Category: Commonplace book

Love Is Labor

I am sorry that I cannot say anything more comforting, for active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with…

Today’s One-Liner (#219)

If we would only avoid deceiving ourselves, we would find out what to do, where to go, how to live, and do so with clarity. –Leo Tolstoy, Spiritual Writings, edited Charles E. Moore

Deliver Us

Deliver us from that unparalleled sorrow of seeing those we love suffer without remedy. Deliver us from spiritual darkness. Deliver us from anguish, which is doubtless the state of suffering on which the Holy Spirit…

Faith and Testimony

As thousands of faculty committees have found out, “teacher evaluation” is a hopeless business. There is, thank God, no teacher meter, and there never is going to be one. A teacher’s major contribution may pop…

Longing

I remember some time ago I visited a very wonderful home for old people. There were about forty people there and they had everything, but they were all looking toward the door. There was not…

Today’s One-Liner (#217)

Everything depends on these words: “I will” or”I will not.”  –Mother Teresa, Everything Starts from Prayer: Meditations on Spiritual Life for People of All Faiths, selected and Arranged by Anthony Stern, 42

Appreciation Is the Sacrament

 Now the preaching of St. Francis was on this wise: “My sisters the birds, much are ye beholden unto God your creator, and alway and in every place ought ye to praise Him, because He…

Today’s One-Liner (#215)

Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars;  in the heavens you have made them, precious and beautiful.  –Saint Francis of Assisi, Canticle of the Sun, translated by Bill Barrett from the Umbrian…