the chloroform of the anthropocentric.......

 

     You can be anything you want to be.

     No, you can't.

     Not from your old mind's knowing.  You weren't born to be anything you want; you were born to be something quite specific.  There is a spiritual directive to your life that was assigned somewhere else before you were even born.  There's a vocation to your years, even if they appear unremarkable to the rest of us.  This is not a status-driven affair.  This is a soul coaxed into listening.  To be 'anything you want' is part of the chloroform of the anthropocentric, the usual empirical ambition dished out from toddlerhood to many of us.  That doesn't mean you don't stretch and grow as you age, but that you build on an essential, not societal, sense of vocation.

-Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass

forgiving, forgetting, and responsibility...........

 

     Confusing forgiving with forgetting sets another trap: We become convinced that mistakes and wrongdoings not only can, but should, be forgotten.  Spiritual tradition sees it as a strange delusion that our problems have to be gotten rid of; instead, the sages and saints suggest, such difficulties are best put to use.  The offense is precisely what must not be forgotten, since it is through the act of facing what has happened and fitting it into a whole by re-membering it that the possibility of atonement (making at-one) occurs and forgiveness comes to fruition.  "Salvation lies in remembrance."

    And so, finally, because the past is important, there can be no "unconditional forgiveness."  Because we are human, and therefore limited, there can be no unconditional anything.  We are not God.  Forgetting that, as is our all-too-human tendency, we commit idolatry by assuming that since God loves and forgives unconditionally, we can be like God and do the same.  But all "idolatry" has ironic consequences, producing the opposite of the goal intended.  Thus the claim to "forgive unconditionally" is the antithesis of benign, for it devalues the one we are supposedly forgiving by implying that he is not responsible for his choices.

     Any understanding of forgiveness must include some notion of responsibility.  Forgiveness, divine or human, does not remove responsibility for our actions.  If we ignore the consequences of irresponsible actions by claiming or asking for unconditional forgiveness, then forgiveness loses its significance—it comes to be interpreted as not caring.  Every human being is responsible for his or her choices: which means, quite simply, that each of us has a need to matter—somehow, to someone.  We especially need to know that our actions have an effect on the people we love.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

finding....................

 

Spirituality is not just about finding quiet in a noisy world. It is about finding the sacred in the mundane.

-Tara Mohr

via

Teachers.....................

 

     Everyone loves to teach, but rarely do any of us take unsought advice well, and even more rarely are we truly teachable.  Being teachable means being open to learn.  In order to learn, one must listen, and we learn to listen only if we know the most important thing—that we do not know everything, that we do not have "all the answers." . . .

In the long history of spirituality, those recognized as somehow spiritually "great" have consistently been called "Teacher"—they help others to learn, to become teachable.  Spiritual teachers (who are never "experts") do three things:  First and foremost, they listen.  Second, they ask questions.  Third, they tell stories.  Each practice reflects the acceptance of not having all the answers, and each teaches the essential truth of spirituality's open-endedness.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

again and again................

 

As the fourth-century monk Macarius emphasized, all improvement in spirituality is "a matter of falling and getting up again, building something up and then being knocked down again."

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

seek..................

 

     Spirituality is one of those realities that you have only so long as you seek it; as soon as you think you have it, you've lost it.  In rediscovering this basic spiritual insight, the earliest members of Alcoholics Anonymous tapped the essence of open-endedness that characterizes a spirituality of imperfection.  Spirituality is boundless, unable to be fenced in:  We do not capture it; it captures us.  As much as we might like to "wrap things up," to lock spirituality in and hold it fast, it will forever escape our grasp.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

accepts......................

 

      Humility  is, above all, honesty.  True humility neither exaggerates nor minimizes, but accepts.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

Imperfection...............

 

     To deny imperfection is to disown oneself, for to be human is to be imperfect.  Spirituality, which is rooted in and revealed by uncertainties, inadequacies, helplessness, the lack and the failure of control, supplies a context and suggest a way of living in which our imperfections can be endured.  Spiritual sensibilities begin to flower when the soil is fertilized with the understanding that "something is awry."  There is, after all, something "wrong" with us.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection

Never surrender.........................

