The Delight of Being Ordinary Quotes

“All difficulties in this life, every moment of difficulty, come from the distance between what is and what we want to be.”
― Roland Merullo, The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama

“We make up stories about the other person. In our minds we build these stories--she is this way, he is that way; look, she always do this, he always do that--and then these things keep us from seeing this person full as they are in the present moment.”
― Roland Merullo, The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama

“It was as if we’d been caught in a surreal photograph—the two of them looked so out of place there, in a room dedicated to superficialities. And yet it occurred to me that, in a way similar to what had been done to the people on the walls, we’d overlaid the humanity of the holy ones with a garment of fame. We looked at each of them and saw something more than a human being: a reflection of our own potential for greatness, maybe, spiritual greatness. We made them larger than life in order to remind ourselves that some part of us existed beyond the petty meanness of the ordinary day.”
― Roland Merullo, The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama

“By example. By being genuine. Simply by being your absolute, most genuine self in every interaction of every hour, you provide a great and rare service on this earth.”
― Roland Merullo, The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama

“When we were first together, when you first brought me here to this beautiful place, you used to say you were glad you found a napoletana, remember? You said the northerners were sane and orderly and hardworking and maybe more honest, but that without the south, Italy would have too many brains and not enough heart. It would be like Europe having only Germany and Austria - no Spain, no France, no Italy. It would be a world of scientists without singers. I thought it was romantic. What happened to the man who said those things?”
― Roland Merullo, The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama

“Now, at a point when the entire world seems mired in violence and cynicism, when the Church is shrinking, the environment being poisoned, when good souls are giving up hope, when greed and bitterness seem to be gaining at the expense of kindness and compassion - now, I believe, we have been given a divine help.”
― Roland Merullo, The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama

“Simply by being your absolute, most genuine self in every interaction of every hour, you provide a great and rare service on this earth.”
― Roland Merullo, The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama

“...if we somehow find the courage to go directly into the discomfort - even the discomfort of illness, pain, old age, and death - we might discover something unexpected there.”
― Roland Merullo, The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama

“We have a tradition in Tibet. Sacred craziness. Men and women who act in a strange way. People think they are fools, but their wisdom, in fact, is more than those we call normal.”
― Roland Merullo, The Delight of Being Ordinary: A Road Trip with the Pope and the Dalai Lama