Where the fulfillment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest
spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not
be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons
the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development,
in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and
ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions,
which actually give it the character of sport.
Max Weber, 1905
The will of God is not a question of rules established from the outset. It
is something new and different in each situation in life, and for this reason
a man must forever rexamine what the will of God may be. The will of God may
lie deeply concealed beneath a great number of possibilities.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics
The enjoyment of God should be the supreme end of spiritual technique; and it is in that enjoyment of God that we feel not only saved in the Evangelical sense, but safe: we are conscious of belonging to God, and hence are never alone... In that relationship Nature seems friendly and homely; even its vast spaces instead of eliciting a sense of terror speak of the infinite love; and the nearer beauty becomes the garment with which the Almighty clothes himself. Henry Guntrip, Psychotherapy and Religion
Whenever Christ calls us, his call leads us to death.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lutheran theologian who was executed by the Nazis
... the will is infinite and he execution confined, that the desire is boundless
and the act a slave to limit... [appetite] is an universal wolf, so doubly
seconded with will and power... it must make perforce an universal prey, and
last eat up himself.
Shakespeare, in Troilus and Cressida
The maintenance of the highly developed self entails a rift between self and society. Thus the highly developed self, although emerging in social interaction, is not simply a product of amiable sociability. It is not totally committed to friendly cooperation with others, but it also requires some measure of conflict for its very survival: it must at some point fight the system of which it is a part and those who wish to subject it to that system. Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, p. 222.
We should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of human society. Albert Einstein
One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals
on the alter of the great historical ideas -- justice or progress or happiness
of future generations...or emancipation of a nation or race or class...this
is the belief that somewhere...there is a final solution.
-- Sir Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts Of Liberty (1958)
The West... has two wellsprings: Greco-Roman philosophy and Judeo-Christian
religion. More important, as long as these two sources are open to the ongoing
challenge each presents to the other, the project of European civilization
has no reason to come to an end. In this understanding, the genius of the
West is that the question of the world's meaning is always kept open, precisely
because it is niether answered in a definitive manner nor abandoned as unanswerable.
Peter Causton, First Things, July 2009
"Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life." (John 12:24)
My life is too valuable to spend it on money.
T. Hoyt, 7/3/09
Why do people tell lies?
Usually because they want something and they're afraid the truth won't get
it for them.
Charade, 1963, in exchange between Carey Grant and Aubrey Hepburn
The human race has passed from a static conception of humanity to a more
dynamic, evolutionary one. In consequence, there has arisen a new series of
problems, a series as important as can be, calling for new efforts of analysis
and synthesis.
from Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes
When intelligence is missing, the first law of self-preservation takes over.
Bernard Longergan, SJ
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
W B Yeats, "Second Coming"
There is no safety, and there is no end. The word must be heard in silence;
there must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above
the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.
Sparrowhawk, in Le Guin's The Farthest Shore, p. 121 of the 1980 Bantam paperback
edition.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are
always so certain of themselves while wiser people are so full of
doubt. Bertrand Russell
The last temptation that is (also) the greatest temptation is to do the right
thing for the wrong reason.
T. S. Eliot
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of
our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other
work is but preparation.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
A Thousand Serious Moves
What is the difference
Between your Existence
And that of a Saint?
The Saint knows
That the spiritual path
Is a sublime chess game with God
And that the Beloved
Has just made such a Fantastic Move
That the Saint is now continually
Tripping over joy
And Bursting out in Laughter
And saying, "I Surrender!"
Whereas, my dear,
I am afraid you still think
You have a thousand serious moves.
Hafiz
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves ...
Don't search for the answers,
which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually, without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
A resolution that is a fine flame of feeling allowed to burn itself out without
appropriate action, is not merely a lost opportunity, but a bar to future
action.
William James
Real love is hard work. You have to decide if you want it in your story,
or if you'd rather stay in the dream.
Joan of Arcadia, CBS
Certain forms of perplexity--for example, about freedom, knowledge, and the meaning of life--seem to me to embody more insight than any of the supposed solutions to these problems. Thomas Nagel, "The View From Nowhere"
We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring will
be to arrive from where we started And know the place for the first time.
TS Elliot
One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself
and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful.
Normal Maclean, A River Runs Thru It
People will always regress from rehabilitation. They will not regress from
transformation.
Robert Woodson, President, National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, Times
Picayune, Oct. 30, 1994
I do nothing but go about persuading you, young and old alike, not to take
thought for your persons or properties but first and chiefly to care about
the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given
by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good, public as
well as private.
Attributed to Socrates, in "The Apology of Socrates", written by
Plato
Human happiness depends wholly on the quality of the object which we love.
Spinoza
Reason is delicate, and it is very easy to destroy its subtlety with an unsubtle
mind. The point is that the less subtle mind cannot know its lack of subtlety,
and proclaims its understanding as having reached that subtlety. This, of
course, has always been the fate of philosophy.