 

     Gibran's bitter denunciation of both religious and political injustice prevailing at the time, brought about his anticipated exile from the country and his excommunication from the church, although his parents were staunch Maronites.  It was the story, Khalil the Heretic, in particular which drove the Sultan and his Emirs into trepidation and cause nervous authorities in the entire Middle and Near East to examine their governments.

    Gibran was quietly pursuing painting with his friend Rodin in Paris when he learned of the ceremonial destruction of his book, and he merely expressed the thought that it was excellent cause for the issuance of a second edition.

-Martin L. Wolf, from the Preface to Gibran's Spirits Rebellious

hell......................

 

Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there.

-As quoted in an AA meeting

return.........................

 

The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe; nor have I any fear that a skeptical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down-weigh. The strength of that principle is not measured in ounces and pounds: it tyrannizes at the centre of Nature. We may well give skepticism as much line as we can. The spirit will return, and fill us. It drives the drivers. It counterbalances any accumulations of power.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, as culled from his essay, Worship

with keener avarice..........

 

For Emerson as for Thoreau, economy means how to live.  Failure to understand that means missing Emerson's main point.  "The true thrift," he concludes, "is always to spend on the higher plane, to invest and spend, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation, and not in augmenting animal existence."

-Robert D. Richardson, Jr.,  Emerson:  The Mind on Fire

an infinitude................

 

That we are spirits that have descended into our bodies, of this Emerson was sure.  That each man was utterly important and limitless, an "infinitude," of this he was also sure.  And it was a faith that leads, as he shows us again and again, not to stasis but to activity, to the creation of the moral person from the indecisive person.

-Mary Oliver, from her essay Emerson: An Introduction

from first page to last...........

 

His life shows, the Yale scholar A. Whitney Griswold has noted, "what Puritan habits detached from Puritan beliefs were capable of achieving."

     He was also far less inward looking than Cotton Mather or other Puritans.  Indeed, he poked fun at professions of faith that served little worldly purpose.  As A. Owen Aldridge writes, "The Puritans were known for their constant introspection, fretting about sins, real or imaginary, and agonizing about uncertainty of their salvation.  Absolutely none of this soul-searching appears in Franklin.  One can scrutinize his work from first page to last without finding a single note of spiritual anxiety."

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

a story to tell..................

To wit, people must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves.  We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here.

-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

 

More homework.....................

 

What would make cooking a spiritual practice rather than mere work is cultivating a sense for what is sacred and doing you best to bring that alive in the world of the kitchen.

-Edward Espe Brown,  No Recipe: Cooking as a Spiritual Practice

demand...............................

 

The world, Solzhenitsyn said, “will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed, as in the Middle Ages, but even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon, as in the Modern Era.”

-as culled from this Douglas Murray post

Prayers...................

 Prayers to the Holy Spirit are all fundamentally a plea for the Spirit's coming. . . . The Holy Spirit is the unrestricted presence of God in which our life wakes up, becomes wholly and entirely living, and is endowed with the energies of life.

-Jürgen Moltman, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life

A story of rebellion.................

 Here is how Paul describes himself: “I am an animist in an age of machines; a poet-of-sorts in a dictatorship of merchants; a believer in a culture of cynics. Either I’m mad, or the world is.” He continues: “My most strongly-held belief is this: that our modern crisis is not economic, political, scientific or technological, and that no ‘answers’ to it will be found in those spheres. I believe that we are living through a deep spiritual crisis; perhaps even a spiritual war. My interest these days is what this means.”

-Bari Weiss, from her intro to this Paul Kingsnorth essay

It's the vision thing.............................

In the short-run it’s difficult to see an easy way out of the current geopolitical nightmare.

In the long-run it’s always a bad idea to bet against the power of the human spirit.

-Ben Carlson, from here