Love is when I am concerned with your relationship with your own life, rather than with your relationship to mine. . . . There must be a commitment to each other’s well-being. Most people who say they have a commitment don’t; they have an attachment. Commitment means, “I am going to stick with you and support your experience of well-being.” Attachment means, “I am stuck without you.”
“Sully, for shame!” Jonathan said in reproach, “and don’t be foolish! What are we trying to practice every day? If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we’ve destroyed our own brotherhood! But overcome space, and all we have left is Here. Overcome time, and all we have left is Now. And in the middle of Here and Now, don’t you think that we might see each other once or twice?”
And someday there shall be such closeness that when one cries the other shall taste salt.
It is sublime to think and say of another, I need never meet, or speak, or write to him: we need not reinforce ourselves, or send tokens of remembrance; I rely on him as on myself: if he did thus and thus, I know it was right.
And I would find myself and not an image That is our modern hope and by its light We have lit upon the gentle sensitive mine.
We have often heard it said that God never closes one door unless he opens another. It is a great comfort to know we never really lose when we believe, for any defeat can be turned to good if we will absorb the lesson in it. And yet, how often we refuse to go through that door that has been opened for us. It is so much easier to stand back and wail about the closed one. There seems to be a certain amount of glorification in defeat. Sometimes a door will close for us because that particular one would have caused us more unhappiness, but it never closes for punishment. God is love — and love does not punish, nor does it have any power but to give what is right and good for us. With this knowledge we can walk with grace through those doors that open to us.
We have to surpass the Enlightenment notion that in the life of the species or of the individual there is a definitive change-over from darkness to light. Light is always light in darkness; that is what the unconscious is all about. Nor can the light become a current, always turned on, in ordinary prosaic language. Truth is always in poetic form; not literal but symbolic; hiding, or veiled; light in darkness. Yes, mysterious. Literalism is idolatry of words; the alternative to idolatry is mystery.
Compulsion is being trapped in a known psychic reality, a dead-end space. Freedom is in the unknown. If you believe there is an unknown everywhere, in your own body, in your relationships with other people, in political institutions, in the universe, then you have maximum freedom. If you can examine old beliefs and realize they are limits to be overcome and can also realize you don’t have to have a belief about something you don’t yet know anything about, you are free.
Never did any man know God by tolds. You get God by feels.
One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay “in kind” somewhere else in life.
God bless the grass that grows through cement.
Keep it on a high level. Be mobile. Finish up strong.
