Casper ter Kuile

“And here is the paradoxical secret: connection and isolation are bound to each other. I am confident that without my experience as a lonely closeted teenager at a boys’ boarding school, I wouldn’t be as passionate about deep connection today. We simply cannot know connection without also experiencing disconnection. There is nothing wrong with you when you feel that vast emptiness. Nothing you need to change. Nothing to fix. But there is one thing to do. Remember. Remember that both are true. The vast emptiness and the eternal connection. The sense of total aloneness and the interdependent belovedness. It is the paradox in which we live. And all of the practices and stories and strategies that we’ve explored in this book are simply there to help you, in moments of joy and sadness, overwhelm and barrenness, to remember.”
― Casper ter Kuile, The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices

“Tradition is living and active,” Merton writes, “but convention is passive and dead.”
― Casper ter Kuile, The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices