“My soul sings in gratitude. I’m dancing in the mystery of God. The light of the Holy One is within me and I am blessed, so truly blessed. This goes deeper than human thinking. I am filled with awe at Love whose only condition is to be received.”
“In my selections this month I tried to capture the holiness and messiness that closeness brings. We read about the power of spiritual friendships, and how friendship can become spiritual. That sexuality is a gift from God, which we are tasked with using with integrity. That marriage is a divine leading built on reciprocity. That we are our children’s first spiritual teachers. And that when we experience loss or loneliness, we are presented with the opportunity to enter into ‘deeper and more continual acquaintance with the unseen and eternal things.'”
“I came to realise that the best way to deepen my love of God was to use my experience of the love in my everyday life in all its variety, subtlety and uncertainty. Getting on with those I love is often a business demanding patience, discretion, tact and understanding. It gets complicated sometimes. It also gets strained, occasionally to the breaking point. But without expression it is barren. I show my love in the things I do, and I also show it by words of endearment. These things are all part and parcel of one another. This is what worship should be like. This is the idiom in which we should speak to God.”
“For me the certain realisation of God came at the time of the breakdown of my marriage. The unthinkable had happened and I seemed to be at my lowest state physically and mentally. There seemed to be no present and no future but only a nightmare of dark uncertainty. One distinct message reached me: to ‘go under’ was out of the question, I could only start again, learn from my mistakes and take this second chance at life that I had been given. I found a strength within I did not know I had, and I believe now that it came from the prayers and loving support of so many people round me.”
“Every man knows in his heart that there is no greater thing in the world than pure unselfish love. Death cannot conquer, nay, he teaches ever that love is supreme. Good men do not die. Their lives are as the tearing of the veil, they show us something of that which is eternal, for if here love is greatest in the heart of man, must it not be greatest in God himself? And if greatest in himself, then let the mystery of his will be never so dark, we may gird ourselves each to his life’s work with something more than courage.
“…There is for some of us beyond the sexual experience a further one, in which there comes a spiritual blessing of the body. While this is not in the least pious it is intensely held and when it happened to me I found myself murmuring, ‘I praise thee, Lord, with my breasts, I praise thee with my womb, I praise thee with my whole body and all my love…’ I had been in some suffering and was determined, if I could, to remain faithful to my marriage and to those I had such affection for.”
“The practise of discernment helps us to realise that we do have choices about the kind of family life we cultivate. We do not simply have to accept whatever the consumer culture dictates, including the deliberate targeting of children by the advertising industry. Neither do we have to reject modern culture wholesale in the attempt to protect our children from everything potentially harmful.”
“There are some individuals who by constitution are born lovers, who have what a friend of mine calls “the gift of intimacy.” To be near them is to find yourself warmed by their fire. Their presence in the midst seems to activate in others a contagion of good feeling towards the world in general. But for most of us, it is a thing that has to be worked at, cultivated as a kind of inner development. We have all experienced this warmth in some degree. You know what a difference it makes when you feel that another person is truly aware of you, of your presence, or even of your existence.”
“In the autumn of 1658, just after the death of the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, two Westcountry women set sail for the shores of the Mediterranean, leaving the shores of their fractured homeland for a mission of religious friendship. Katherine Evans and Sarah Cheevers were both married with children, but such was the strength of their bond, and their commitment to the Quaker faith, that the demands of family and neighborhood were set aside.”
“The amount of solitude which is attainable or would be wholesome in the case of any individual life is a matter in which each of us must judge for himself. I would not, if I might, attempt to prescribe in this matter for any human being but myself – and I feel that it needs much wisdom to minister even to oneself in regard to it. But I also feel sure that a due proportion – whether it be little or much – a due proportion of solitude is one of the most important conditions of mental health. Therefore (to return to our original problem) if it be our lot to stand apart from those close natural ties by which life is for most people shaped and filled, let us not be in haste to fill the gap; let us not carelessly or rashly throw away the opportunity of entering into that deeper and more continual acquaintance with the unseen and eternal things which is the natural and great compensation for the loss of easier joys. The loneliness which we rightly dread is not the absence of human faces and voices – it is the absence of love.”
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