Posted by Dr. Onno on Kant list
In the seasons, in plants, in the body and above all in civil society, excessive
action results in violent transformation into its opposite.
Plato, The Republic
Men would rather live for Nothingness than nothing.
Nietszche
For men are good in one way but bad in many.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, in Book 2 where Aristotle defines virtue as
moderation, or the mean.
The wish to be normal conceals a deep desire negatively - an attempt to avoid
the wage of our individuality, and positively, the desire to be fully ourselves
within a community.
Thomas More, The Original Self
The tragedy of our day is that everyone desires the appearance of goodness but very few the reality... I. Kant
The psychotic messes into which many tumble are due either to a want of a
knowledge of human nature or to a want of genuine religion.
F. Sheen, Peace of Soul
Of all the masks of freedom, discipline is the most impenetrable.
Anonymous
The world is full of scholars who speak about extending the frontiers of knowledge
but who never use the knowledge that has already been acquired; who love to
knock at the door of truth but would drop dead if that door ever opened to
them.
Fulton Sheen, Peace of Soul
At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfullness,
self-distraction... And therefore he turns away from all those problems and
abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness.
Henri Amiel AIH
Most people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.
Virginia Satir
We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful.
We have done so much for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to
do anything with nothing. Karachi's top anti-terrorist operative. New Republic,
11/11/02
But when the time comes to enter the darkness in which we are naked and helpless
and alone; in which we see the insufficiency of our greatest strength and
the hollowness of our strongest virtues; in which we have nothing of our own
to rely on, and nothing in our nature to support us, and nothing in the world
to guide us or give us light - then we find out whether or not we live by
faith.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
People ask, "How can I have courage when I'm afraid?" The answer is clear.
Courage is not the absence of fear, but the willingness to move forward in
spite of it. When fear comes up in your life, fully feel and experience it.
If you try to push it away, it will only expand.
Hazelden, 3/22/00
We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring will
be to arrive from where we started And know the place for the first time.
TS Elliot
Indeed, we know that when the earthly tent in which we dwell is destroyed
we have a dwelling provided for us by God, a dwelling in the heavens, not
made by hands but to last forever. ... Therefore we continue to be confident.
We know that while we dwell in the body we are away from the Lord. We walk
by faith, not by sight. I repeat, we are full of confidence and would much
rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. This being so, we
make it our aim to please him whether we are with him or away from him....
From St. Paul, 2 Corinthians 5: 1, 6-10. Spoken at the Memorial Service at
Washington Cathedral on 9/14/01
The paradox of Christian ethics is precisely that it has always tried to
devise a code for society as a whole from pronouncements which were addressed
to individuals or small communities to separate themselves off from the rest
of society.
Alisdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, p. 115.
The Meditations it is true belongs still to the culture of the search, but Descartes has deformed the movement by reifying its partners into objects for an Archimedean observer outside the search. E. Voegelin, The Gospel and Culture, p. 177.
To imagine the search for truth not to be the essence of humanity but an
historical imperfection of knowledge to be overcome, in history, by perfect
knowledge that will put an end to the search, is an attack on man's consciousness
of his existence under God.
E. Voegelin, p. 226, "Published Essays: On Hegel"
The spiritual life is not a theory. We have to live it.
A.A. Big Book, p. 83.
God whose love it is that he who tears must suffer and even in our sleep
pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our despair
against our will comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
Aeschylius
The truth is that we needed to be contented with who we were. By observing
him, I could learn patience, steadiness, loyalty, the limitation of words,
the value of silence, and the beauty of the concrete and the ordinary. From
observing me, he could learn humor, exuberance, the value of vulnerability
and feeling, the adventurous spirit, and the glory beyond the surface. I am
the kite he holds securely so I won't get carried away and lost in space.
He is the earthbound basket stuck in the dirt which my balloon lifts up into
the atmosphere. I am the bell that gladdens his silence. He is the hush that
quiets my noise.
Anonymous
My illusive tools for survival, gifts for some primeval ancestor, passed
in secret along the chain of my forebears. In the end, mine is a navigator's
sense of place and the strength again to hoist the sails, the will again to
catch the winds; and even when the land and all that I ever loved are lost
to me, and the stars are shrouded, and I am sore with losses, and afraid --
even then the miracles all around leap to celebrate themselves, and I will
celebrate them too. And even then, I'll trust that a new shore will rise to
meet me, and there in that new place, I will find new things to care about.
From "What Falls Away"
Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don't know it,
are asleep. They're born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep
without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty
of this thing that we call human existence. You know all the mystics - Catholic
Christians, non-Christian, no matter what their theology, are unanimous on
one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all
is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But tragically, most people never get
to see that all is well, because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.
Anthony de Mello, SJ "Awareness"
Fighters are most susceptible to giving up at the moment where the pain of
the past meets fear of the future.
Judging Amy, CBS, 12/7/04.
