Nothing is more practical than
finding God, than
falling in Love
in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.
It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in Love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.

attributed to Fr. Pedro Arrupe, SJ (1907-1991)

from Finding God in All Things: A Marquette Prayer Book © 2009

How much I must criticize you, my church, and yet how much I love you!

You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe more to you than to anyone.  I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence.

You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness.  Never in this world have I seen anything more compromised, more false, and yet I have never touched anything more pure, more generous, or more beautiful.

Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms!   No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you.

Then to where would I go?  To build another church?

But I could not build one without the same defects, for they are my defects.  And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ's church.  No, I am old enough.  I know better!

 

-Carlo Carretto

 

 

We invite you to join us for Sacred Snapshots, on April 20, 2013, at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. Sacred Snapshots is a day-long event celebrating spiritual practices from a range of religions and traditions.

 

love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds

e.e. cummings

"And I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in."

-Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

"I condemn poverty and I advocate it.  Anything you do not need belongs to the poor. . .  Once we begin not to worry about what kind of house we are living in, what kind of clothes we are wearing, once we give up the stupid recreation of the world, we have time which is priceless--to remember that we are all our brothers' and sisters' keepers and that we must not only care for their needs as far as we are immediately able, but we must try to build a better world."

--Dorothy Day, Loaves and Fishes

"When you cease to fear your solitude, a new creativity awakens in you. Your forgotten or neglected wealth begins to reveal itself. You come home to yourself and learn to rest within. Thoughts are our inner senses. Infused with silence and solitude, they bring out the mystery of inner landscape."

- John O'Donohue, Anam Cara

Inspirati, next Monday, Nov. 5, 7:30-9:30PM (@ Fran's place)

 

Please bring a work of art, your own or someone else's,
finished or in-progress,  of any medium, size, volume, or duration
-a friend, or just your inspired and inspiring self!

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?'

And I said, 'Here am I; send me!'"

-Isaiah 6:8

 

 

"Nobody living can ever stop me,

as I go walking that freedom highway.

Nobody living can ever make me turn back,

this land was made for you and me."

-Woody Guthrie

 

 

 

 

"Seek out that which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, ... the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me.'"

-William James

The Great Secret of Death

"The great secret of death, and perhaps its deepest connection with us, is this: that, in taking from us a being we have loved and venerated, death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves."

Rainer Maria Rilke; translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows, in Letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouty, January 23, 1924 

 

The Swan

This laboring of ours with all that remains undone,
as if still bound to it,
is like the lumbering gait of the swan.

And then our dying—releasing ourselves
from the very ground on which we stood—
is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself

into the water. It gently receives him,
and, gladly yielding, flows back beneath him,
as wave follows wave,
while he, now wholly serene and sure,
with regal composure,
allows himself to glide.

Rainer Maria Rilke; translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

"Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other."

-Rainer Maria Rilke

 

"Looked at Japanese prints with Glassner.  That's how I want to write.  With that much space round a few words. They should simply emphasize the silence.  Just like that print with the sprig blossom in the lower corner.  A few delicate brush strokes -- but with what attention to the smallest detail -- and all around it  space, not empty space but inspired.  The few great things that matter in life can be said in a few words.  If I should ever write -- but what? -- I would like to brush in a few words against a wordless background.  To describe the silence and the stillness and to inspire them.  What matters is the right relationship between words and wordlessness, the wordlessness in which much more happens than in all the words one can string together.  And the wordless background of each story -- or whatever it may be -- must have a distinct hue and a discrete content, just like those Japanese prints.  It is not not some vague and incomprehensible silence, for silence too must have contours and form.  All that words should do is lend the silence form and contours.  Each word is like a small milestone, a slight rise in the ground beside a flat, endless road against sweeping plains...."

-Etty Hillesum, journal, 5 June 1942

 

 

"Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope."

-Albert Camus

Never give up, never escape, take everything in, and perhaps suffer, that's not too awful either, but never, never give up.

-Etty Hillesum, journal, 30 April 1942

"We have seen the highest circle of spiraling powers. We have named this circle God. We might have given it any other name we wished: Abyss, Mystery, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, Silence. But we have named it God because only this name, for primordial reasons, can stir the heart profoundly. And this deeply felt emotion is indispensable if we are to touch, body with body, the dread essence beyond logic."

-Nikos Kazantzakis

 

... is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

 

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

 

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

 

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

 

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

 

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

 

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

 

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

 

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

 

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

 

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

 

~ Mary Oliver ~

(New and Selected Poems, Volume I)

"Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of human being. When we want to give high praise to someone we say, ‘Yu, u nobuntu'; ‘Hey so-and-so has ubuntu.' Then you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, ‘My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.' We belong in a bundle of life. We say, ‘A person is a person through other persons.' It is not, ‘I think therefore I am.' It says rather: ‘I am human because I belong, I participate, I share.' A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed, or treated as if they were less than who they are."

-Archbishop Desmond Tutu