Quotes About Connection

Western people are a ritually starved people, and in this are different than most of human history.

Once you see that your skin and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it. It preserves religion from any arrogance and denial.

This seems to have been St. Augustine's very notion of memory, not just nostalgia for some past moment, but connecting past, present, and future in one complete contemplative knowing.

your soul is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16:26).

The tragic sense of life is ironically not tragic at all, at least in the Big Picture. Living in such deep time, connected to past and future, prepares us for necessary suffering, keeps us from despair about our own failure and loss, and ironically offers us a way through it all. We are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us. The tragic sense of life is not unbelief, pessimism, fatalism, or cynicism.

Having looked at the objects of the universe, I find there is no one, nor any particle of one, but has reference to the Soul. —Walt Whitman

The place which God takes in our soul he will never vacate, for in us is his home of homes, and it is the greatest delight for him to dwell there… The soul who contemplates this is made like the one who is contemplated. Lady Julian of Norwich, Showings On that day, you will know that you are in me and I am in you. John 14:20

Francis's all-night prayer, "Who are you, O God, and who am I?" is probably a perfect prayer, because it is the most honest prayer we can offer.

Life is not about me; it is about God, and God is about love. When we don't know love, when we don't experience love, when we experience only the insecurity and fragility of the small self, we become restless.

I would wonder if you could be a hero or heroine if you did not live in deep time, that is, Past, present, and future all at once.

Given our present evolution of consciousness, and especially the historical and technological access we now have to the "whole picture," I now wonder if a sincere person can even have a healthy and holy "personal" relationship with God if that God does not also connect them to the universal. A personal God cannot mean a smaller God, nor can God make you in any way smaller—or such would not be God.

We are here to witness the creation and to abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other.… Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house."266

The God-image, the self-image, and the world-image are deeply connected. Normally, when one of them changes, the other two have to readjust. So, when our God-image changes, then we have to change. When our world-image is adjusted, we are confused or even depressed for a while.

As I said, this Spirit has two jobs. First, she creates diversity, as exemplified in the metaphor of wind—just breathing out ever-new life in endlessly diverse forms. But then the Spirit has another job: that of the Great Connector—of all those very diverse things! All this pluriform life, the Spirit keeps in harmony and "mutual deference"267—"so there shall be one Christ, loving Himself," as Augustine daringly put it.268

Even inside an incarnational worldview, we grow by passing beyond some perfect order, through a usually painful and seemingly unnecessary disorder, to an enlightened reorder or "resurrection." This is the "pattern that connects" and solidifies our relationship with everything around us.

Thomas Merton, say it, as he so often does: "A door opens in the center of our being, and we seem to fall through it into immense depths, which although they are infinite—are still accessible to us. All eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact.

love, not death, is the eternal thing.

We actually respond to one another's energy more than to people's exact words or actions. In any situation, your taking or giving of energy is what you are actually doing. Everybody can feel, suffer, or enjoy the difference, but few can exactly say what it is that is happening. Why do I feel drawn or repelled? What we all desire and need from one another, of course, is that life energy called eros! It always draws, creates, and connects things.

Only love effects true inner transformation, not duress, guilt, shunning, or social pressure.

the eyes with which you will look back at God will be the same eyes with which God first looked at you.

Clearly, you are participating in a Love that's being given to you. You are not creating this. You are not generating this. It is being generated through you and in you and for you. You are participating in something larger than yourself and you are just allowing it and trusting it for the pure gift that it is.

Every time you take in a breath, you are repeating the pattern of taking spirit into matter, and thus repeating the first creation of Adam. And every time you breathe out, you are repeating the pattern of returning spirit to the material universe. In a way, every exhalation is a "little dying" as we pay the price of inspiriting the world.

Isn't that ironic? The point of the Christian life is not to distinguish oneself from the ungodly, but to stand in radical solidarity with everyone and everything else. This is the full, final, and intended effect of the Incarnation—symbolized by its finality in the cross, which is God's great act of solidarity instead of judgment.

Allow yourself to be fully known, and you will know what you need to know.