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