Category Archives: Humanities

Real Choice

People tend to think of nonviolence as a choice between using force and doing nothing. But the real choice takes place at another level. Nonviolence is less a matter of “not killing” and more a matter of showing compassion, of saving and redeeming, of being a healing community. One can only choose between doing good to the person placed in one’s path, or to do him evil. To do good is to love a person; but not to do that is as good as killing him. To love someone is to restore that person physically, socially, and spiritually. To neglect and postpone this restoration is already to kill.

–André Trocmé

A Tree Full of Angels

Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. Life wants to lead you from crumbs to angels, but this can happen only if you are willing to unwrap the ordinary by staying with it long enough to harvest its treasure.

–Macrina Wiederkehr, O.S.B

Read the Signs

Whenever I drive past a church I’m often amused by the signage. Sometimes they are clearly clever on purpose; other times they are clever by accident. Often they are funny. My fiancé has wondered if anyone has compiled these in a book that ministers use for reference. Tonight I stumbled across a site that answers the question, and that answer is: yes. The site also has photos of signs submitted by various people. Some of my favorites:

Forgive Your Enemies. It Messes With Their Heads.

God So Loved the World That He Did Not Send a Committee.

Staying in Bed Shouting O God! Does Not Constitute Going to Church.

Walmart Is Not The Only Saving Place.

Can You Hear Me Now? How About Now? –God

Don’t Let Worries Kill You, Let the Church Help

See more at The Church Sign Generator page. You can also make your own signs there.

Circle of Compassion

A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.

–Albert Einstein

The Divine Erotic

The following excerpt is from Heart & Soul: Living The Joy, Truth & Beauty Of Your Intimate Relationship, by Daphne Rose Kingma.

Integrate The Divine Erotic

Your erotic life, the expression of your sensuality in every dimension, is the mysteriously lovely vehicle for the integration of all that you are as a personality and a spirit. It is the sacred playground of physical passion, the point in our experience more than any other at which the material and spiritual intersect. Here the physical body becomes a temple of joy, of deeply rooted connections, of solace, of coming home.

Through sensuality, emotions are expressed in physical form. The body knows, feels, and teaches, eloquently and directly. When we are touched in exactly the right way, when making love is graceful and ecstatic, we are moved without words to a level of integration of body, mind, and spirit that can be instantly healing.

Because of the power of sexuality to heal the rift between our bodies and our souls, we all have a yearning toward it that is far stronger than what we can attribute to the physical sex drive alone. That is because deep inside we know that the erotic life can lead us to integration. And it is only people who are healed physically, emotionally, and sexually from the great raft of wounds we have all endured (if in no other form than our culture’s repression and perverted exaggeration of the erotic) who can be true vessels of compassion and approach the whole world with generosity.

Unfortunately, many of us have been unable to welcome our bodies, our innate sensuality, and the power of the erotic itself into the ken of the spiritual. We’re not even sure that we should, and yet like our sense of the spirit inside us, we do somehow vaguely understand that our erotic life, too, is divine.

If sexual energy and the joy it creates weren’t so awesome a power, no one would bother with it. Instead of being so focused on it, in so many forms, good and awful, we would have gone off to live quite comfortably without it. The truth is that sexuality is a light of such incredible brilliance that it draws the moths of darkness to it; and for this reason, if for no other, it is a spiritual responsibility that we integrate the divine and erotic in our lives.

In your grand quest for love, therefore, for the finest and most beautifully integrated becoming that your heart can entertain, do not overlook — indeed consciously seek — the sexual healing that will bring your personality and spirit into alignment with your body. For when we integrate our sexuality, claim it as the amazing gift it is, we not only heal ourselves and our partners, we help to restore the divine erotic to the entire world.

Two Ways

Now there are two ways to approach a subject that frightens you and makes you feel stupid: you can embrace it with humility and an open mind, or you can ridicule it mercilessly.

–Judith Stone, Light Elements: Essays in Science From Gravity to Levity (1991)

What Did I Know?

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

–Robert Hayden (1913-1980)

A Certain Fierceness

Another gem unearthed from Michael Ventura’s excavations.

It takes fierceness to grow old well. It takes a fierce devotion to the word good-bye — learning how to say it in many ways — fiercely, yes, but also gently, with laughter, with tears, but, no matter how, to say it every time so that there’s no doubt you mean it.

–Michael Ventura, “Across the Great Divide”; Psychotherapy Networker, Jan/Feb 2005

In Search of Its Dreams

“My heart is afraid it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky.

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”

–Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

A Gift of Getting Older

A great gift of getting older, of becoming old, is to realize that I, too, am a precious vessel — quite apart from any idea of self-worth I might have, quite apart from anything I may have accomplished. I’m a precious vessel because of all that I’ve seen, all the stories I know, all the images and memories that will die with me. In this way, we’re all precious vessels. And it isn’t that we must get frantic about preserving all we’ve seen and all we know. Preserving all the stories isn’t a human possibility, for all will be forgotten one day. But to know that I’m such a vessel, as you are, makes me more attentive, makes me more available to anyone who asks for what I know, makes me speak more carefully, with less of the judgmental and more attention to nuance — makes me try to speak more slowly and reflectively, and to be like… an older man, the kind of older man I once admired: tolerant, receptive, at ease in his age, not trying to be anything he isn’t, not trying to be younger.

–Michael Ventura, “Across the Great Divide”; Psychotherapy Networker, Jan/Feb 2005

I love this guy; I’m grateful he pours out his words for the rest of us to soak up.