Many of us wish God were more visible. We think that if we could see him better or know what was going on, then faith would come more easily. But if Jesus dominated the space and overwhelmed our vision, we would not be able to relate to him. Everyone who had a clear-eyed vision of God in the Bible fell down as if he were dead. It’s hard to relate to pure light.
— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 193
Without revelation and reframing, life can seem like an endless desert of danger with scratchy sand in your shoes, and yet if we remember or are reminded to pay attention, we find so many sources of hidden water, so many bits and chips and washes of color, in a weed or the gravel or a sunrise. There are so many ways to sweep the sand off our feet. So we say, “Oh my God. Thanks.”
— Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, p. 53
Love once said to me, “I know a song,
would you like to hear it?”
And laughter came from every brick in the street
and from every pore
in the sky.
After a night of prayer, He
changed my life when
He sang,
“Enjoy Me.”
— St. Teresa of Avila, translated by Daniel Ladinsky in Love Poems from God, p. 276
Love is not denying ourselves and doing for others; rather, it is honestly expressing whatever our feelings and needs are and empathically receiving the other person’s feelings and needs. To receive empathically does not mean that you must comply — just accurately receive what is expressed as a gift of life from the other person. Love is honestly expressing our own needs; that doesn’t mean making demands, but just, “Here I am. Here’s what I like.”
— Marshall Rosenberg, PhD, Living Nonviolent Communication, p. 29
Accepting our powerlessness over the behavior of others isn’t easy. We think, If only I’d said it this way. Or perhaps, If only I had made that special dinner or bought flowers first. We get fooled into thinking that if we do something differently, we might get the object of our attention to do something differently, too. Alas, that’s never going to happen, unless by accident. People do what they do. Period. Our good fortune is to learn how empowered we feel when we let them!
Awaking each morning, being grateful to know that we can have the kind of day we want, is one of the gifts of embracing a spiritual program. Relieving ourselves of the burden of trying to make others conform to our wishes is a gift we can gladly unwrap a day at a time.
— Karen Casey, Let Go Now, p. 105
If all humans were to start singing more, many of the earth’s troubles would cease to exist; I am convinced of that.
— Agneta Nyholm Winqvist, Wabi Sabi, p. 66
Most of us figure out by a certain age — some of us later than others — that life unspools in cycles, some lovely, some painful, but in no predictable order. So you could have lovely, painful, and painful again, which I think we all agree is not at all fair. You don’t have to like it, and you are always welcome to file a brief with the Complaints Department. But if you’ve been around for a while, you know that much of the time, if you are patient and are paying attention, you will see that God will restore what the locusts have taken away.
— Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, p. 50
When God seems silent and our prayers go unanswered, the overwhelming temptation is to leave the story — to walk out of the desert and attempt to create a normal life. But when we persist in a spiritual vacuum, when we hang in there during ambiguity, we get to know God. In fact, that is how intimacy grows in all close relationships.
— Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life, p. 192
When definitions of “us” and “them” begin to contract, there seems to be no limit to how narrow these definitions can become. As they shrink and narrow, they are increasingly inflamed, more dangerous and inhumane. They present themselves as movements toward truer and purer community, but, as I have said, they are the destruction of community. They insist that the imagination must stay within the boundaries they establish for it, that sympathy and identification are only allowable within certain limits. I am convinced that the broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health, individual and global.
— Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child, I Read Books, p. 26
How long will grown men and women in this world
keep drawing in their coloring books
an image of God that
makes them
sad?
— Meister Eckhart, translated by Daniel Ladinsky, in Love Poems from God, p. 117