Meaning of our Lives

Life, Love 0

The meaning of our lives cannot be found in books or lecture halls or even churches or synagogues. It’s discovered through these acts of love. If God is love, and I believe that to be true, then we learn about God when we learn about love. The first, and usually the last, classroom of love is the family.

The remarkable thing about this crucible of love is that the love we experience in our families doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, it can’t be perfect, because none of us is perfect.

— Kerry Egan, On Living, p. 29

Signs of God’s Love

God, Love 0

If only we could all wear a heart right across the center of us so there was always this knowing: God has not forgotten you. God has not abandoned you. God’s love is around you everywhere. When you feel in your marrow how you’re His Beloved, you do more than look for signs of His love in the world, more than have a sign of His love; you actually become a sign of His love.

— Ann Voskamp, The Broken Way, p. 23

Love Is an Inside Job.

Core Value, Growth, Life, Love, Relationships 0

Through her own challenging experiences of both love and solitude, she had come to know that love is first and foremost an inside job — not in the sense of trying to love herself with positive affirmations but rather in becoming intimate with her own experience, with allowing herself to be transparent to herself and others rather than protecting her heart for fear of being known too well and then rejected.

She was also engaged in a creative and fulfilling life that she loved. As an individual ripens, becomes something in herself, as Rilke puts it, there is less need to find someone else to fill the missing gap. Athena wasn’t averse to an intimate relationship; on the contrary, she knew that she wanted one, but she didn’t need it.

— Roger Housden, Dropping the Struggle: Seven Ways to Love the Life You Have, p. 74-75

A Gift

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Being attracted to someone lets us know that we have a gift for them. Often, when we are attracted to somebody, we think they are supposed to give us something, but our joy comes in realizing that if we give the gift, a creative project comes to both of us as a result of that connection. If we are willing to give our gifts with integrity, we enjoy a creative connection with many, many joyful people.

Today, as you recognize yourself being attracted to someone ask yourself, “What is the gift I am to give them that would really move them forward?” It might only be a blessing or a feeling of support, but whatever it is give it without any expectation of receiving anything in return. Give your gift with integrity and love, and enjoy this creative connection you now have with them.

— Chuck Spezzano, If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love, p. 182

Loving God

Acceptance, Faith, God, Love, Truth 0

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.” If we are angry at God because of something that happened to us or because of something going on in the world, and we are reluctant to admit our anger either because it seems disrespectful or because we fear that God will punish us for being angry at Him, we won’t be able to “love God with all our heart.” We can only love him halfheartedly. The wife who is afraid to tell her husband how bothered she is by some of his habits, for fear that he will be upset with her and perhaps even leave her, will not be able to love him wholeheartedly, and that inability will affect their relationship. The adolescent who is scolded for being angry at his parents “after all we’ve done for you,” or whose hopes and dreams are mocked by his parents, will learn to keep his feelings to himself. That will be an impediment to his being able to love his parents as wholeheartedly as he would like to.

Accepting anger, ours and that of people close to us, has to be part of any honest relationship. If the opposite of faith is not doubt but despair, then the opposite of authentic love, wholehearted love, is not anger but pretense, censoring our feelings. I don’t believe God is fooled by that, nor do I believe that is what He wants from us. God will accept our anger, justified or not, so that we can then go on to love Him “with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our might.”

— Harold S. Kushner, Nine Essential Things I’ve Learned About Life, p. 129-130.

Grievances Have an Expiration Date.

Forgiveness, Joy, Love 0

Grievances don’t make you happy: Sometimes we hold on to grievances because we are afraid that our past was our best chance for happiness. However, you can’t continue to carry a grievance and hope to be happy. To be truly happy, you have to be willing to make love more important than your grievances, your ego, and your past. There comes a time, then when you have to accept that every grievance has an expiration date. By being willing to forgive, you come to see that there is life after a grievance.

— Robert Holden, Loveability, p. 182

God Meets You Where You Are

God, Life, Love 0

Even though God is always calling us to constant conversion and growth, and even though we are imperfect and sometimes sinful people, God loves us as we are now. As the Indian Jesuit Anthony de Mello said, “You don’t have to change for God to love you.” This is one of the main insights of the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius: you are loved even in your imperfections. God already loves you.

The Christian can see this clearly in the New Testament. Jesus often calls people to conversion, to cease sinning, to change their lives, but he doesn’t wait until they have done so before meeting them. He enters in relationship with them as he finds them. He meets them where they are and as they are.

— James Martin, S.J., The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, p. 81-82.