The Courage to Live with an Open Heart

Compassion, Joy 0

The Archbishop and the Dalai Lama had revealed throughout the week one of the core paradoxes of happiness: We are most joyful when we focus on others, not on ourselves. In short, bringing joy to others is the fastest way to experience joy oneself. As the Dalai Lama had said, even ten minutes of meditation on the well-being of others can help one to feel joyful for the whole day — even before coffee. When we close our heart, we cannot be joyful. When we have the courage to live with an open heart, we are able to feel our pain and the pain of others, but we are also able to experience more joy. The bigger and warmer our heart, the stronger our sense of aliveness and resilience.

— Douglas Abrams, The Book of Joy, p. 261

Angels of Prayer

Prayer 0

No one ever prays alone.  When you pray to God, there is a multitude of angels of prayer there, praying with you, regardless of your religious faith or how you are behaving.  They are there enhancing your prayer, interceding on your behalf and imploring God to grant your prayer.  Every time you pray, even if it is only one word, the angels of prayer are like a never-ending stream flowing at tremendous speed to Heaven with your prayers….

I know it’s hard to believe that I see hundreds of thousands of angels of prayer flowing like a river toward Heaven, bringing a person’s prayers and presenting them at the throne of God.  But that is what I am shown; it’s as if angels of prayer bring every bit of the prayer – every syllable that is prayed for – up to Heaven.  When the person stops praying, the flow stops, but as soon as the person starts to pray again, the stream of angels of prayer resumes.

— Lorna Byrne, A Message of Hope from the Angels, p. 49-50

Inescapable Love

Forgiveness, God, Love, Redemption 0

The notion of suffering as an offset for sin comes first of all, I think, from the satisfaction we feel when wrong comes to grief. We hate wrong, but, not being righteous ourselves, to a degree we cannot keep from hating the wronger as well. In this way the inborn justice of our nature passes over to evil. It is no pleasure to God, as it so often is to us, to see the wicked suffer. To regard any suffering with satisfaction, unless it be sympathetically with its curative quality, comes of evil and is a thing God is incapable of. His nature is always to forgive, and just because he forgives, he punishes. Because God is so altogether alien to wrong, because it is to him a heart-pain and trouble that one of his little ones should do the evil thing, there is, I believe, no extreme of suffering to which, for the sake of destroying the evil thing in them, he would not subject them. A man might flatter, or bribe, or coax a tyrant. But there is no refuge from the love of God. That love will, for very love, insist upon the uttermost farthing.

“That hardly sounds like love,” you say. “It’s certainly not the sort of love I care about.”

No, how should you? How should any of us care for it until we begin to know it? But the eternal love will not be moved to yield us to the selfishess that is killing us. You may sneer at such a love, but the Son of God, who took the weight of that love and bore it through the world, is content with it, and so is everyone who truly knows it.

— George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, Third Series, “Justice,” quoted in Discovering the Character of God, edited by Michael Phillips, p. 261-262

In the Company of Artists

Beauty, Writing 0

When I look back on [my] decade of total failure – it’s been a mixture, both before, and since – there was, even on the days of rejection slips, a tiny, stubborn refusal to be completely put down. And I think, too, and possibly most important, that there is a faith simply in the validity of art; when we talk about ourselves as being part of the company of such people as Mozart or van Gogh or Dostoyevsky, it has nothing to do with comparisons, or pitting talent against talent; it has everything to do with a way of looking at the universe. My husband said, “But people might think you’re putting yourself alongside Dostoyevsky.” The idea is so impossible that I can only laugh in incredulity. Dostoyevsky is a giant; I look up to him; I sit at his feet; perhaps I will be able to learn something from him. But we do face the same direction, no matter how giant his stride, how small mine.

— Madeleine L’Engle, Circle of Quiet, quoted in Madeleine L’Engle, Herself, p. 32

Our Vocation

Community, Faith, God, Redemption 0

The remarkable thing is that the Creator, having made the world to work in this way – with humans functioning like the “image” in a temple, standing between heaven and earth and acting on behalf of each in relation to the other – has not abandoned the project. Yes, it gets distorted again and again. But it remains the way the world was supposed to work – and the way in which, through the gospel, it will work once more. The powers that have stolen the worshipping hearts of the world and that have in consequence usurped the human rule over the world would like nothing better than for humans to think only of escaping the world rather than taking back their priestly and royal vocations.

— N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began, p. 80

Letting Go of the Past

Healing, Letting Go 0

When we are holding on, we are living in the past. When we are living in the past, we are just living in a fantasy that we made up. Holding on can never make us happy, because fantasy is an illusion. As we are willing to let go of the ghosts of yesterday, we allow ourselves to receive what life has for us now, which is better than what we are letting go of. Life has something that is true for us that would move us forward. It is something that would let us really make contact and be satisfied.

— Chuck Spezzano, If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love, p. 262

Lit from Within

Core Value, Love, Relationships 0

When we’re in the Gift Zone we hold a certain luminosity. Even in sadness we are somehow lit from within, because we are holding our experience with a quality of compassion. This is the zone that attracts love. And like anything that precious, the stakes get raised if we want to claim it. Claiming our authentic self is one of the scariest and most heroic things we can do. In our Gift Zone, there’s a sense of aliveness, a sense of self — even if that sense of self doesn’t feel as secure or happy as we think it should. We brave a new frontier when we face the risk of entering our Gift Zone And that very sense of risk heightens our ability to love.

— Ken Page, Deeper Dating, p. 26-27.

Dwelling on Good

Forgiveness 0

Just because bad things happen does not mean you have to dwell on them. I regularly ask people why they do not dwell on their good fortune with the same energy that they invest in their bad fortune. This question always catches people by surprise. They rarely consider appreciating their good fortune as an equal option to obsessing over their bad fortune. Are you one of those people who seem to find their problems more compelling than their blessings? Do you, or someone you know, rent out more space to what is wrong than what is right?

— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Good, p. 9

Beautiful Cracks

Beauty, Healing 0

One has to be done with the pretense of being just fine, unscarred, perfectly self-sufficient. No one is.

The ancient Chinese had a practice of embellishing the cracked parts of valued possessions with gold leaf, which says: We dishonor it if we pretend that it hadn’t gotten broken. It says: We value this enough to repair it. So it is not denial or a cover-up. It is the opposite, an adornment of the break with gold leaf, which draws the cracks into greater prominence. The gold leaf becomes part of its beauty. Somehow the aesthetic of its having been cracked but still being here, brought back not to baseline but restored, brings increase.

— Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway, p. 50