Category: Quotes

Inspirational quotes that guide us to the best version of our higher selves.

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Punish with Charity

I’m wandering the halls of the museum at the Igreja da Misericórdia, in Porto, a lay order of brothers founded Portugal in 1498. The order was founded on the works of mercy, seven corporal and seven spiritual. These principles are hung on floor-to-ceiling banners lining a long corridor. One reads, “Punish with charity those who err.” I stop and stare with a quizzical expression.

In traditional Catholic teaching, the works of mercy instruct believers on how to fulfill our divine purpose and come closer to God, what I might describe as living a spiritual life. The corporal works direct us to relieve the bodily suffering of others, feeding the hungry, clothing and sheltering the poor, caring for the sick. The spiritual works guide us to relieve the spiritual suffering of others by such acts as comforting the afflicted, forgiving others willingly, bearing insults with patience.

Traditionally, one of the spiritual works of mercy is phrased, “Admonish the sinner.” But here at the Misericórdia, the wording is, “Punish with charity those who err.” This is not just a softer phrase, it upends the energy entirely. Charity is the opposite of punishment. To admonish a sinner assumes a superiority, where I am the one who judges and corrects. Charity offers an abundance that does not stop to assess merit. It erases the need for judgment.

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My Changing Constellation

“A person is a perpetual ongoingness perpetually mistaking itself for a still point. We call this figment personality or identity or self, and yet we are constantly making and remaking ourselves. Composing a life … is the work of continual revision, not toward greater perfection but toward greater authenticity.”

Maria Popova, The Marginalian

I tend to think of myself as a stable entity; solid, steady, durable. The illusion is strong because of the deep fissure running through me that goes all the way back. My earliest memories carry the recognizable strain of a personality, a personhood I still feel today, the image of who I think myself to be.

It’s not a complete illusion, like one created by the conjurist who makes an elephant disappear. The personality is real enough, it’s just that it’s the lesser part of me. My worries, irritations, preferences, the clothes I choose, how I flavor my food, the mirror glance to check my hair – these are ephemera. Even the things I think are important (and they are important, within their sphere), my beliefs, convictions, my sense of right and wrong, my dreams, my longings, these are outer reflections of an inner brightness. And I cling to my reflections tightly.

My ongoingness is discomforting. I don’t like that I am mostly a fluid constellation of moving parts, like the constellations I see at night, whose names give the illusion of a fixed image to stars that are hurtling through space. Incrementally, but inevitably, their shape will change. In a thousand or a million years, they will be altered into something else. And on a smaller scale, so will I, despite my clinging.

The still point is not the point. I did not enter the stream of life to arrive at a personality that was a collection of right answers. If life is an examination, it is not true-or-false; it’s an ever expanding lab experiment to a question that keeps evolving. My growth accelerates if I can engage my discomforts, loosen my hold on the fixed image I have of the bursting elements within me, and let the movements of the kaleidoscope proceed. There is information in the field I cannot see when I hold so fast to what I think I know.

Photo by Johnny Kaufman on Unsplash

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Walking Each Other Home

“We’re all just walking each other home.”

Ram Dass

Ram Dass describes life as a walk. That image feels right. It’s a terrain I learn about by moving though. There are easy stretches where fields explode with flowering brush and insects buzzing in the sunshine. There are rough patches where soaking rains have washed away the trail. The distant hills might slope gently, convincing me I have the strength to meet them, before turning into mountain cliffs that seem to want to break me. It’s all there for me to learn from as I go. I pray the joys outweigh the woes, but I know, whatever comes, I am stronger for the walking.

And it’s true, my walk is leading somewhere; I am walking home. I’m trying to find my way through the wood, guided by the lessons I’ve been given. My learning has not always been pretty. I’ve made mistakes that hurt people, as many times as I’ve been hurt. But when the lesson took, I advanced another step, my inner goodness brightened, and my actions from that point were better.

Isn’t that how we all proceed along this road, learning, laughing, cringing, crying, finding our way through the flowers and the mud? We’re all trying to figure out how to make it through with a minimum of harm, under motivations we only partly understand, all of us wanting, desperately, to feel love, and trying stunningly stupid ways to find it.

