Alas, O Lord, to what a state dost Thou bring those who love Thee!
We are not human beings trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to be human.
Spirituality is the sacred center out of which all life comes, including Mondays and Tuesdays and rainy Saturday afternoons in all their mundane and glorious detail. . . . The spiritual journey is the soul’s commingling with ordinary life.
They lied to you, sold you ideas of good and evil, gave you distrust of your body, . . . invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization.
The strongest, surest way to the soul is through the flesh.
Who can order the Holy? It is like a rain forest, dripping, lush, fecund, wild. We enter its abundance at our peril, for here we are called to the wholeness for which we long, but which requires all we are and can hope to be.
Don’t worry if the baby cries. Crying is very helpful for digestion. Cry, so that you can digest the joy of knowing God; cry and shed tears of joy. The tear glands have been allotted to you, not for weeping helplessly before others with hands extended for alms, but to shed tears of joy, of thankfulness, at the feet of the Lord.
If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy, I believe many propositions would sound like 2 x 2 = 13.
In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.
A person is neither a thing nor a process but an opening through which the Absolute can manifest.
Christ and Moses standing in the back of Saint Pat’s, looking around. Confused, Christ is, at the grandeur of the interior, the baroque interior, the rococo baroque interior. Because his route took him through Spanish Harlem, and he is wondering what the hell fifty Puerto Ricans were doing living in one room when that stained-glass window is worth ten Gs a square foot.
The fall of man stands as a lie before Beethoven, a truth before Hitler.
When we speak of treading the path of the dharma . . . it does not mean that we become religious, calm, and good. Trying to be calm, trying to be good, is also an aspect of striving, of neuroticism.
We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.
We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others.
In our darkness, there is not a place for beauty. Every place is for beauty.
If there be anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe from falling, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in the same precious love.
