Present Moment, Only Moment
We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past…
Category: Wisdom Traditions
Today’s One-Liner (#180)
If you withdraw yourself from unnecessary talking and idle running about, from listening to gossip and rumors, you will find enough time that is suitable for holy meditation. –Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, translated…
Each and Every
Therefore we take joy in all the living, the unborn, the rejected and despised, those declared expendable, the aged (so often also unwanted). We welcome them all! We rejoice in each and every one! –Daniel…
Wake Up Already!
In our own place and time, we have made a science of escape and sleep. Rather than live at that sharp edge of life, awake and alert, we pretend that we have no sin. There…
Today’s One-Liner (#169)
To have courage for whatever comes in life – everything lies in that. –Saint Teresa of Avila, quoted in Eknath Easwaran, Love Never Faileth: The Inspiration of Saint Francis, Saint. Augustine, Saint Paul, and Mother…
By Little and Little
If you do not overcome small, trifling things, how will you overcome the more difficult? Resist temptations in the beginning, and unlearn the evil habit lest perhaps, little by little, it lead to a more…
First Things First
If men used as much care in uprooting vices and implanting virtues as they do in discussing problems, there would not be so much evil and scandal in the world, or such laxity in religious…
Today’s One-Liner (#167)
No one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. –René Girard, Maxim #22, in All Desire Is a Desire for Being: Essential Writings, edited by Cynthia L. Haven
Today’s One-Liner (#165)
These are only hints and guesses, Hints followed by guesses; and the restIs prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action. –T. S. Eliot, Dry Salvages
Bearing Fruit
Russian literature might almost be described as the literature of conversion. (We noted some famous instances in Chapter 3.) Time and again, suffering leads to awareness of Truth or apprehension of God. Tolstoy’s autobiographical Confession recounts…