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@discourseoflove
“If we love somebody, we go out of our way to learn the best of who they are. And when you caricature someone you’re saying, ‘I don't care enough to actually know you.’”
— Tony Kriz, quoted in “The Confessional Booth,” Lord, Save Us from Your Followers: Why Is the Gospel of Love Dividing America? by Dan Merchant
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“Love is patient. Because the first thing that love is is patient. So if you have a problem with patience, it's because you have a problem with love. So if you say, ‘Oh my gosh, patience's just really hard for me,’ that just means love's really hard for you. But if you grow in love, patience is an automatic; it's just a default that's in love. It's the first one, because 'Love is patient, love is kind. . . [love] is not easily provoked' (1 Corinthians 13:4-7). Love is amazing. You can change the world with that thing. It's the most amazing thing in the gospel. It's love.”
— Todd White, Words and Timing
“The blessing that we have to offer to each other is hidden in our poverty, in these places in our lives where we are quite weak, quite vulnerable, quite broken.”
— Henri Nouwen, Henri Nouwen: 1994 COMISS Award
“What does it mean to be called to the religious life? Even the most articulate of these women [called to the religious life] cannot find the precise words to explain how she came to understand her vocation. The youngest nun says, ‘I’m sure anyone who falls in love, they look back and say, “Oh, remember how we met? Or he showed his love?” It’s the same, how God has shown his personal love.’
But how does one fall in love? These women are no more capable of explaining their love of the holy than we are of understanding the reasons two human beings are attracted to each other, and yet they try. One sister compares it to God ‘playing hide-and-seek,’ drawing her to the religious life, but leaving her unsure of where to go. Like any love, there is struggle, not only with which of the various religious orders to join but how to live once there; it is not desperation which brings these women to the cloister but desire.”
— Casey N. Cep, Inside the Cloister (on Abbie Reese’s new book Dedicated to God: An Oral History of Cloistered Nuns)
“As I seriously sought God’s counsel about why I had such difficulty in relationships, He taught me that I could not give away what I did not have. I had not received God’s unconditional love, so I could not give it to others. I had not received God’s complete forgiveness, so I could not give it away to the people in my life who needed it.
I saw God as angry about something most of the time, and l was angry most of the time about something, too. I was angry with myself for my flaws and also angry with other people for theirs. I hadn’t yet learned that our view of God affects our relationship with Him and all of our other relationships as well. We don’t need to wait until we are perfect to receive God’s love, and we must not demand perfection from others either. If we do, it will place a burden on them that they cannot bear, and it will destroy our relationships with them.”
— Joyce Meyer, “Be the Person God Meant You to Be,” God is Not Mad at You: You Can Experience Real Love, Acceptance and Guilt-free Living
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“A love which is truly for the other is a slow love, because it is a patient love. It does not demand that the beloved immediately open himself until he is ready. And it is a love that constantly adjusts itself as more of the other is revealed. It constantly adjusts its giving according to the beloved's need. And if the beloved is not prepared to receive love, it will not thrust itself upon the beloved.
You can only ‘love at first sight’ if you're in love with an idea. Loving a person requires something more. Each person requires a particular love. So if you're going to love a particular person, you'll have to learn who that person is, what that person needs, and how you can fit into that. And as the person grows, so will the way you fit into that person's life. Love is a lifetime work.”
— Chris Damian, The Labor of Love
“Learning to be merciful toward the faults of others releases joy in our lives. We can choose to confront every minor thing that someone does to distress us, or we can be merciful and understanding. There are things that we do need to confront, but a lot of things that we turn into huge problems could be easily overlooked if we would choose to be more merciful. I am very grateful that God doesn’t make a big deal out of every little mistake that we make, aren’t you? He does chastise us for our own good, but He doesn’t overload us with excessive reminders of our flaws. If He did we would be overwhelmed and unable to press forward.”
