“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for living in someone’s skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me unless there is peace and joy finally for you too.”
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“Spirituality doesn’t look like sitting down and meditating. Spirituality looks like folding the towels in a sweet way and talking kindly to the people in the family even though you’ve had a long day.
It’s enfolded into the act of parenting. You fold the towels in a sweet way. It doesn’t take extra time.”
~Sylvia Boorstein from What We Nurture
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“When there is a great disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may be just the beginning of a great adventure.”
~Pema Chödrön
“Calvin says that God takes an aesthetic pleasure in people. There’s no reason to imagine that God would choose to surround himself into infinite time with people whose only distinction is that they fail to transgress. King David, for example, was up to a lot of no good. To think that only faultless people are worthwhile seems like an incredible exclusion of almost everything of deep value in the human saga. Sometimes I can’t believe the narrowness that has been attributed to God in terms of what he would approve and disapprove.”
~Marilynne Robinson from The Paris Review
Hear more of Marilynne Robinson in The Mystery We Are
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“Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear.
On the location of Australia, and the Outer Hebrides;Such maps abound; more precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day.”
~Alexander McCall Smith from Love Over Scotland
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“Peace is the fruit of love, a love that is also justice. But to grow in love requires work — hard work. And it can bring pain because it implies loss — loss of the certitudes, comforts, and hurts that shelter and define us.”
~Jean Vanier from Finding Peace
Photo by George Duncan, cc by-nc-nd 2.0
Hear more of Jean Vanier in L’Arche a Community of Brokenness and Beauty
