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.
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.
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
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
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 spiritual life is not a theory. We have to live it.
A.A. Big Book, p. 83
Most people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.
Virginia Satir
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
Human happiness depends wholly on the quality of the object which we love.
Spinoza
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
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,
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”
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”
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
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
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 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
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
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 will always regress from rehabilitation. They will not regress from transformation.
Robert Woodson, President, National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, New Orleans Times Picayune, Oct. 30, 1994
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
When we are young we are often puzzled by the fact that each person we admire seems to have a different version of what life ought to be, what a good man is, how to live, and so on. If we are not especially sensitive it seems more than puzzling, it is disheartening. What most people usually do is to follow one person’s ideas and then another’s, depending on who looms largest ones for horizon at the time. The one with the deepest voice, the strongest appearance, the most authority and success is usually the one who gets our momentary allegiance; we try to pattern ideals after him. But as life goes on we get a perspective on this, and all these different versions of truth become a little pathetic. Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life’s limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man, and he usually tries to win the following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of you because it is more than merely an outlook on life; it is an immortality formula. Not everyone; of course has the authority of Kant speaking the words we have used in our epigraph to this chapter, but in matters of immortality everyone has the same self-righteous conviction. The thing seems perverse because each diametrically opposed view is put forth with the same maddening certainty; and authorities who are equally unimpeachable hold opposite views!
Ernest Becker, Denial of Death, 1973. P. 255