When we forgive someone, we don’t pretend that the harm didn’t happen or cause us pain. We see it clearly for what it was, but we also come to see that fixating on the memory of harm generates anger and sadness. Those feelings then prevent us from savoring the love and joy available to us right now. Forgiveness is the way we break the grip that long-held resentments have on our hearts.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love, p. 193
Photo: Prague, July 16, 2004
When we think about how God could bring it about that all would ultimately choose to repent and be reconciled to God, we are not limited to thinking that God will have to twist people’s arms behind their backs or beat them into submission. A foundational Christian belief is that God has the power to break into people’s hearts and lives and change them from the inside out and make them new people. God has the power to dispel our illusions and set us free from the bubbles of self-deception in which we often live. In the age to come, when we are immersed in the divine presence, surrounded by the unmediated and pure holiness and love of God, the light will shine on the ugliness of our sin and on the beauty of God’s love for us. God will not externally force anyone to do something they do not want to do. Rather, we can trust that God has the power to internally compel all people to see the truth about themselves and the truth about God in such a way that will leave them without any motivation to cling to their sin, and every motivation to throw themselves onto the mercy of God.
— Heath Bradley, Flames of Love, p. 99-100
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, October 25, 2013
I’ve learned from giving thousands of talks that you never appeal to the conscience of your audience but, rather, introduce them to their own goodness. I remember, in my earliest days, that I used to be so angry. In talks, in op-ed pieces, in radio interviews, I shook my fist a lot. My speeches would rail against indifference and how the young men and women I buried seemed to matter less in the world than other lives. I eventually learned that shaking one’s fist at something doesn’t change it. Only love gets fists to open. Only love leads to a conjuring of kinship within reach of the actual lives we live.
— Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir, p. 6
Photo: South Riding, October 25, 2017
The Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or — if they think there is not — at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
— C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, quoted in C. S. Lewis’ Book of Wisdom: Meditations on Faith, Life, Love, and Literature, compiled by Andrea Kirk Assaf & Kelly Anne Leahy, page 56.
More thoughts about this quote found on Sonderjourneys.
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, October 23, 2015
One of the biggest barriers in romantic love is that so many people don’t love themselves enough. I repeat: if you don’t love yourself, you are not able to love another fully. So many people are looking to a romantic partner to complete themselves; but we are complete. We are all the same pure love we were as a baby, but the problem is we have locked away so much of it inside us. We feel this absence of self-love in our lives but instead of unlocking it — and only we can do this — we seek someone special to love us to compensate for our lack of self-love.
— Lorna Byrne, Love from Heaven, p. 136
[Photo: Schloß Neuschwanstein, June 2, 1997]
We naturally gravitate toward what we love. The more we move toward what we love, the more we enjoy ourselves, and we begin to resonate with it. We find that what we love is also within us. This allows a giving and receiving, a sharing and joining in love, which lets us know it as ourselves. What we love, we then plant in our heart and help grow like a garden. We want to give it to everyone, so they, too, can receive and enjoy what we are receiving and enjoying. Enjoyment always wants to be shared.
— Chuck Spezzano, If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love, p. 327
[Photo: Keukenhof, Holland, April 17, 2004]
The message for us, then, is plain. Forget the “works contract,” with its angry, legalistic divinity. Forget the false either/or that plays different “theories of atonement” against one another. Embrace the “covenant of vocation” or, rather, be embraced by it as the Creator calls you to a genuine humanness at last, calls and equips you to bear and reflect his image. Celebrate the revolution that happened once for all when the power of love overcame the love of power. And, in the power of that same love, join in the revolution here and now.
— N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began, p. 416
[Photo: Donnersbergkreis, Germany, November 8, 2003]
The third benefit from forgiveness emerges as we give more love and care to the important people in our lives. I know from my own experience and those of many others that hurts from the past often cause us to draw away and mistrust the very people who are trying to love us. Too often the people who suffer from our grievances are not the people who hurt us but those who care for us today.
If we rent too much space to what went wrong, where is the space to appreciate the good in our lives? If we focus our attention on past defeats, how can we give our full loving attention to our significant other, friends, or co-workers? If we remain bitter over past parenting cruelties, who suffers — our parents or our current friends and loved ones?
— Fred Luskin, Forgvie for Good, p. 73
Photo: South Riding, Virginia, October 26, 2014
Jesus, in Matthew’s gospel, says, “How narrow is the gate that leads to life.” Mistakenly, I think, we’ve come to believe that this is about restriction. The way is narrow. But it really wants us to see that narrowness is the way.
St. Hedwig writes, “All is narrow for me, I feel so vast.” It’s about funneling ourselves into a central place. Our choice is not to focus on the narrow, but to narrow our focus. The gate that leads to life is not about restriction at all. It is about an entry into the expansive. There is a vastness in knowing you’re a son/daughter worth having. We see our plentitude in God’s own expansive view of us, and we marinate in this.
— Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart, p. 31-32
Photo: Notre Dame, Paris, April 2001
Feelings of apathy as they relate to our relationships often stem from insufficiently paying attention to those around us. Remember: everyone we interact with has the capacity to surprise us in an infinite number of ways. What can first open us up to each of our innate capacities for love is merely to recognize that.
— Sharon Salzberg, Real Love, p. 127
Photo: Sky Meadows State Park, Virginia, July 3, 2017