The third element of true love is the capacity to offer joy. When you know how to generate joy, it nourishes you and nourishes the other person. Your presence is an offering, like fresh air, or spring flowers, or the bright blue sky.
— Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Love, p. 20
Photo: Centreville, Virginia, April 10, 2010
The more you take things personally, the more you suffer. You observe it, hold it up to the light, release it, and move on. One can choose to let suffering be the elevator to a heightened place of humble loving. You adjust the knot on the red string around your wrist and find your center again.
Humility returns the center of gravity to the center. It addresses the ego clinging, which supplies oxygen to our suffering. It calls for a light grasp. For the opposite of clinging is not letting go but cherishing. This is the goal of the practice of humility. That having a “light grasp” on life prepares the way for cherishing what is right in front of us.
— Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir, p. 105-106
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 13, 2019
Our frightened selves want only for the gathered to like us, to agree with us, or be intimidated by us. I suppose Jesus walks into a room and loves what he finds there. Delights in it, in fact. Maybe, He makes a beeline to the outcasts and chooses, in them, to go where love has not yet arrived. His ways aren’t our ways, but they sure could be.
We have grown accustomed to think that loving as God does is hard. We think it’s about moral strain and obligation. We presume it requires a spiritual muscularity of which we are not capable, a layering of burden on top of sacrifice, with a side order of guilt. (But it was love, after all, that made the cross salvific, not the sheer torture of it.)
— Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart, p. 155
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 8, 2019
There’s power in love. There’s power in love to help and heal when nothing else can. There’s power in love to lift up and liberate when nothing else will. There’s power in love to show us the way to live.
— Michael Curry, The Power of Love, p. 8
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 6, 2018
For God to resort to violence in order to save the world is not saving the world; it’s condemning the world. But John tells us, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” God saves the world not through the impatience of violence but through the infinite patience of divine love. I understand the incredulity of unbelievers toward the idea that the world can be saved by love and without violence; it is this very incredulity that lies at the foundation of their unbelief. But it is the very inconceivability of God-saving love in Christ that Christians are to believe in most of all. If John 3:16 is to mean anything, it must mean that God gets what God wants through love, or not at all. If I believe that love never fails, it’s because I believe that God is love. To believe in the sufficiency of God’s love to save the world is not naïve optimism; it’s Christianity.
— Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, p. 206-207.
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, March 21, 2018
Instead of gripping tightly to a fixed idea of how things are and how they should be, we can train our mind to hold those notions lightly and begin each day ready to explore. We do not need to face the world demanding that it prove us right. Instead, we can say to it: Surprise me. We can become excited by the possibility that if we keep our eyes open, we open our hearts to something new. To have the kind of openness that cultivates awe does not mean we have to be credulous and sentimental, but the ironic stance – to act unimpressed because we fear looking foolish – has us experiencing our own lives at a distance. If, instead, we open our hearts to real love, we allow ourselves to feel the wonder of life, which research says is vital to sustaining our connection to the world and to one another.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love, p. 283
Photo: January 24, 2004, Sembach, Germany
I hope you recognize love as the most powerful force for personal change and for changing the world around us. Yes, we live in scary times. Yes, people are hurting. Yes, people are hurting one another. But anger is not the key; revenge is not the answer. The way of love — the love and power of God — is the key to our hope and to our future.
The message of God is very simple. Love one another. Take care of one another. Take care of creation. And while you’re at it, love me — love God. Do that and you will find your way. That is the core of the gospel. That is the only sermon that matters.
— Michael Curry, The Power of Love, p. xvi.
Photo: Leithöfe, Germany, Christmas 1996
What Jesus certainly does not say is that the sheep and goats are divided on the basis of who has and who has not said a sinner’s prayer! Unfortunately, a cobbled-together misreading of Paul has been used to either ignore or evade what Jesus taught about the priority of loving our neighbors as ourselves being the criterion for judgment. Jesus taught that the Golden Rule is the narrow gate that leads to life. The narrow gate is not a sinner’s prayer but a life of love and mercy. The way of self-interest that exploits the weak is the wide road to destruction; the way of cosuffering love that cares for the weak is the narrow road that leads to life.
— Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God, p. 129
Photo: Isle of Iona, Scotland, July 13, 2003.
Forgiveness can also be bittersweet. It contains the sweetness of the release of a story that has caused us pain, but also the poignant reminder that even our dearest relationships change over the course of a lifetime. Regardless of the decision we reach about whether or not to include someone in our present-day life, in the end, forgiveness is a path to peace and an essential element of love for ourselves and others.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love, p. 199
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, December 4, 2018
Love allows us to get out of our own way. It allows us to transcend this fear and these calcified ways of reacting. Love allows us to receive freely. Love raises us above the worries and cares and creates the responsiveness that brings contact and joy.
Today, go out there and love. Get out of your own way. Love everyone you meet, and let the love that wants to come to you from God through others reach you.
— Chuck Spezzano, If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love, p. 381
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, November 30, 2018