"You must give birth to your images.

They are the future waiting to be born.

Fear not the strangeness you feel.

The future must enter you

long before it happens.

Just wait for the birth,

for the hour of new clarity."

--Rainer Maria Rilke

"Compassion is the ultimate and most meaningful embodiment of emotional maturity. It is through compassion that a person achieves the highest peak and the deepest reach in his or her search for self-fulfillment."  --Arthur Jersild

"Never let anyone—any person or any force—dampen, dim, or diminish your light."  John Lewis

The Rowing Endeth

The Rowing Endeth

I’m mooring my rowboat

at the dock of the island called God.

This dock is made in the shape of a fish

and there are many boats moored

at  many different docks.

“It’s okay.” I say to myself,

with blisters that broke and healed

and broke and healed –

saving themselves over and over.

And salt sticking to my face and arms like

a glue-skin pocked with grains of tapioca.

I empty myself from my wooden boat

and onto the flesh of The Island.

“On with it!” He says and thus

we squat on the rocks by the sea

and play – can it be true –

a game of poker.

He calls me.

I win because I hold a royal straight flush.

He wins because He holds five aces,

wild card had been announced

but I had not heard it

being in such a state of awe

when He took out the cards and dealt.

As he plunks down His five aces

and I am still grinning at my royal flush,

He starts to laugh,

and laughter rolling like a hoop out of His mouth

and into mine,

and such laughter that He doubles right over me

laughing a Rejoice-Chorus at our two triumphs.

Then I laugh, the fishy dock laughs

the sea laughs. The Island laughs.

The Absurd laughs.

Dearest dealer,

I with my royal straight flush,

love you so for your wild card,

that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha

and lucky love.

--Anne Sexton, An Awful Rowing toward God

In Service We Encounter God

Radical servanthood does not make sense unless we introduce a new level of understanding and see it as the way to encounter God. To be humble and persecuted cannot be desired unless we can find God in humility and persecution. When we begin to see God, the source of all our comfort and consolation, in the center of servanthood, compassion becomes much more than doing good for unfortunate people. Radical servanthood, as the encounter with the compassionate God, takes us beyond the distinctions between wealth and poverty, success and failure, fortune and bad luck. Radical servanthood is not an enterprise in which we try to surround ourselves with as much misery as possible, but a joyful way of life in which our eyes are opened to the vision of the true God who chose to be revealed in servanthood. The poor are called blessed not because poverty is good, but because theirs is the kingdom of heaven; the mourners are called blessed not because mourning is good, but because they shall be comforted.

Here we are touching the profound spiritual truth that service is an expression of the search for God and not just of the desire to bring about individual or social change.

--Henri Nouwen

"If you want to create a viable, peaceful world, we’ve got to integrate compassion into the gritty realities of 21st century life. Compassion is not an option. It is the key to our survival."  --Karen Armstrong

"We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers."   --Bayard Rustin

"It's the simple things in life that are the most extraordinary."   --Paulo Coelho

"There are some who take such a gloomy view of things they make them much worse, I always look on the bright side."  --St. Therese of Lisieux

"Forgiveness is not always easy. At times it feels more painful than the wound we have suffered to forgive the one that inflicted it and yet there is no peace without forgiveness."  --Marianne Williamson

"Time is how you spend your love."  --Nick Laird, “The Last Saturday in Ulster”

"Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair."  --Thomas Merton

"There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them is sufficient."  --Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004)

“The human soul is like a fine wine that needs to ferment in various barrels as it ages and mellows…Growing up and maturing is precisely a process of fermentation.  It does not happen easily, without effort and without breakdown.  But it happens almost despite us, because such is the effect of a conspiracy between God and nature to mellow the soul."  --Fr. Ron Rolheiser, Sacred Fire

“Society is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.”  --Edward Abbey

"What peace pours over the soul once it soars above natural feelings."  --St. Therese of Lisieux

Creative Reciprocity

"We who want to bring about change have first of all to learn to be changed by those whom we want to help. This, of course, is exceptionally difficult for those who are undergoing their first exposure to an area of distress. They see poor houses, hungry people, dirty streets; they hear people cry in pain without medical care, they smell unwashed bodies, and in general are overwhelmed by the misery that is all around them. But none of us will be able to really give if he has not discovered that what he gives is only a small thing compared to what we have received. When Jesus says: “Happy the poor, the hungry, and the weeping” (Luke 6:21), we have to be able to see that happiness. When Jesus says: “What you did to the least of my brothers, you did to me” (Matthew 25:40), he is addressing to us a direct invitation not only to help but also to discover the beauty of God in those who are to be helped. As long as we see only distasteful poverty, we are not really entitled to give. When, however, we find people who have truly devoted themselves to work in the slums and the ghettos and who feel that their vocation is to be of service there, we find that they have discovered that in the smiles of the children, the hospitality of the people; the expressions they use, the stories they tell, the wisdom they show, the goods they share; there is hidden so much richness and beauty, so much affection and human warmth, that the work they are doing is only a small return for what they have already received."  --Henri Nouwen

"It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddha, or whether you are or not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can't. On both occasions, the man breathes."  --Zadie Smith

"In my Little Way there are only very ordinary things."  --St. Therese of Lisieux

"He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much."  --Bessie Anderson Stanley

God Loves Us from Eternity to Eternity

"I have always been very conscious of my clock-time. Often I asked myself: “Can I still double my years?” When I was thirty I said: “I can easily live another thirty!” When I was forty, I mused, “Maybe I am only halfway!” Today I can no longer say that, and my question has become: “How am I going to use the few years left to me?” All these concerns about our clock-time come from below. They are based on the presupposition that our chronology is all we have to live. But looked upon from above, from God’s perspective, our clock-time is embedded in the timeless embrace of God. Looked upon from above, our years on earth are not simply chronos, but kairos—another Greek word for time—which is the opportunity to claim for ourselves the love that God offers us from eternity to eternity."  --Henri Nouwen

"One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak."  --G.K. Chesterton

"Between fight and flight is a third path: The Way Between. The Way Between stands its ground, neither causing harm nor allowing harm to be done. . . . Everything can be done with the Way Between, from the smallest task to moving the largest mountains."  --Rivera Sun, The Way Between

"As I walk with Beauty

As I walk, as I walk,

The universe is walking with me,

In beauty it walks before me,

In beauty it walks behind me,

In beauty it walks below me,

In beauty it walks above me,

Beauty is on every side."

--Traditional Navajo Prayer

"You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference and you have to decide what kind of a difference you want to make."  --Jane Goodall

"Outrage without an accompanying action turns into paralysis."  --Sr. Helen Prejean

The Preciousness of Life

"It is not so difficult to understand why, through all the ages, people searching for the meaning of life tried to live as close to nature as possible. Not only St. Benedict, St. Francis, and St.Bruno in the olden days, but also Thomas Merton, who lived in the woods of Kentucky, and the Benedictine monks who built their monastery in an isolated canyon in New Mexico. It is not so strange that many young people are leaving the cities and going out into the country to find peace by listening to the voices of nature. And nature indeed speaks: the birds to St. Francis, the trees to the Native Americans, the river to Siddhartha. And the closer we come to nature, the closer we touch the core of life when we celebrate. Nature makes us aware of the preciousness of life. Nature tells us that life is precious not only because it is, but also because it does not have to be."  --Henri Nouwen

"Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first they have to understand that their neighbor is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions."  --Paulo Coelho

The Friend Who Cares

"When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing, not-healing, and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is the friend who cares."  --Henri Nouwen