Andy Basic

“The greatest number of those who share [John Thomas] Perceval’s concerns are the people who have more or less recovered from psychotic episodes, and remain haunted by a compulsion to find the essential meaning and importance of the extraordinary events through which they have lived, and may live through again. For them, this is not simply a scholastic concern, it is felt as an urgent opportunity for self-discovery.”
― Edward M. Podvoll, Recovering Sanity: A Compassionate Approach to Understanding and Treating Psychosis

“It is not that suffering or failure might happen, or that it will only happen to you if you are bad (which is what religious people often think), or that it will happen to the unfortunate, or to a few in other places, or that you can somehow by cleverness or righteousness avoid it. No, it will happen, and to you! Losing, failing, falling, sin, and the suffering that comes from those experiences—all of this is a necessary and even good part of the human journey.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“the best part of prayer is our listening to God. Sometimes in the Scripture a prayer of urgent and definite petition rises, "Oh that I might have my request; And that God would grant me the thing that I long for!" (Job 6:8); but another sort of prayer is very frequently indicated: "Speak; for thy servant heareth" (I Sam. 3:10); "My soul, wait thdu in silence for God only; For my expectation is from him" (Psalm 62:5); "I will hear what God Jehovah -will speak" (Psalm 85:8); or in Luther's version of Psalm 37: 7, "Be silent to God and let him mold thee." Without such openheartedness to God, some things which he wills never can be done.”
― Harry Emerson Fosdick, The Meaning of Prayer