Living Their Dream - But Not Mine

 "The vast majority of us go to our graves without knowing who we are. We on consciously live someone else's life, or at least someone else's expectations for us. This does violence to ourselves, our relationship with God, and ultimately to others."

- Peter Scazzero. Emotionally Healthy  Spirituality

Jesus Dressed, Spoke, and Lived The Culture

"When Jesus dressed, he did not dress in a generic, cultureneutral way or put on clothing that set him apart from everyone else of his day. He dressed himself in the customary garb of the day where he lived. He spoke the language of the day in which he lived. He fully inhabited the cultural space of the first century."

- Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

Just Disappear

  "I suppose each of us has his own fantasy of how he wants to die. I would like to go out in a blaze of glory, myself, or maybe simply disappear someday, far out in the heart of the wilderness I love, all by myself, alone with the Universe and whatever God may happen to be looking on. Disappear - and never return. That's my fantasy."

- Edward Abbey

Leave Yourself Alone

"We began to inhibit, control and organize our immediate impulses, so that we could stop interfering with other people and our future selves."

- Jordan Peterson.

Twisted Thinking

Interesting statement with a twist.....

"We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking."

-Richard Rohr. Everything Belongs. 

Life Of Normal

"Life is neither particularly exciting or great, nor disastrous or grandly and interestingly tragic. Life is just trundling along, which is why I have been  quiet."
- Commuting To Timbuktu.. Swiss expart used to live in Djenne Mali

Much Suffering In Life

"Mitya broke into sobs and seized Alyosha’s hand. “My dear, my dear, in degradation, in degradation now, too. There’s a terrible amount of suffering for man on earth, a terrible lot of trouble."

- Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov

Too Simplistic View Of Ancient Life

"Twelve years in the jungle had sharpened my vision and given me my own fanatic interpretation of reality. Deprived of the details that might prove me wrong, namely perhaps, more than anything, just rational or thoughtful men with whom I could speak, I had constructed a disastrous philosophy of nice simplicities in black and white."

- Moritz Thomsen. The Saddest Pleasure. A Journey On Two Rivers 

How Is Your Now?

"So much of religion involves teaching people this and that, and accumulation of facts and imperative that is somehow supposed to add up to Salvation. The great teachers know that one major change is needed: how we do the moment.

- Richard Rohr. The Naked Now 

Neithet Dance Nor Crying

We tend to stay away from mourning and dancing. Too afraid to cry, too shy to dance...we become narrow-minded complainers, avoiding pain and also true human joy...While we live in a world subject to the evil one, we belong to God. Let us mourn, and let us dance.

- Henri Nouwen

When We Recognize The Monster In Us

A profound example of that can be found in the perceptibility of new soldiers to post-traumatic stress disorder, which often occurs because of something they watch themselves doing, rather than because of something that has happened to them. They react like the monsters they can truly be in extreme battlefield conditions, and the revelation of that capacity undoes their world. And no wonder. Perhaps they assume that all of history’s terrible perpetrators were people totally unlike themselves. Perhaps they were never able to see within themselves the capacity for oppression and bullying…

- Jordan Peterson. The 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote To Chaos 

Give Holy Friendship

"Like the sacramental use of water and bread and wine, friendship takes what's common in human experience and turns it into something holy.” 

~ Eugene Peterson 

Stuff Your Eyes With Wonder

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”

― Ray Bradbury

A life of Requirements, or Relationship?

Theologian Marcus Borg (1942-2015) wrote:

The gospel of Jesus—the good news of Jesus’ own message—is that there is a way of being that moves beyond both secular and religious conventional wisdom. The path of transformation of which Jesus spoke leads from a life of requirements and measuring up (whether to culture or to God) to a life of relationship with God. It leads from a life of anxiety to a life of peace and trust. It leads from the bondage of self-preoccupation to the freedom of self-forgetfulness. It leads from life centered in culture to life centered in God.

Face Palm Prayers

"Pressing my eyes against my hands is not praying, and reading about your presence is not living in it."

(Henri Nouwen A Cry For Mercy)

An Ecology and Poverty That Allows Time For Prayer

"Lord, help me choose a simpler life-style that promote solidarity with the world's poor,
helps me appreciate nature more,
affords greater opportunity to work together with my neighbors,
reduces my use of limited resources, creates greater inner harmony,
saves money,
allows time for meditation and prayer,
incites me to take political and social action.
May all my decisions about my style of life celebrate the joy of life that comes from loving You. Amen

~ Thomas Pettepiece. Visions of a hungry world

Monastery Fires And Bellows

"If when we plunge our hand
into a bowl of water,
Or stir up the fire with the bellows
Or tabulate interminable columns of figures
on our book-keeping table,
Or, burnt by the sun, we are plunged in
the mud of the rice-field,
Or standing by the smelter’s furnace
We do not fulfill the same religious life
as if in prayer in a monastery,
the world will never be saved."

~ Gandhi

One Life And It's Yours

"Your life is not something from which you can stand aside and consider what it would have been like had you had a different one. There is no 'you apart from your actual life."

~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy.

Seeing With New Eyes

To begin to see with new eyes, we must observe—and usually be humiliated by—the habitual way we encounter each and every moment. It is humiliating because we will see that we are well-practiced in just a few predictable responses. Not many of our responses are original, fresh, or naturally respectful of what is right in front of us. The most common human responses to a new moment are mistrust, cynicism, fear, defensiveness, dismissal, and judgmentalism. These are the common ways the ego tries to be in control of the data instead of allowing the moment to get some control over us—and teach us something new!"

~ Richard Rohr

Being Human Is Good

"Jesus came to put it all together for us and in us. He was saying, in effect, “To be human is good! The material and the physical can be trusted and enjoyed. This physical world is the hiding place of God and the revelation place of God!”

Richard Rohr. Daily Meditation, Jan 05, 2018