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"We should seek to become reservoirs rather than canals. For a canal just allows the water to flow through it, but a reservoir waits until it is filled before overflowing, then it can communicate without loss to itself. In the church today, we have many canals but few reservoirs."
St. Bernard of Clairvaux - 12th century
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In this journey of self discovery, as I come to be in touch with my deepest longings, and open myself to God, to others and the world, two deepest longings meet: mine and God’s. To my surprise and joy, I discover that these longings are in fact identical.
Therese Daly – in ‘Deepest Longings’
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“I cannot define for you what God is, I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every human being and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all energies for transformation and transfiguration of our natural being.”
Jung
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‘God is in everything, closer to me than I am to myself. God is in every fact, every moment. Everything and everyone is sacred. Every bush is burning, if only we have the eyes to see.’
Gerard Hughes in God - Where are you?
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When we look at our world, its pain and suffering, and then at ourselves and our inability to do anything about it, we can become overwhelmed by our own helplessness and powerlessness. A good question then to ask ourselves is, 'Who do you think you are?' Our feelings of helplessness arise because we assume that we are the ones who should be able to effect lasting change; and we are leaving God out. But our Christian faith is faith in a God who, in Jesus, has entered into human suffering, human sinfulness, human death, and is risen again. God's love has triumphed over evil and can transform it into good. The only thing we can change is ourselves, and the only thing in ourselves that we can change is our way of perceiving reality.
Gerard Hughes What is your God like?
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People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life.
I don't think that's what we're really seeking.
I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive,
so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane
will have resonances within our inner most being, and reality,
so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
That's what it's all finally about ..."
Joseph Campbell
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The maxim of illusory religion runs: “fear not; trust in God and he will see that none of the things you fear will happen to you”; that of real religion, on the contrary is “Fear not; the things that you are afraid of are quite likely to happen to you, but they are nothing to be afraid of.”
John Macmurray, Persons in Relation
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If we attempt to act and do things for others or for the world, without deepening our own self-understanding, our own freedom, integrity and capacity to love, we will not have anything to give to others. We will communicate nothing but the contagion of our own obsessions, our aggressiveness, our own ego-centred ambitions…
Thomas Merton:
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After immense activity one passes into a phase where passivity is the only way.
I pray that you may be finding this passivity as the way in which the soul serves God, not by doing this or that, but by passively receiving the great stream of his love and compassion.
Archbishop Michael Ramsey
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Silence before God has little to do with achieving and a great deal to do with receiving.
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We must make spaces
In our lives
for quiet gentle times,
to remind us that
all is gift,
and blessing flows
through our lives
as we expect and
recognise it
woven in
our heart beats
Edina Gateway
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It is my belief, that we should not be too sure of having found Christ in ourselves until we have found him also in that part of humanity that is most remote from our own.
Thomas Merton.
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