Don't spend your life moaning. Being miserable depresses us, diminishes us, discourages us; and expressing it makes it worse. The more we say, “It's hard”, the more miserable we become. No, nothing is hard, if we look at life from the point of view of him who gives it to us. We mustn't think about tomorrow. Almost the whole of our suffering comes from our imagination and from looking ahead pointlessly. We should live in the present moment.
DOM PAUL DELOTTE The Spirit of Solesmes
Where in my own life and experience have I found that spring of water in the midst of the garden of Eden that makes it possible for God to shape the Adam in me into a living being by softening the clay of the ground and making it malleable, responsive to the divine Sculptor’s hands? We must discover, at the center of the garden of our lives, the hidden spring of water that God has surely hidden there! We must continually return to it like the Samaritan woman to her well. Discovering that deep well within ourselves is perhaps the central activity of our spiritual search. That discovery goes hand-in-hand with my response to what the Lord says to us through Jeremiah: “Like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.” The hidden spring must water the clay of my being for as long as I am on that potter’s wheel.
ERASMO LEIVA-MERIKAKIS The Way of the Disciple, Ch. 1
Strength of soul does not mean lack of feeling. It is not unfeeling souls that are strong. Strength of soul consists and rising above suffering, in bearing it bravely, in setting before ourselves the highest motives for living, and in allowing ourselves to be guided by them. Of these motives, the highest and most powerful are the supernatural; in other words, the thought of God who alone can satisfy our hearts, and who offers Himself to us for that very purpose. But there are also natural motives, which we must not overlook. A man who is at the mercy of his trials and of his feelings is not fulfilling the end God has in view for him. He is growing smaller, and is no longer worthy of being called a man. Time passes with him, but more or less aimlessly. He plays no part in the world, and does no good. He hasn't the influence he might have.
A CARTHUSIAN They Speak By Silences
Humility reminds me that my life is not mine alone. I believe we are all meant to help shoulder one another’s burdens, share one another's joys, and affirm the goodness in one another. This is impossible if my choices and priorities are always made on the basis of what's in it for me. But the more I see of life, the more convinced I am that it's a mistake to take such a self-indulgent stance. “What are we here for?” asked George Eliot in her novel Middlemarch, “if not to make life less difficult for each other?” And several centuries earlier Saint Benedict said something very similar when he urged his monks to bear “one another's weaknesses of body or behavior” with patience (RB 72.5). It is what self-sacrifice is all about.
TRISHA DAY Inside the School of Charity: Lessons From the Monastery
In the misery and disorder of our lives, true love thus demands—like monasticism, but in a more humble and apparently more prosaic way—asceticism and sanctification. Moreover, it implies, with man as with woman, an “interiorized monasticism”… the healthy solitude that each must respect in the other in order to keep alive the sense of one’s otherness. At times, only distance allows one to perceive the unity; only an awareness that the more the other is known the more he is unknown creates the deepening and the renewal of love.
OLIVIER CLEMENT The Sacrament of Love