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There are many reasons for the failure to comprehend Christ's teaching...but the chief cause which has engendered all these misconceptions is this: that Christ's teaching is considered to be such as can be accepted, or not accepted, without changing one's life.

--Leo Tolstoy

 

The one true freedom in life is to come to terms with death, and as early as possible, for death is an event that embraces all our lives. And the only way to have a good death is to lead a good life.... The more we do God's will, the less unfinished business we leave behind when we die.

--William Sloane Coffin,

June 1, 1924 -April 12, 2006

 

Long periods of well-being and comfort are in general dangerous to all. After such prolonged periods, weak souls become incapable of weathering any kind of trial. They are afraid of it. Yet it is a fact that difficult trials and sufferings can facilitate the growth of the soul. I know there is a widespread feeling that if we highly value suffering this is masochism. On the contrary, it is a significant bravery when we respect suffering and understand what burdens it places on our soul.

--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

 

God uses suffering to call us into the peace of his presence.  If God could not use pain and suffering for our good, then he would not allow such things to remain in the world. The grain of wheat must lie in the dark womb of the earth before it can be called forth into the open air by the light and the warmth of the sun. Then it grows into a healthy plant and bears fruit. God has no joy in our pain, but he sometimes uses pain and suffering as bitter medicines for the treatment of souls.

--Sundar Singh, in Wisdom of the Sadhu.

 

When all the things we want beyond our reach move slowly within our reach, it is easy to feel good about life.  But if our sense of well-being becomes dependent on the constant delivery of goods to our door, we experience a sense of loss when the supply suddenly dries up, or we no longer perceive it has the same value.  At this point we are thrown back on ourselves and must live on what we find there.  In a way we are finally forced to rely on the one thing already within the compass of our grasp—our soul’s natural entanglement in the world.  This entanglement is often perceived for the first time through a sense of loss.  It is as if we first stumble into our belonging by realizing how desperately out of place we feel.  This sense of loss has a natural way of drawing us inside ourself.  We might at first label the body’s simple need to focus inward depression.  But as we practice going inward, we come to realize that much of it is not depression in the least; it is a cry for something else, often the body’s simple need for rest, for contemplation, and for a kind of forgotten courage, one difficult to hear, demanding not a raise, but another life.  It seems that to find the real path we have to go off the path we are on now, even for an instant, and earn the privilege of losing our way.  As the path fades, we are forced to take a good look at the life in which we actually find ourselves.

--David Whyte, The Heart Aroused