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Desmond Tutu told me on a recent trip to Cape Town, “We are only the light bulbs, Richard, and our job is just to remain screwed in!”
The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it.
No wise person ever wanted to be younger. —NATIVE AMERICAN APHORISM
you could only tell a good tree from a bad one “by its fruits” (Matthew 7:20).
The pattern in fact is so clear that one has to work rather hard, or be intellectually lazy, to miss the continual lesson.
You cannot avoid sin or mistake anyway (Romans 5:12),
We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.
So Jesus makes it into a central axiom: the “last” really do have a head start in moving toward “first,” and those who spend too much time trying to be “first” will never get there.
The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling or changing or dying.
“It is when I am weak that I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10).
Like skaters, we move forward by actually moving from side to side.
Those who have somehow fallen, and fallen well, are the only ones who can go up and not misuse “up.”
Jesus praised faith and trust even more than love.
People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.
You cannot walk the second journey with first journey tools.
Home is both the beginning and the end.
Rilke put it, “When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.”
you want a job done well, on time, with accountability and no excuses, you had best hire someone who has faced a few limit situations.
Those who whine about parents and authority for too long invariably remain or become narcissists themselves.
There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life.
“Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.”
“Well, after all is said and done, remember that church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus.”
you know that the Greek word for tragedy means “goat story”?
Jung put it, that “where you stumble and fall, there you find pure gold.”
Any attempt to engineer or plan your own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven.
Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For another union, a deeper communion —T. S. ELIOT, “EAST COKER”
Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, in which he says, “We have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.”
It takes a lot of learning to finally “learn ignorance” (docta ignorantia)
T. S. Eliot puts it in the Four Quartets, We had the experience but missed the meaning, And approach to the meaning restores the experience In a different form, beyond any meaning We can assign to happiness.3
If you talk too much or too loud, you are usually not an elder.
Many depressed people are people who have never taken any risks, never moved outside their comfort zone, never faced necessary suffering, and so their unconscious knows that they have never lived—or loved!
Learn and obey the rules very well, so you will know how to break them properly. —THE DALAI LAMA
The bottom line of the Gospel is that most of us have to hit some kind of bottom before we even start the real spiritual journey.
Remember, in the Gospel, at the end of the day, the employer pays those who worked part of a day just as much as those who worked the whole day (Matthew 20:1–16).
“The lamp of the body is the eye. If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be filled with light” (Matthew 6:22).