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Writ in Water – The Ripples of Our Choices

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.“

John Keats

Keats asked that these words be engraved on his tombstone. A star among the Romantic poets, he burned brief and bright and then died at the age of 25 from tuberculosis.

What are the things writ in water? Our names, our reputations, our actions; certainly, the things we write; everyone we know, everything we can see and touch in the material world. Scientists tell us that even the Earth will someday end her spiraling course across the heavens and collapse into the sun. Caesar, Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Elizabeth I – their names will be forgotten too.

But those are things written at the surface. Water is deep. A pebble dropped might fall forever, silent as a feather. And it is in the depths that the world is continually recreated.

Read a Keats poem and you are affected in some small way, if only for an instant, even if you don’t like it. Its presence has disrupted an atom of the mind. The same is true for every thought, action, or aspiration of you and me. Beneath the physical, the energy of a kind word or loving gesture ripples out, shaping the fiber of the universe like the grain of living wood. Cruel and selfish acts too, but their brittle force has far less power. Consciousness is a field, and we are all plowing furrows that run on and on.

What remains when my life is done? My body will die, of course, and my name will be forgotten, along with Caesar and Keats. Obvious but irrelevant. This does not change the core of who I am or why I make the choices I do. I’m part of a longer stream running below the surface, adding to the world’s recreation.

A thing of beauty is a joy forever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness…

John Keats

Photo by Nazym Jumadilova on Unsplash

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The Channel of Your Life

“Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.”

Henry David Thoreau

What is Thoreau talking about? Where else could I be? Aren’t I always in the channel of my life?

Sadly, no. I am often pulled away by the pressures of the moment, the expectations of others, or even my own fear of facing the totality of who I am. Thoreau knew that the noise of the world can distract and overwhelm and that without a conscious return to the channel, we are set adrift.

The channel Thoreau describes is the true me, the essence beneath the fickle appearance at the surface. When I rest in the channel of my life, things flow. I align with an inner compass of values, passion, and purpose that guides my actions. The signal of my inner compass is strong but quiet, humming at a low vibration. Unless I pause to listen, it is easy to float with the tide and pass it by.

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Don’t Get Stuck in Your Conclusions

“A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.”  

Martin H. Fischer

Our desire for certainty is deeply embedded in our psyche. The ability to make decisions on scant information was probably crucial to our survival as a species. But this incredible skill creates hidden obstacles that influence us in ways we cannot see.

As mystics, our ultimate goal is to transform our default way of being from ego to Essence, and that is nearly impossible if we can’t understand and undo our conditioned ways of seeing.

By way of example, imagine these three scenes that might occur in a typical day.

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There Has to Be a Bow

“Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow.”

Bill Moyers

I have many ideas about my spirituality. I get new ones all the time, or am reminded of old ones. I’m reading Kabir Helminski’s book on mysticism, Living Presence, which fills me with ideas, a word or phrase leaping from the page and into my imagination every minute:

That it is possible to reside in the “I” at the center and recede from the “I” that is absorbed by the distractions of ego; that noise can settle like dust and allow silence to flood the room; that the state of presence is always accessible, where experience and experiencer occupy equal proportions.

I want these ideas to be more than a collection of ornaments arranged for my private entertainment. I want them to move from abstraction to actuality, to serve their intended purpose as a force for transformation. I feel their potential, humming, waiting to be seeded in the garden of my life. I need a tool to help me plant.

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I’ve Never Seen This Day Before

“This is a wonderful day. I’ve never seen this one before.”

Maya Angelou

Sitting with a cup of coffee, the reliable comfort that settles my morning, I begin to plan my day, listing the things I want to finish or start. It’s an optimistic bundle, a bristlecone of activity.

Maya Angelou’s words invite a pleasant disruption. The art of seeing and the skill of planning occupy separate parts of the mind. Seeing is not cognitive, it’s a whole-bodied, sensory experience that removes me from the sometimes oppressive pressure of thinking. More than observation, seeing is immersive, allowing the world to enter through my perceptions and land in the cradle of my body.

