“Pleased to Meet You, Hope You Guess My Name”
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy…
Category: Wisdom Traditions
Ecclesiastes
Compared with the neat little nostrums of comfort-mongering minds who cross our t’s and dot our i’s, Ecclesiastes is as great, as deep, and as terrifying as the ocean. If this philosopher were alive today…
Turning
It is at those moments when we are, as we say, in a bad mood, when we feel incapable of the elevation of soul that befits holy things, it is then that it is most…
Today’s One-Liner (#230)
I don’t find anything comparable to the magnificent beauty of a soul and its marvelous capacity. –Saint Teresa of Avila, quoted from The Interior Castle in Rosemary Broughton, Praying with Teresa of Avila
Today’s One-Liner (#229)
I recited the Our Father in Greek every day before work and I repeated it very often in the vineyard. –Simone Weil, Waiting for God
It’s Not Everyday Your Soul Gets Restored
“Rakitin,” [Alyosha Karamazov] suddenly said loudly and firmly, “don’t taunt me with having rebelled against my God. I don’t want to hold any anger against you, and therefore you be kinder, too. I’ve lost such…
Today’s One-Liner (#228)
The love of our neighbor in all its fulness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” –Simone Weil, Waiting for God
This Leads to That
Often, at the culminating point of a violent headache, I make myself say [George Herbert’s Love] over, concentrating all my attention upon it and clinging with all my soul to the tenderness it enshrines. I…
Today’s One-Liner (#227)
Meditation is concentration, and concentration becomes, finally, consecration. –Sri Eknath Easwaran, Passage Meditation: Bringing the Deep Wisdom of the Heart into Daily Life
Life Is in the Collective
With the story of Thérèse, and only with her story, we see a fully realized mystic and saint portrayed as someone living at the center of a web of intense relationships: embedded, that is, in…