Quotes About Transformation

Revolutions always appear impossible in prospect and inevitable in retrospect.

Long ago, in the infancy of civilization, man learned that there were drugs in Nature, cell products of the growth or transformation of "our brother organisms, the plants," by whose agency pain was turned to pleasure. By the aid of these outside influences he could clear "today of past regrets and future fears," and strike out from the sad "calendar unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday.

Monastic contemplatives have staked out a clearly limited area to be transformed by contemplation: the monastery. Lay contemplatives face the challenge of transforming the whole world.

The light of love shines " in the darkness" (John 1:5), in suffering, in confusion, in all that we will never understand. Love makes darkness itself shine. This opens altogether new possibilities for dealing creatively with the shadow side of reality. Words can only serve as pointers; we must put this to the test in our own dark hours. Those who have done so, those who have suffered lovingly, have discovered the transformative power of love.

From year to year, environmental changes are incremental and often barely register in our lives, but from evolutionary or geological perspectives, what is happening is explosive change.

It was as if he'd arrived at the center of himself after a long journey through the wilderness of his own soul.

Displaced by darkness, you lie flat on your back, putting the world behind you, and stare at the moon, the embarrassing moon, with nothing to offer it, no ebb or flow, no wolfish transformations except this lunacy you keep to yourself

The loose skin on her face had been lifted. Her nose was smaller. Her teeth were capped. The lines on her forehead had been erased. Her eye bags had disappeared. Her wrinkles had gone. Her breasts were much, much bigger. But she was still limping.

Monsterfication Machine

may not be perfect as a person, but God is perfect… and if I roll with Him, He will help me become more like Him until it's my time to go.

No matter the self-conceited importance of our labors we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine.

In the silence that follows a great line you can feel Lazarus deep inside even the laziest, most deathly afraid part of you, lift up his hands and walk toward the light.

What we are actually about to become or are afraid of becoming always trumps and rules over what we think we are already.

Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief, turning down through its black water to the place we cannot breathe, will never know the source from which we drink, the secret water, cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering, the small round coins, thrown by those who wished for something else.

WORKING TOGETHER We shape our self to fit this world and by the world are shaped again. The visible and the invisible working together in common cause, to produce the miraculous. I am thinking of the way the intangible air passed at speed round a shaped wing easily holds our weight. So may we, in this life trust to those elements we have yet to see or imagine, and look for the true shape of our own self, by forming it well to the great intangibles about us.

To forgive is to put oneself in a larger gravitational field of experience than the one that first seemed to hurt us. We reimagine ourselves in the light of our maturity and we reimagine the past in the light of our new identity; we allow ourselves to be gifted by a story larger than the story that first hurt us and left us bereft.

In the contemplative Christian tradition, to be humiliated is to be returned to the ground of your being.

And when you are humiliated all your fancy ideas about yourself and who you are and what you can accomplish and how are shriveled away suddenly in the encounter with the ground.

Be taught now, among the trees and rocks, how the discarded is woven into shelter, learn the way things hidden and unspoken slowly proclaim their voice in the world. Find that far inward symmetry to all outward appearances, apprentice yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back all you sent away, be a new annunciation, make yourself a door through which to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you.

Sometimes with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out someone has written something new in the ashes of your life. You are not leaving. Even as the light fades quickly now, you are arriving.

THE BELL AND THE BLACKBIRD (excerpt) The sound of a bell still reverberating, or a blackbird calling from a corner of a field. Asking you to wake into this life or inviting you deeper to one that waits. Either way takes courage, either way wants you to be nothing but that self that is no self at all, wants you to walk to the place where you find you already know how to give every last thing away.

The Teen Challenge ministry was born out of those humble early days of ministry. It now includes over 500 drug and alcohol rehab centers around the world, even in Muslim countries. These include homes for girls and women addicts and alcoholics, all which are reaching many.

It should have been the epiphany of the sixties. Instead it turned out to be its requiem,

Sometimes I come to hate people because they can't see where I am. I've gone empty, completely empty and all they see is the visual form: my arms and legs, my face, my height and posture, the sounds that come from my throat. But I'm fucking empty. The person I was just one year ago no longer exists, drifts spinning slowly into the ether somewhere way back there.