No plans

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There must be a time of day when the man who
  makes plans forgets his plans,
  and acts as if he had no plans at all.

 There must be a time of day when the man who has
 to speak falls very silent.
 And his mind forms no more propositions,
 and he asks himself:
 Did they have a meaning?

 There must be a time
 When the man of prayer goes to pray
 as if it were the first time in his life
 he had ever prayed,
 when the man of resolutions puts his
 resolutions aside
 as if they had all been broken,
 and he learns a different wisdom:

 distinguishing the sun from the moon,
 the stars from the darkness,
 the sea from the dry land,
 and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.

Thomas Merton

Better to give

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This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love:

The more they give, the more they possess.

 Rainer Maria Rilke

Balance

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25% of Irish people check work emails while on holidays.  49% of Irish people between 25 and 34 check social media overnight if they can’t sleep.

Irish Times, Signs of the Times Survey 2019, April 27, 2019.

What is balance in a society whose skewing of time has it totally off-balance? What is balance in a culture that has destroyed the night with perpetual light and keeps equipment going twenty-four hours a day because it is more costly to turn machines on and of than it is to pay people to run them at strange and difficult hours? In the first place balance for us is obviously not a mathematical division of the day. For most of us our days simply do not divide that easily. In the second place, balance for us is clearly not equivalence. Because I have done forty hours of work this week does not mean that I will have forty hours of prayer and leisure. What it does mean, however, is that somehow I must make time for both. I must make time or die inside.

Joan Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily

 

Where real worth lies

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Once a learned Bishop was traveling by ship from Archangel to the great monastery at Solovetsk. As the ship neared a remote island, the captain told the bishop that three old hermits had spent their entire lives there in deep prayer. The bishop was intrigued, and insisted on visiting. So the captain dropped anchor and the bishop went to the island in a small dinghy.

The three hermits were ancient, with white beards down to their knees, and they were dressed in rags. They greeted the bishop, bowing to the ground. He blessed them, and then asked them how they served God on their tiny bit of island. They replied that they had no idea how to serve God. They just served one another.

Well then, the bishop asked, how do you pray? They replied that they simply lifted their arms heavenward and chanted: “Three are ye, three are we, have mercy upon us.” The bishop was alarmed at all this, and he spent the rest of the day teaching the three aged hermits the Lord’s Prayer and the rudiments of theology. But they were slow learners, and the bishop had to keep repeating his lessons.

As the sun was setting, the bishop bade the hermits farewell and returned to the ship. But as it sailed away from the island, he saw something….. The three hermits were running after the ship, on water, as if they were on dry land. When they caught up with the ship, they bowed down and humbly begged the bishop to remind them of how the Lord’s Prayer went, because they’d already forgotten it. The bishop crossed himself and, in tears, told the hermits to continue with their old way of praying because they had no need of his poor instruction. Then he bowed deeply before them, and asked for their blessing. After giving it, the hermits ran back across the sea to their island, and a light shone until daybreak on the spot where they were lost to sight.

from, Tolstoy, Три Старца, (Three Hermits), An Old Legend current in the Volga district, 1886

As you do

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The self is relatedness. Only when the self mirrors itself in so many mirrors does it really exist. . . You can never come to your self by building a meditation hut on top of Mount Everest; you will only be visited by your own ghosts and that is not individuation. . . . 

The self only exists inasmuch as you appear. 

Not that you are, but that you do the self. 

The self appears in your deeds and deeds always mean relationship.

Jung, Seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,

The small things

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Do not think that love has to be extraordinary in order to be genuine.

What we need is to love without getting tired.

Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.

Mother Teresa