The Gift of Being Human

To be human is to be fundamentally a gift, for each and every human being bears in a unique manner the imprint of the God who created them in freedom and love. Nowhere is the character of that gift more apparent than in our own human capacity for freedom and love, not simply in terms of our earthly relationships but also in our openness to perfect fulfillment in union with the God whose likeness we bear. Such fulfillment has been made possible for us by Jesus Christ.

JOE EGAN The Godless Delusion (Peter Lang, 2009) 

The Ultimate Method

Having read many books containing different methods of reaching God, I felt that they would confuse me rather than help me find what I was looking for, which was to become completely God’s. This led me to resolve to give all for the All. I renounced, for love of Him, everything that was not Him, and I began to live as if there was nothing but He and I in the world.

BROTHER LAWRENCE OF THE RESURRECTION The Practice of the Presence of God

Taught of God

No man, wise in his own opinion, because he has studied all the sciences and is learned in external wisdom, will ever penetrate God's mysteries or see them unless he first humbles himself and becomes foolish in his heart, repudiating his self-opinion together with his acquirements of learning. For a man who acts thus and follows with undaunted faith those who are wise in things Divine, is guided by them and with them enters into the city of the living God, and, taught and enlightened by the Holy Spirit, sees and knows things which no one else can see or know. Thus he becomes taught of God.

ST. SIMEON THE NEW THEOLOGIAN Philokalia, Practical and Theological Precepts 

Intelligible Through Love

God cannot be comprehended by the faculty of intelligence, but is totally and perfectly intelligible through the power of love. Every single creature, moreover will know him differently. Dwell on this if you have the grace to do so, because to experience this for oneself is everlasting joy, and the contrary is everlasting pain.

ANONYMOUS The Cloud of Unknowing

Love is Greater Than Prayer

It can happen that when we are at prayer some brothers come to see us. Then we have to choose, either to interrupt our prayer or to sadden our brother by refusing to answer him. But love is greater than prayer. Prayer is one virtue amongst others, whereas love contains them all.

JOHN CLIMACUS The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 26th Step

Religious Instinct

Man, I am convinced, is religious by nature. The religious instinct belongs to his very nature, is part of his make-up. It is part of his make-up to be oriented towards God. True, for the vast majority of persons this orientation is unknown, unrecognized. Often it is directed towards things that are less than God; but in so far as the mind is constantly groping towards the ultimate meaning of things and in so far as man's desire craves to be satisfied by this or that good, then the unacknowledged, unrecognized, unknown search for God has begun. Many indeed of man's frustrations are attributable to the fact that he cannot, and does not, in his present condition, attain that ultimate in knowing and that ultimate in loving which belong, so it seems, to the very perfection of his nature. And in so far as he fails to attain it either in the realm of his knowing or in that of his loving, to that extent he remains a frustrated being.

CARDINAL BASIL HUME, OSB The Intentional Life

Thinking About Tomorrow

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

The Hidden Spring of Water

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

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 and Self-Sacrifice

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 

Interiorized Monasticism and True Love

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