The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.
I know of no sculpture, painting or music that exceeds the compelling spiritual command of the soaring shape of granite cliff and dome, of patina of light on rock and forest, and of the thunder and whispering of the falling, flowing waters.
I think joy and sweetness and affection are a spiritual path. We're here to know God, to love and serve God, and to be blown away by the beauty and miracle of nature. You just have to get rid of so much baggage to be light enough to dance, to sing, to play. You don't have time to carry grudges; you don't have time to cling to the need to be right.
To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind
the whole world burns and sparkles with light.
I know the thrill of the grasses when the rain pours over them.
I know the trembling of the leaves when the winds sweep through them.
I know what the white clover felt as it held a drop of dew pressed close in its beauteousness.
I know the quivering of the fragrant petals at the touch of the pollen-legged bees.
I know what the stream said to the dipping willows, and what the moon said to the sweet lavender.
I know what the stars said when they came stealthily down and crept fondly into the tops of the trees.
To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind
the whole world burns and sparkles with light.
Mystery is to be embraced, not avoided. It is the place where the great secrets of the universe are told. In the center of mystery there sits, like an ancient treasure chest hidden long ago, wonder and awe. Swirling around the edges of mystery is learning, the kind that leads to wisdom. Mystery is the magic dust that transforms the mundane into a life glittering with significance. Once you have found the courage to enter the mystery, you are less likely to be overwhelmed with fear ever again.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
I have a friend who speaks of knowledge as an island in a sea of mystery. . . . We dredge up soil from the bed of mystery and build ourselves room to grow. And still the mystery surrounds us. It laps at our shores. It permeates the land. Scratch the surface of knowledge and mystery bubbles up like a spring.
A sense of Mystery can take us beyond disappointment and judgment to a place of expectancy. It opens in us an attitude of listening and respect. If everyone has in them the dimension of the unknown, possibility is present at all times. . . . Knowing this enables us to listen to life from the place in us that is Mystery also. Mystery requires that we relinquish an endless search for answers and become willing to not understand. . . . Perhaps real wisdom lies in not seeking answers at all. Any answer we find will not be true for long. An answer is a place where we can fall asleep as life moves past us to its next question. After all these years, I have begun to wonder if the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.
It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. One who has never experienced that has missed something important. We must sense that we live in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.
The Creative Process is a process of Surrender, not control. Mystery is at the heart of Creativity.
Love all the earth, every ray of God's light, every grain of sand or blade of grass, every living thing. If you love the Earth enough, you will know the divine mystery.
Our planet is awash in the gentle light and shadow of an impenetrable Mystery; it is time, in spite of all our vaunted learning and might, to kneel at the rim of the abyss of our profound unknowing.
Taking on the mystery is yielding to grace, letting go of all explanations, analyses, ideologies, self-images, images of God, agendas, expectations. Taking on the mystery is undergoing the finitude of years, hallowing diminishments, and living into the solitude of our own integrity. Taking on the mystery is undergoing the pain of learning that there are no empires favored by the Holy One: not the Roman, or the British, or the Soviet, or the American. Taking on the mystery is undergoing the grief of understanding that there are no theologies favored by the Holy One: not communism or capitalism, not Islam, Judaism, or Christianity. Taking on the mystery is acknowledging that we cannot name the mystery, though we try; we cannot claim the mystery, though we do. The mystery names and claim us, inviting us to take it upon ourselves as if we were God's spies.
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery.
The divine mystery is not a collection of problems. As the mystics keep chanting, it is a light so bright that it blinds us, that we are bound to experience it as darkness. To become intimate with it, we have to "unknow" worldly knowledge. We have to give up our tendency to assault it as we would a problem, learning to wait patiently for it to reveal itself as an intimate, at times even shy and vulnerable, lover. . . . The mystery never fails to nourish and heal me. I know that my spirit has been made to contemplate it, to love it as the central reality and treasure of my being. It is my lever for moving the world.
For a few minutes we sat there petting the kittens, saying nothing. But every so often I glanced at Demetrios. His big, thick, wrinkled hands cradled the animal lovingly as he stroked its fur in repetitive waves from the neck on down. Then he looked up and sighed.
"Touch everything this way."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Try to love everything. Everything wants love, just like these ghatakia (kittens). Let your love flow--let it be constant, like the seasons. . . . We are called to love people, birds, beasts, trees, seas, stars . . . all the universe wants to be cherished!"
Be a sweet melody in the great orchestration,
instead of a discordant note.
The medicine this sick world needs is love.
Hatred must be replaced by love,
and fear by faith that love will prevail.
I have never met a person whose greatest need was anything other than real, unconditional love. You can find it in a simple act of kindness toward someone who needs help. There is no mistaking love. You feel it in your heart. It is the common fiber of life, the flame that heats our soul, energizes our spirit and supplies passion to our lives. It is our connection to God and to each other.
An act of love that fails is just as much a part of the divine life as an act of love that succeeds, for love is measured by its own fullness, not by its reception.
I was recently rereading the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., and I understood once again that the whole movement was based on love--love that doesn't exclude anybody. . . when you take that view and you begin to live by it, something begins to shift very dramatically and you begin to see things in a different way. You begin to have the clarity to see injustice happening, but you can also see that injustice, by its very definition, is harming everybody involved. It's harming the people who are being oppressed or abused, and it's harming those who are oppressing and abusing.
