Quotes About Connection

A pet is something to love, a dog particularly. He loves you without opinion or judgment, he does not speak to you indignantly, he does not confuse your affections with foolish ideas and odd perspectives; he merely loves. I sometimes think of how easy it was for my father to favor you, Cassius.

despite the unpopularity of the notion, surrender plays a crucial role in the spiritual journey as understood by most major religions and spiritual traditions. Far from being a sign of weakness, only surrender to something or someone bigger than us is sufficiently strong to free us from the prison of our egocentricity. Only surrender is powerful enough to overcome our isolation and alienation.

There is nothing more important in life than learning to love and be loved. Jesus elevated love as the goal of spiritual transformation. Psychoanalysts consider it the capstone of psychological growth. Giving and receiving love is at the heart of being human. It is our raison d'être.

We do not find our true self by seeking it. Rather, we find it by seeking God.

Christian spirituality involves a transformation of the self that occurs only when God and self are both deeply known. Both, therefore, have an important place in Christian spirituality. There is no deep knowing of God without a deep knowing of self, and no deep knowing of self without a deep knowing of God.

Giving and receiving love is at the heart of being human. It is our raison d'être.

The deepest ache of the soul is the spiritual longing for connection and belonging. No one was created for isolation. "Nothing in creation is ever totally at home in itself," says John O'Donohue. "No thing is ultimately at one with itself."2

The more we identify with our psychologically and socially constructed self, the more deeply we hide from God, ourselves and others.

This disconnection of being and doing represents a misalignment of our souls that clouds our presence to ourselves and others.

Prayer is not simply what we do. It is a way of being. More specifically, it is resting in the reality of our being-in-God. This is our fundamental identity. It is the hidden but deepest truth of our existence.

We seek bridges from our isolation through people, possessions and accomplishment. But none of these are ever quite capable of satisfying the restlessness of the human heart. To be human is to have been designed for intimate relationship with the Divine.

if love connects us to life, it offers us a life that we can no longer control. No longer can I choose whom I will love and whom I will ignore.

The prayer conversation always begins with God. It does not begin with us. Prayer is our response to a divine invitation to encounter. The prayer conversation has already begun because God has already reached out, seeking our attention and response. Until we learn to attend to the God who is already present and communicating, our prayers will never be more than the product of our minds and wills.

Some Christians speak of a personal encounter with Jesus as if this were a one-time matter—something that happens at conversion. This is a tragic confusion of an introduction and a relationship. A first encounter is just that—a first encounter. What God longs for us to experience is intimate knowing that comes by means of an ongoing relationship.

What God wants is simply our presence, even if it feels like a waste of potentially productive time. That is what friends do together—they waste time with each other. Simply being together is enough without expecting to "get something" from the interaction. It should be no different with God.

Transformational knowing of God comes from meeting God in our depths, not in the abstraction of dusty theological propositions.

We all dream of home," said Mrs. Szince. "We dream of a place where what we are is right, where what we can do is the right thing.

Every one of her foxey ways was now so absolutely precious to him that I believe that if he had known for certain she was dead, and had thoughts of marrying a second time, he would never have been happy with a woman. No, indeed, he would have been more tempted to get himself a tame fox, and would have counted that as good a marriage as he could make.

I am truly my mother's son.

She was his north star, the fixed point round which his world turned. For as long as his heart beat, or hers, he believed they would always share a destiny.

Love is a mystery. We embrace it where we can. Mostly we do not choose whom we love. It just happens. A voice speaks to us, in ways the ears cannot hear. We recognize a beauty the eye does not see. We experience a change in our hearts that no voice can describe.

Why now? Why not? Live or die, a man and a woman need love. There is a need in the race. We need to share. To belong. Perhaps you will die before the year is out. But remember this: to have may be taken from you, to have had never. Far better to have tasted love before dying, than to die alone.

This is my manifesto. My attempt to nudge people toward something, or back toward something. Toward what? An understanding that most of us already have on a deeper level. That a world exists outside of us. A world that reminds us that we are animals, too, animals who have evolved along with other animals on this earth. Thinking, planning, scheming, talking, writing animals, but animals nonetheless.

Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert, Rick Bass's The Watch, Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge, Charles Bowden's Red Line, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years, and Pam Houston's Cowboys Are My Weakness.