and courage to walk out into the world as into my own heart, and to “love the things / as no one has thought to love them."

Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Making sense of the world takes so many forms! Some of them just engage the lineage of despair more explicitly than others... you could expand... to so many other forms of art, including the unheralded art of living our everyday lives, and the creation and maintenance of connection. What does it look like to cherish other people? To cultivate our empathy for one another, even when our own experiences are so disparate? If a burning world is our lived reality, how do we continue to steer ourselves towards the sort of compassion that might create a different one?

...But we do have to figure out how to create narratives — amongst people who hold very similar beliefs, but also with those who do not... All of those ideologies are, at heart, antidotes to the deep sadness at the heart of everyday life. We need better ones.

We can never speak about God rationally as we speak about ordinary things, but that does not mean we should give up thinking about God. We must push our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing.

Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

...When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

Behold how good and pleasant
it is
when brothers and sisters
dwell in unity!
It is like vistas seen from
atop a mountain one has
Or like the stillness of a sunset
climbed...
after a long day's work.

It is like a shimmering rainbow
breaking through a summer rain.
When men and women dwell in
` harmony,
the star of Truth appears.

We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.

The wisdom of a true community often seems miraculous. This wisdom can perhaps be explained in purely secular terms...There are times, however, when this wisdom seems to my religious eye to be more a matter of divine spirit and possible divine intervention. This is one of the reasons why the feeling of joy is such a frequent concomitant of the spirit of community. The members feel that they have been temporarily—at least partially—transported out of the mundane world of ordinary preoccupations. For the moment it is as if heaven and earth had somehow met.

Community is first and foremost a gift of the Holy Spirit, not built upon mutual compatibility, shared affection, or common interests but upon having received the same divine breath, having been given a heart set aflame by the same divine fire, and having been embraced by the same divine love.

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close friendship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.