The poet Mary Oliver may have written the best definition of what it means to be a prophet in contemporary spirituality. She writes, “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
Bloom where you are planted,′ the poster reads. But the poster does not tell the whole story. ′ plant yourself where you know you can bloom’ may well be the poster we all need to see. Or better yet, “Work the arid soil however long it takes until something that fulfills the rest of you finally makes the desert in you bloom.
It is what we do routinely, not what we do rarely, that delineates the character of a person.
I learned that the Italians are right. It isn’t what happens to us that counts. It’s what we do with what happens to us that makes all the difference.
As Albert Camus put it: “In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
Indeed, the big decisions in life are hardly ever clear – except for one. And that one is piercingly clear: life is a series of dilemmas, of options, of conundrums, of possibilities taken and not taken. Negotiating these moments well is of the essence of the life well lived.
Life is not about age, about the length of years we manage to eke out of it. It is about aging, about living into the values offered in every stage of life. As E. M. Forster wrote, “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. “One’s friends,” George Santayana wrote, “are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
War within ourselves is always a prelude to war outside ourselves. All war starts within our own hearts. When our egos are inflated or our desires insatiable, we go to war with the other for the sad joy of maintaining our one-dimensional worlds.
Better to walk through life simply and without masks, than to lose ourselves in the pursuit of identities that are purely cosmetic and commercial. Then, at least, we will be known for what we are rather than for what we are not.
We should employ our passions in the service of life,” Sir Richard Steele wrote, “not spend life in the service of our passions.
To simply withdraw from the arena of ideas, from public discourse on public issues, from the value formation of the young – to shrug our shoulders and say, “I don’t know” or, worse, “I don’t care about those things anymore” – is to abandon the young to the mercy of their own ideas without the benefit of experience to guide them.
Benedict sets up a community, a family. And families, the honest among us will admit, are risky places to be if perfection is what you are expecting in life.
For the Jew, Passover is a sign of salvation, of “God with us” at a particular historical moment in the past. For the Christian, Easter is a sign of “God with us” in the past, but with us now also and at a time to come, as well.
Stability of heart – commitment to the life of the soul, faithfulness to the community, perseverance in the search for God – is the mooring that holds us fast when the night of the soul is at its deepest dark, and the noontime sun sears the spirit. When.
God’s will for us is what’s left over when we have done everything we can possibly do to get out of doing what we’re doing rigth now.
Spirituality is not meant to be a panacea for human pain. Nor is it a substitute for critical conscience. Spirituality energizes the soul to provide what the world lacks.
Prayer restores the soul that is dry and dulled by years of trying to create a world that never completely comes.
God is indeed everywhere in everything at all times – in the abstruse as well as the luminous, whether we ourselves can see the hand of God in this moment or not.
Humility does not necessarily require me to agree and comply with everyone else’s position, but it does demand that I be willing to understand and respect the many sides of every issue.