Quotes from Roland Merullo

Resist fear," Jesus said. "Fear is always in the future. Cut through it. Resist it.

There are some kinds of sorrow that words can never reach, certain kinds of things you can never hold in the box of your thoughts, certain kinds of pain you can't soften in other people.

but I could see that she blamed me for the fact that her teacher was twenty-one minutes late. I

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.

The danger here is that, in trying to prove to yourself something you do not need to prove, you will behave in a way that is untrue to you, and place your soul in danger.

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.

God couldn't possibly love my father and hate my mother, or vice versa; that God was bigger than our ideas about him and greater than any name we might call him.

If I look at you"—he pointed to a very old woman who seemed to be teetering in her chair on the far left-hand end of the first row—"and I see not woman, not person, but piece of the energy of God, the same energy that is inside me, how can I hurt you? How can I able to think bad on you? No. You see?" The

Simply by being your absolute, most genuine self in every interaction of every hour, you provide a great and rare service on this earth.

I studied him the way I studied all the people in my life, noticing the changes of his mood, the times when the edge of his patience came into view, even small physical details like the sickle-shaped scar on the top of his right forearm and the small flourish he made with his hand whenever he set down a tool, as if he was brushing bad air away from it.

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.

I took one breath and realized I could be angry a bit later if I wanted to be angry. There would always be time for that. There was no rush. I could resist the reflex. And so I did.

Let the light of goodness guide you in everything you do. Make your difficult voyage the walk of love, and God shall give you an interior peace while you live, and welcome you to eternal peace when your life is finished.

I mused about the human phenomenon that went by the title "organized religion." What, I wondered, was disorganized religion?

All-American and proud of it. Too rich and soft and flawed to make any spiritual mark on anyone other than my own dog and children . . . on a good day.

try if you can to not stay in the small box of old thinking.

Sins are seeds. You plant them, then eat the fruit they produce.

The surfaces fool us.

The realm of human understanding is the only realm most of us have access to," I said.

I have tried, I still try, to do what I can to ease the suffering on this earth, and I'm sure you do the same. The rest of it we have to allow to be, as painful as that is for us. We have to care for ourselves and our loved ones. We have to serve others to the extent we are able. And the rest of it we have to allow to be. It is awful, is it not, the human predicament? Awful and beautiful.

She lifted her face to his, and he thought there was something new in the feeling of her lips against his, a new hope or a different kind of fear.

Micronesians changed things inside themselves and let the planet be.

Maybe, she thought, they have so much disdain for the Italians—our food, our music, our God-given happiness, our warmth—that they want, not to be loved but only to prove their own superiority. There must be decent ones among them, men like the soldier who'd warned her about the rapist. Surely there were thousands of young men who'd never wanted to be in Hitler's army. But it was the vulgar and violent ones who left an impression.

With two teenagers in the house, we sometimes experience a degree of domestic turbulence that sounds, to my ear, like a boiling teakettle filled with hormones shrieking on a stove.