Why is this a wonderful day? Is it so different from yesterday or the day before?

Failure to see the singular wonder in every day is a loss, and that is Maya’s warning. When my brain runs on autopilot, running the film of previous days on the movie screen of my mind, I’m sedated by the rush of images. If I peek behind the blurry curtain of the autopilot, I see the full texture of life: palpable, sensuous, reds and purples seething and brimming, sights and sounds splashing and spilling like a river overflowing its banks, pleading with me to slow my breathless pace and match my breathing to the rhythm of natural time.

Outside my window, finches chatter in conversation; a breeze lifts the last reluctant leaves from their branches and rattles them across the road; a black sheen colors the puddles; my familiar coffee becomes exotic, the warm liquid in my mouth retrieving something from ancestral memory that puts me in kinship with the first human who thought to brew the bean.

Each day, a door opens at dawn and closes at dusk. What a shame to let it pass without acknowledging I’ve never seen this one before and celebrating its arrival, unique and wondrous.

Photo from Ales Krivec on Unsplash

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A Thousand Thousand Reasons

“There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

The anticipation as I raise my cup of coffee, the steam and aroma waving to my taste buds, who are already smiling.

The memories I’ve collected, triumphs and regrets, that pave the road I’m walking.

The miraculous orchestra of my body – lymph and lung and nerve and bone, beating heart and gastro-endo-something (and all the other parts I cannot name) – that serves me as a vehicle for growth, pleasure, wonder and joy, even as it wears around the edges.

A band of friends who have, for decades, grounded, comforted, reveled with me, forgiven excesses, celebrated quirks, shared intimacies, laughed at life’s absurdities, and proven the healing power of acceptance as a form of love.

Naps.

The delicious mystery of awareness itself, the center from which consciousness emanates into perception, experience, and the vibrating pulse of life.

A mind that can imagine; the unfathomable fact that I can fathom.

The gray moment of morning when dreams still hover but my full faculties have not yet arrived and the sound of Linda’s breathing makes everything familiar.

Cool water on a hot day; fleece socks on a cold night.

Tin roof sundaes.

The impossible fact that a planet of rock and water can, in a few billion years, create such staggering beauty: the Ninth Symphony, Abbey Road, the Impressionists, orchids, Italian cooking.

The fullness I feel when I empty the tears I’ve been holding.

An overwhelming intuition that the Cosmos is always here for me, available, accessible, nurturing, calling me to fulfillment, completion.

The inner knowing that beingness is the ground to any figure; that resilience is baked-in; that no matter how turbulent or terrible the world can seem, no matter how consuming the grief or anger, there is a glimmer that can’t be crushed, an element on the periodic table of being human that won’t reduce, a sparkling diamond that cannot die.

How can I pretend to give thanks for my blessings only one day a year? Why am I not constantly singing, drunk on the holy goodness of life?

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

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The Sacred Search to Understand

“I can calculate the motion of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”

                                                            Sir Isaac Newton

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

William Shakespeare

Humans have always wanted to know the why of things. Curiosity and wonder seem to be wired into our nature, and close behind, the unspoken hope that if we could find the lever at the root, we might pull it hard enough to right the world one small degree.

We watch the parade of human endeavor with all its beauty and virtue, flaws and folly, and we wonder:

Why do we light up and fill with kindness when we see a baby?

Why do we allow people in poor neighborhoods to have higher rates of cancer?

Why does ambition so often degrade into greed?

Why do we stop and stare when struck by the colors of a desert sunset?

Why do we stand speechless at the sight of stars against the blackness?

Why have we not found a way to end the senseless slaughter and devastation of war?

Why do I love my wife? (more baffling, why does she love me?)

Why does the piercing pain of grief swell, break, recede, and return like ocean tides?

Why is there poverty and hunger amid an obesity of wealth?

Why are we capable of both immense generosity and crushing cruelty, yet after all these eons still unable to choose wisely?

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