The problem... lay not in "bad thoughts" but in a process of bad thinking
that is really wrong vision - seeing things from the perspective of our fears
and fantasies (unrealities) rather than seeing things truly. Logismos involves
choosing to see the bad - bad in the sense of "unreal", not fitting reality.
Logismos are the arch-enemies of the soul, the demons from within that destroy
the proper perspective on the world and thus prevent us from concentrating
on the actual reality of our life, leading us further and further from our
actual condition, making us try to solve problems that have not yet arisen
and need never arise.
The Spirituality of Imperfection, p. 75,
Now that we have been justified by faith, we are at peace with God through
our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have gained access by faith to the grace
in which we now stand, and we boast of our hope for the glory of God. But
not that only - we even boast of our affliction! We know that affliction makes
for endurance, and endurance for tested virtue, and tested virtue for hope.
And this hope will not leave us disappointed, because the love of God has
been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to
us.
St. Paul to the Romans, Ch. 5:1-5.
It's always a waste of good anger to get annoyed with other human beings...
What the ascetic needs to do is to focus his attention... on the fact that
he is annoyed. Instead of seeing some other human being angrily, he tries
to see his own anger. He can then begin to fight against it.
Tugwell, Ways of Imperfection
Why do we try to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never
want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing
things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite
of what we were made for?
Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island
In questions of science, the authority of a 1000 is not worth the reasoning
of a single humble individual.
Gallileo
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
Natural man is entirely for himself. He is numerical unity, the absolute
whole which is relative only to itself or its kind. Civil man is only a fractional
unity dependent on the denominator; his value is determined by his relation
to the whole, which is the social body. He who in the civil order wants to
preserve the primacy of the sentiments of nature does not know what he wants.
Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations
and his duties, he will never be either man or citizen. He will be good neither
for himself nor for others. He will be one of these men of our days: a Frenchman,
an Englishman, a bourgeois...
J. Rousseau, Emile
... while even the most unscrupulous politician must constantly try to replace
in his own mind political opinion by political knowledge in order to be successful,
the scholarly student of political things will go beyond this by trying to
state the results of his investigations in public without any concealment
and without any partisanship: he will act the part of the enlightened and
patriotic citizen who has no ax of his own to grind.
Leo Strauss, "What is Political Philosophy", p. 15.
Faith is the human component of that mysterious interweaving of divine grace
and human intention that can vanquish the power of attachment.
Gerald May, Addiction and Grace, p. 131
Poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves ...
Don't search for the answers,
which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually, without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer.
...there is a contemporary form of violence to which the idealist fighting
for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork.
The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form,
of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude
of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself
to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb
to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of
the activist neutralizes his or her work for peace. It destroys one's own
inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of one's own work,
because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.
Thomas Merton
The level of sanctimony in the rhetoric is inversely related to the public
benefit of the policy.
Bill Clinton
The best things cannot be taught.
The second best things are misunderstood, by virtue of the fact that the thoughts
about the best tend to be equated with the best.
When we think about ultimate realities, or the most important things, we get
stuck on the thoughts, by virtue of the fact that these things cannot be directly
thought. We get stuck on the thoughts because these are the thoughts which
refer to that which cannot be thought.
The way we "get at" the greatest things is by talking about them.
Religion and deep philosophy is our attempt to talk about the good.
5/08
No matter what annoying habits she has, know that she's dealing with a huge
mountain of imperfections every day, so you might just want to let it go.
Sandra Bullock, in "Forces of Nature", 9/1/08
Something in human nature causes us to start slacking off at our moment of greatest accomplishment. As you become successful, you will need a great deal of self-discipline not to lose your sense of balance, humility, and commitment.
H. Ross Perot
I'm coming to believe that if I do not accept all of what this program offers (demands?), but instead walk away from it as somehow more than I bargained for, I might get drunk. From "Came to Believe", p. 118.
Imagine yourself standing in the rain on the bank of a raging river. Suddenly the water-swollen bank gives way. You fall in and find yourself being tossed around in the rapids. Your efforts to keep afloat are futile and you are drowning. By chance, along comes a huge log and you grab it and hold tight. The log keeps your head above water and saves your life. Clinging to the log you are swept downstream and eventually come to a place where the water is calm. There in the distance you see the riverbank and attempt to swim to shore. You are unable to do so, however, because you are still clinging to the huge log with one arm as you stroke with the other. How ironic. The very thing that saved your life is now getting in the way of your getting to where you want to go. There are people on the shore who see you struggle and yell, "Let go of the log!" But you are unable to do so because you have no confidence in your ability to make it to shore. And so, very slowly and carefully, you let go of the log and practice floating. When you start to sink, you grab back on. Then you let go of the log and practice treading water, and when you get tired, hold on once again. After a while, you practice swimming around the log once, twice, ten times, twenty times, a hundred times, until you gain the strength and confidence you need to swim to shore. Only then can you completely let go of the log.
From "Eating in the Light of the Moon, by Anita Johnston, 1996.