— Joyce Meyer, “Sad, Mad, or Glad?”, God is Not Mad at You: You Can Experience Real Love, Acceptance and Guilt-free Living
“[W]e have got not to be the servants of our sensuality but to bring it into subjection. Thus, those who marry have, as we have the right to do, chosen a life in which, as St. Paul drily says, ‘the husband aims to please his wife rather than the Lord, and the wife her husband, rather than the Lord’ — but although we have chosen a life to please ourselves and one another, still we know we are called with that special calling, and are bound not to be conformed to the world, friendship to which is enmity to God. And so also we ought to help one another and have co-operative pools of help: help people who are stuck in family difficulties; and have practical resources in our parishes for one another’s needs when we get into difficult patches.”
— Elizabeth Anscombe, Contraception and Chastity
“[A]ll the time, I talk to my students about the fact that as individual people, our existence is statistically impossible. There’s virtually no likelihood that you will exist as yourself, you know. We’re an anomalous planet in a huge, roaring, explosion of the cosmos, you know, with our little lives going on in this reliable daily basis for the most part, you know. Our brains are the most complex object known to exist in the universe. Every single person has in his/her head the most complex thing known to exist in the universe. It seems to me as if awe is appropriate. It seems to me as if if we pondered what we are, the impulse not only to respect ourselves but to respect each other would be very much enhanced.
And we have a way—it’s a habit, it’s a cultural habit—of speaking very disparagingly about people today, or whatever the category is. Under no circumstances is disparagement appropriate. Maybe tears are appropriate sometimes, but never dismissal, never undervaluing of the seriousness and importance of a human life, you know.
We shouldn’t—we’re here briefly. We are extraordinarily exceptional. It’s a beautiful thing that we’re involved in, however else you want to describe it. Our sort of systematic expunging of the candid expression of joy, this is all sad to me, that the diminishing of the sense of the aesthetic as an ordinary feature of life. Talk about grace, you know.
And then, of course, there is dear old science, which I love and follow. But the genius of science is that it’s always pointing out where it’s wrong. And it advances by it. It’s the beautiful model of thought in that way. But, you know, these deterministic notions that we’ve had about genetics and so on aren’t true, because science has found out things that complicate them almost infinitely, you know. So there is a tendency to try to impose this very hard carapace on human being, human experience. And science, as much as anything else, disrupts it, you know. And we have to simply be aware. We do not have a reductionist, a true, verifiable, legitimate reductionist definition of ‘human being’.”
— Marilynne Robinson, Marilynne Robinson: 2012 National Book Festival
“The ancient writer Jerome (A.D. 374–419) tells of the frail apostle John, in extreme old age, being carried into his congregation mumbling only, ‘Love one another.’ When asked why he talked of nothing else, John replied, ‘Because it is the Lord's command, and if this only is done, it is enough.’”
— Philip Yancey and Tim Stafford, “Undesirable Guests,” The Student Bible: New International Version
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Only Child
by: D. Nurkse from: The Rules of Paradise
1
I cradled my newborn daughter and felt the heartbeat pull me out of shock. She didn’t know what her hands were: she folded them. I asked her was there a place where there was no world. She didn’t know what a voice was: her lips were the shape of a nipple.
2
In the park the child says: watch me. It will not count unless you see. And she shows me the cartwheel, the skip, the tumble, the tricks performed at leisure in midair, each unknown until it is finished. At home she orders: see me eat. I watch her curl on herself, sleep; as I try to leave the dark room her dreaming voice commands me: watch.
3
Always we passed the seesaw on the way to the swings but tonight I remember the principle of the lever, I sit the child at one end, I sit near the center, the fulcrum, at once she has power to lift me off the earth and keep me suspended by her tiny weight, she laughing, I stunned at the power of the formula.
“The U.S. government estimates 60,000 immigrant children this year [2014]. There are over 300,000 churches in America, most of them hewing to a mission of spreading some kind of good news. What good news? Salvation. The coming kingdom. A God whose will, we pray, be done on earth as it is in heaven.
And what is his will? That's not for me to say, but it is for me to ask, and for you to ask. It's for us to ask, and then to listen. Are we listening, we who spend millions to travel overseas carrying the Gospel to the lost, now that God is sending tens of thousands of them our way?
