Quotes from Gerald G. May

Maybe, sometimes, in the midst of things going terribly wrong, something is going just right.

Many of the old understandings to which I had been addicted were stripped away, leaving a desertlike spaciousness where my customary props and securities no longer existed. Grace was able to flow into this emptiness, and something new was able to grow. Fresh understandings took root, and the insights that emerged were clearer, simpler, and more beautiful.

We cling to things, people, beliefs, and behaviors not because we love them, but because we are terrified of losing them.

Similarly, grace seeks us but will not control us. Saint Augustine once said that God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them. If our hands are full, they are full of the things to which we are addicted. And not only our hands, but also our hearts, minds, and attention are clogged with addiction. Our addictions fill up the spaces within us, spaces where grace might flow.

True love is like some infinite way of being that we become part of: a flowing energy of willingness, an eternal yes resounding with every heartbeat.

This deepening of love is the real purpose of the dark night of the soul. The dark night helps us become who we are created to be: lovers of God and one another.

It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most human beings live only for the gratification of it. ARISTOTLE

Life is not a matter of reaching a stagnant end point, but is rather an ongoing process in which one, hopefully and with grace, grows ever more deeply in love.

Only in the pauses between things, in the brief contemplative spaces of just being, can we catch a glimpse of love itself.

In a spiritual sense, the objects of our attachments and addictions become idols. We give them our time, energy, and attention whether we want to or not, even—and often especially—when we are struggling to rid ourselves of them. We want to be free, compassionate, and happy, but in the face of our attachments we are clinging, grasping, and fearfully self-absorbed.

But one thing is certain: the process of freedom is one of subtraction—we are left more empty than when we began.

it is the discovery of the depths of weakness, the power of grace, and the price of both. Moreover, what takes place in the desert is not simply difficult travel and adventurous learning; it is repentance and conversion, the transformation of mixed motivations into purified desire, the greening of desert into garden through the living water of grace.

The dawn is an awakening to a deepening realization of who we really are in and with God and the world, and of what has been going on within us in the night.

the dark night of the soul is an ongoing transition from compulsively trying to control one's life toward a trusting freedom and openness to God and the real situations of life.

Liberation, whether experienced pleasurably or painfully, always involves relinquishment, some kind of loss.

God darkens our awareness in order to keep us safe. When we cannot chart our own course, we become vulnerable to God's protection, and the darkness becomes a "guiding night," a "night more kindly than the dawn."5

We may yearn to "let go and let God," but it usually doesn't happen until we have exhausted our own efforts.

When we are really given to the why of life, the hows begin to flow.

Joy is the reaction one has to the full appreciation of Being. It is one's response to finding one's rightful, rooted place in life, and it can happen only when one knows through and through that absolutely nothing is being denied or otherwise shut out of awareness.

If we are honest, I think we have to admit that we will likely try to sabotage any movement toward true freedom. If we really knew what we were called to relinquish on this journey, our defenses would never allow us to take the first step. Sometimes the only way we can enter the deeper dimensions of the journey is by being unable to see where we're going.

The dark night is a profoundly good thing. It is an ongoing spiritual process in which we are liberated from attachments and compulsions and empowered to live and love more freely.

It is not that they are unconcerned with social liberation and justice, but that they are convinced such transformation will happen only through the changing of individual hearts.

Willfulness must give way to willingness and surrender. Mastery must yield to mystery.

The glory of God is a human being fully alive. —Ireneaus1