Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me.
One life on this earth is all that we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can.
Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.
The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves, which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.
There is no event so common place but that God is present within it, always hidden, always leaving you room to recognize Him or not to recognize Him.
Like Buddha under the Bo tree, Jesus, on his tree, has his eyes closed too. The difference is this. The pain and sadness of the world that Buddha’s eyes close out is the pain and sadness of the world that the eyes of Jesus close in.
Gail Godwin has written a book about the heaviest matters of loss, grief, and loneliness with a touch so light that I was as often deeply amused by it as I was deeply moved.
At the evening of our day, we shall be judged by our loving.
Wether you call on him or don’t call on him, God will be present with you.
It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.
Think of these pages as graffiti maybe, and where I have scratched up in a public place my longings and loves, my grievances and indecencies, be reminded in private of your own. In that way, at least, we can hold a kind of converse.
You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary.
Unbelief is as much of a choice as belief is. What makes it in many ways more appealing is that whereas to believe in something requires some measure of understanding and effort, not to believe doesn’t require much of anything at all.
True faith, a simple life, a helping hand- the three things prized most in Heaven.
Where your deep gladness meets with the deep hunger of the world, there you will find a further calling.
Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.
Love yourself not in some egocentric, self-serving sense but love yourself the way you would love your friend in the sense of taking care of yourself, nourishing yourself, trying to understand, comfort, and strengthen yourself.
Envy is the consuming desire to have everybody else as unsuccessful as you are.
Don’t look down on them for looking down on us. Look at them, instead, as friends we don’t know yet and who don’t yet know what they are missing in not knowing us.
Grace is something you can never get but only be given.