I know there are geopolitical practicalities that transcend the priorities of my stupid bleeding heart, but 300,000 churches and 60,000 children.
What if, instead of greeting the federal agents with protest signs, we greeted them with petitions? Give us these children. We will feed them, we will clothe them, we will give them shelter. We will teach them and we will pray over them. Their parents, God help them, sent them away, and now here we stand to make good on the faith or hope or desperation in which those mothers and fathers sent them forth. Give us these children, and we will find a way. We will show mercy, because while we can scarcely agree between ourselves on anything else, we agree that the kingdom of heaven includes a hand stretched out in love.
It's utterly impractical, I know. But how have we done so far, Christians, with practicality? For Christ's sake, let's not be known for our practicality.”
— Tony Woodlief, Thy kingdom come (via ayjay)
excerpt:
“In the Modern world, ‘freedom’ has come to mean ‘the lack of imposition of rules.’ But in the Catholic worldview, ‘freedom’ means the freedom to do great things. If you want to be a great tennis player, if you want to have the freedom to put the ball exactly where you want it on the court, the freedom to be able to return a mean volley, you actually have to put a lot of rules on yourself. You have to bind yourself to practice and practice and practice. You have to abide by rules. But these rules only make you free.
Or think of music. If you want to have the freedom to express yourself through playing beautiful music, you need to bind yourself to practice playing an instrument at least one hour every day.
Or think of swimming. When I was a young kid, my Mom wanted me to learn how to swim. But that sounded boring, and I said no. My Mom said, why not? And, being the smartass I was, I said ‘Because don’t want to swim! And I’m free! I do what I want! My body, my choice!’ (Ok, maybe I didn’t say ‘my body, my choice’) And my Mom looked at me and said: ‘…Really? No, you’re not free. Imagine you’re going to the beach with your friends, and they want to go for a swim. If you don’t know how to swim, you won’t be free. You won’t have a choice. Only if you bind yourself to learn how to swim will you then be actually free to decide whether to swim or not.’
(Seriously, my mind was totally blown. I still remember that moment all these years later.)
What virtue ethics tells us, in other words, is that if growth in virtue is growth in self-mastery, then rules don’t necessarily curtail our freedom; indeed, we need the right rules to increase our freedom.”
“I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the kingdom of night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.
I remember: he asked his father: ‘Can this be true?’ This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?
And now the boy is turning to me: ‘Tell me,’ he asks. ‘What have you done with my future? What have you done with your life?’
And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.
And then I explained to him how naive we were, that the world did know and remain silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.”
— Elie Wiesel, in his Acceptance Speech on the occasion of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, December 10, 1986 (via prayingbuddha)
“If we can have compassion for ourselves, then we are inviting ourselves to have compassion for others, which makes relationships fairer and more equal.”
— Judith Ohikuare, Have Compassion for Yourself
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“[Christians] believe the living God. Who is he? He is the Creator, and he is one God in three Persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. God exists as three Persons who give themselves to each other in love.
In classical Christian theology, the family is an icon of the Trinity. Humanity, that is to say, man and woman, is the image of God—two persons, alike in dignity and nature yet different, giving themselves to each other in love, and out of this mutual self-giving springs forth life. God is a family.
In classical Christian theology, God wants, first, to be known to us. One of the most important ways in which he does this is through the institution of the family; through the institution of the family, mystagogically, we learn about God. This is what the life-giving one-flesh union is about.”
— Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Spanking Is Intrinsically Disordered
“[U]nlike many people today, I don't see disagreement, theologically or otherwise, as evidence of disrespect. [. . .] But some ways of criticizing are better than others. To be sure, there is no formula here, but triumphalism is never attractive. When someone from a rival tradition says or does something outrageous, it ought to be treated with outrage. But we can't lose sight of the bigger picture. This is something I struggle with, but probably don't struggle with as much as I should. Standing in truth is an important thing, but it's not always the most important thing. If we do it in the wrong way, or at the wrong time, we can drive apart fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, in ways that will be difficult to heal, if they ever can be.”
— Rod Dreher, The Problem Of Truth & Triumphalism
