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August 5, 2019
community is the fruit born through shared brokenness, and intimacy is the fruit that grows through touching one another’s wounds. Let’s remind one another that what brings us true joy is not successfulness but fruitfulness.
Patience asks us to live the moment to the fullest, to be completely present to the moment, to taste the here and now, to be where we are.
Let’s be patient and trust that the treasure we look for is hidden in the ground on which we stand.
We have very little control over what happens in our lives, but we have a lot of control over how we integrate and remember what happens.
Friendship is one of the greatest gifts a human being can receive. It
Friendship is being with the other in joy and sorrow, even when we cannot increase the joy or decrease the sorrow.
The art of living is to enjoy what we can see and not complain about what remains in the dark. When
Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on.
humility is in reality the opposite of self-deprecation. It is the grateful recognition that we are precious in God’s eyes and that all we are is pure gift.
As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.
Prayer is the bridge between our conscious and unconscious lives.
The person of hope lives in the moment with the knowledge and trust that all of life is in good hands.
Loneliness is painful; solitude is peaceful. Loneliness makes us cling to others in desperation; solitude allows us to respect others in their uniqueness and create community.
As long as we approach another person from our loneliness, no mature human relationship can develop.
For love to be possible we need the courage to create space between us and to trust that this space allows us to dance together.
When we act out of loneliness our actions easily become violent.
Solitude, whether it is connected with a physical space or not, is essential for our spiritual lives.
Solitude is not immediately satisfying, because in solitude we meet our demons, our addictions, our feelings of lust and anger, and our immense need for recognition and approval.
Community is not the place where we are no longer alone but the place where we respect, protect, and reverently greet one another’s aloneness.
Instead of making us yearn for company that will offer us immediate satisfaction, solitude makes us claim our center and empowers us to call others to claim theirs.
community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another.
Community is the fruit of our capacity to make the interests of others more important than our own (see Philippians 2:4).
The question, therefore, is not “How can we make community?” but “How can we develop a...
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Forgiveness is the cement of community life. Forgiveness holds us together through good and bad times, and it allows us to grow in mutual love.
As people who have hearts that long for perfect love, we have to forgive one another for not being able to give or receive that perfect love in our everyday lives.
Only as people who have accepted forgiveness can we find the inner freedom to give it. Why is receiving forgiveness so difficult? It is very hard to say, “Without your forgiveness I am still bound to what happened between us. Only you can set me free.” That requires not only a confession that we have hurt somebody but also the humility to acknowledge our dependency on others. Only when we can receive forgiveness can we give it.
To forgive another person from the heart is an act of liberation.
We set that person free from the negative bonds that exist between us. We say, “I no longer hold your offense against you.” But there is more. We also free ourselves from the burden of being the “offended one.”
As long as we do not forgive those who have wounded us, we carry them with us or, worse, ...
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Forgiveness, therefore, liberates not only the other but also ourselves. It is the way to the freedom of the children of God.
This mutuality between giving and receiving is what creates peace and harmony.
Forgiving the other is first and foremost an inner movement. It is an act that removes anger, bitterness, and the desire for revenge from our hearts and helps us to reclaim our human dignity. We cannot force those we want to forgive into accepting our forgiveness. They might not be able or willing to do so. They may not even know or feel that they have wounded us. The only people we can really change are ourselves. Forgiving others is first and foremost healing our own hearts.
The God who lives within us will give us the grace to go beyond our wounded selves and say, “In the Name of God you are forgiven.” Let’s pray for that grace.
Forgiveness allows us to claim our own power and not let these events destroy us; it enables them to become events that deepen the wisdom of our hearts. Forgiveness indeed heals memories.
Joy is what makes life worth living, but for many joy seems hard to find.
One may choose to trust that what happened, painful as it may be, holds a promise. The other may choose despair and be destroyed by it.
Freedom of choic
True joy is hidden where we are the same as other people: fragile and mortal. It is the joy of belonging to the human race.
Joy is hidden in compassion. The word compassion literally means “to suffer with.”
We need silence in our lives. We even desire it. But when we enter into silence we encounter a lot of inner noises, often so disturbing that a busy and distracting life seems preferable to a time of silence.
Lust reveals our many unsatisfied needs, anger, our many unresolved relationships.
How do we befriend our inner enemies lust and anger? By listening to what they are saying. They say, “I have some unfulfilled needs” and “Who really loves me?” Instead of pushing our lust and anger away as unwelcome guests, we can recognize that our anxious, driven hearts need some healing.
Our restlessness calls us to look for the true inner rest where lust and anger can be converted into a deeper way of loving.
There is a lot of unruly energy in lust and anger! When that energy can be directed toward loving well, we can transform not only ourselves but even those who might otherwise become the victims of our a...
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In our competitive and often violent world, kindness is not the most frequent response. But when we encounter it we know that we are blessed.
To be kind means to treat another person as your “kin,” your intimate relative.
To be kind is to reach out to someone as being of ...
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To love without condition does not mean to love without concern. God
We often confuse unconditional love with unconditional approval. God loves us without conditions but does not approve of every human behavior.
Gentle is the one who is attentive to the strengths and weaknesses of the other and enjoys being together more than accomplishing something.
gentle person knows that true growth requires nurture, not force.
