Quotes About Connection

Because you were once at home somewhere, you are never an alien anywhere.

How can we ever know the difference we make to the soul of the earth? Where the infinite stillness of the earth meets the passion of the human eye, invisible depths strain towards the mirror of the name. In the word, the earth breaks silence.

The beauty of being human is the capacity and desire for intimacy. Yet we know that even those who are most intimate remain strange to us. Like children, we often "make strange" with each other.

The deepest things that you need are not elsewhere. They are here and now in that circle of your own soul. Real friendship and holiness enable a person to frequently visit the hearth of his solitude;

We live in a world that responds to our longing; it is a place where the echoes always return, even if sometimes slowly.

The Celtic mind was not burdened by dualism. It did not separate what belongs together. The Celtic imagination articulates the inner friendship that embraces Nature, divinity, underworld, and human world as one.

Each of us is a secret envoi of the earth. We

We enter the world as strangers who all at once become heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit, and dream that has long preceded us and will now enfold, nourish, and sustain us. The gift of the world is our first blessing.

I have learned myself painfully that you can only relate to someone if you somehow have the courage and the need to inhabit your own solitude. You can only relate out of your separateness, otherwise you are just using the other person to shield you from your own solitude.

Television and the computer world are great empty shadow-lands. To look at something that can gaze back at you, or that has a reserve and depth, can heal your eyes and deepen your sense of vision.

When we love and allow ourselves to be loved, we begin more and more to inhabit the kingdom of the eternal. Fear changes into courage, emptiness becomes plentitude, and distance becomes intimacy.

Kathleen Raine, a Scottish poet, says that unless you see a thing in the light of love, you do not see it at all. Love is the light in which we see light.

The commercial edge of so-called progress has cut away a huge region of human tissue and webbing that held us in common with one another.

Each life is clothed in raiment of spirit that secretly links it to everything else.

When you are in rhythm with your nature, nothing destructive can touch you. Providence is at one with you; it minds you and brings you to new horizons. To be spiritual is to be in rhythm.

In each person, there is a point of absolute nonconnection with everything else and with everyone. This is fascinating and frightening. It means that we cannot continue to seek outside ourselves for the things we need from within.

There is a desperate hunger for belonging. People feel isolated and cut off. Perhaps this is why a whole nation can assemble around the images of celebrities. They have no acquaintance with these celebrities personally. They look at them from a distance and project all their longings onto them. When something happens to a celebrity, they feel as if it is happening to themselves. There is an acute need for the reawakening of the sense of community.

Person als Vermittlung (The Person as Mediator)

We have fallen out of belonging.

One of the questions that John loved to pose was "when was your last great conversation with someone?" Good conversation chases the truth of things, it demolishes the flimsy foundation of facade, and it penetrates the depths so as to soar unto unfolding possibility.

The story of the Bible isn't primarily about the desire of people to be with God; it's the desire of God to be with people.

Prayer, perhaps more than any other activity, is the concrete expression of the fact that we are invited into a relationship with God.

The entire sum of Creation, each private and individual act of nature, is God waving hello.

Then MacDonald writes this insightful line: "that the same God who is in us, . . . also is all about us—inside, the Spirit; outside, the Word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us.