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Loving Lord God,
help me to be aware of your loving presence
regardless of where I am
or what I am doing.
Lead me into the center of your heart of love,
The Holy of Holies
where peace and joy abide.
Let me live in your presence always.
Love is the Conductor of our lives
be like members of a fine orchestra
with all eyes seeing as One.
Keep your inner eye single, focused
only on Love; thus
will the Great Conductor inspire
and guide the music
of your life.
In a world so torn apart by rivalry, anger, and hatred, we have the privileged vocation to be living signs of a love that can bridge all divisions and heal all wounds.
Try to radiate your love equally to all people instead of just a few. Try to feel that the whole world is your Self, your God. Try to see the Self in all people. Spread your love in all directions as an act of worship and surrender, because everything in the world is a manifestation of God.
As Aldous Huxley wrote: "There isn't any formula or method. You learn by loving." But sometimes, if we're lucky, we live long enough to grow into it in such a way that because of it we come to recognize the value of life. . . . We learn enough about love to allow things to slip away and ourselves to melt into the God whose love made all of it possible. . . . Sometimes we live long enough to see the face of God in another. Then, in that case, we have loved.
There is love like a small lamp, which goes out when the oil is consumed; or like a stream which dries up when it doesn't rain. But there is a love like a mighty spring gushing up out of the earth; it keeps flowing forever, and is inexhaustible . . .
Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it.
No separation between God and humans . . . a complete, mutual indwelling: I am in God, God is in you, you are in God, we are in each other. "I am the vine; you are the branches. Abide in me as I in you." . . . There is no separation between humans and God because of this mutual interabiding which expresses the indivisible reality of divine love. We flow into God--and Go into us--because it is the nature of love to flow. . . . The whole and the part live together in mutual, loving reciprocity, each belonging to the other and dependent on the other to show forth the fullness of love.
Faith is a gift that comes, the gift of assurance that the powers of light have conquered and will keep on defeating the darkness.Hope is our own attitude of looking steadfastly toward that victory and trying to order our lives toward it.Faith and hope are far easier attitudes to live with than despair and disillusionment . . . so I deliberately choose to hope.Through hope and faith the inner journey has direction and a goal and meditation becomes a process of discovering the reality of Divine Love.
Hope is what sits by a window and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there is not one ounce of proof in tonight's black, black sky that it can possibly come.
We have only begun
to imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope?
So much is in the bud.
The hope that is left after all your hopes are gone -- that is pure hope, rooted in the heart.
We cannot avoid the question of integrity or wholeness to which all of us proceed. We cannot exclude anyone from the process of becoming fully human, neither a woman nor a man. Personal experience is essential. God gives us the ability to experience ourselves and to assume relationships. As we develop this, we learn to overcome the tensions and the difficulties in life; and those times when there is a lack of love, we are given hope. We experience hope. The great thing about all this is the hope and the realization that it is within our reach.
The gift we can offer others is so simple a thing as hope.
Are we not called to communicate
a mystery of hope
to those around us
by the lives we lead?
The power of love is in hope,
For by it we await the reward of love.
The failing of hope is the disappearance of love.
Hope is a rest from labors in the midst of labors.
Toils depend on it.
Mercy encircles it.
Experiencing the gifts of the Giver of Life engenders hope.
But he who is without experience remains in doubt.
Narrow is the boundary
of "now" and "not-yet"
Deep and dark it stretches
like an ancient passageway
no map has ever marked.
One by one we walk it
step by solitary step.
Not hand in hand,
Not side by side,
But sounding the distance with our tears.
Hope is the chorus sounding, "Come!"
Hope is the embrace, waiting to welcome.
Hope is the companion,
In-Between . . .
Waiting patiently in hope and expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.
Silence is the strength of our interior life . . . if we fill our lives with silence, then we will live in hope.
Hope is the realization of the inner connectedness of all things; of your life and your daily activity with the cosmic scheme of things. The awareness of who you are, that you are the self--that gives you hope. Faith and hope stem from the same inner, intuitive realization of who you are, that you are here for a purpose and that nothing on earth can shake that.
Hope is rooted in emptiness, in poverty, in a waiting that belongs to the pure in heart. Hopeful silence is patient, thirsty, yet withal dynamic, for it desires to become One with God. In this kind of silence of hope lies our strength.
Hope is essential for us. What the breath is to our physical bodies, hope is to our human spirits.
True hope is rooted in a Reality beyond ego and illusion. Hope that rises in our hearts is like a buoyant bubble of champagne; for some, it brings tears of relief, while others, may sense a new way to the future that will bring healing to us -- personally, communally, nationally, globally -- to all of Creation. Hope recognizes that many challenges await us on the path, obstacles and possible pitfalls that may delay outcome. In hope we are made new; for it is a sure and steadfast anchor of our soul that enters "the inner shrine behind the curtain," where the Divine Guest abides. So, in the Silence, let us embrace Love and dare to hope: the promise for all of Creation.
Angels are forms, images and expressions through which the essences and energy forces of God can be transmitted; and, since there are an infinite number of these forms, the greatest service anyone can pay the angelic host is never consciously to limit the ways angels might appear to us.