Sunday Quote: We think we know

Every time you make sense out of reality,

you bump into something that destroys the sense you made.
 

Anthony de Mello, s.j.

Life flows

When effort is needed, effort will appear.
When effortlessness becomes essential, it will assert itself.
You need not push life about.
Just flow with it and give yourself completely to the task of the present moment,
which is the dying now to the now. For living is dying.
Without death life cannot be.

Nisargadatta Maharaj, 1897 – 1981, Hindu Non-Dualist teacher

Serene

They don’t grieve over the past,

Nor do they yearn for the future

They live only in the present

That’s why their face is serene

Its from yearning for the future

And grieving over the past

This is how fools become withered

Like a fresh reed that’s been hacked down

The Buddha, Collected Discourses, 1.10

Sunday Quote: New worlds

When patterns are broken, new worlds emerge.

Tuli Kupferberg, 1923 – 2010, American counterculture poet and author.

Our reality as humans

The period between Good Friday and Easter Sunday shows us all the aspects of human life, from darkness to light:

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet

Whose hands can strike with such abandon

That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living

Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness

That the haughty neck is happy to bow

And the proud back is glad to bend

Out of such chaos, of such contradiction

We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

Maya Angelou, A Brave and Startling Truth

 

The limits to our understanding

If God’s incomprehensibility does not grip us in a word,

if it does not draw us into his superluminous darkness,

if it does not call us out of the little house of our homely, close-hugged truths ...

we have misunderstood the words of Christianity. 

For they all speak of the unknown God who only reveals to give himself as the abiding mystery.

Karl Rahner sj., 1904 – 1984 Jesuit Theologian, Poetry and the Christian.