“To be mindful of our fragile fate each day, in a non-morbid acknowledgment, helps us remember what is important in our life and what is not, what matters, really, and what does not.”
“And how meaningful Beckett's admonition is to me today: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Rilke's paradoxical words also draw me onward still toward the unlived life that haunts all of us. Our task, he writes, is to be 'continuously defeated by ever-larger things.”
“Today, Marxism and fascism have been replaced by only slightly subtler but no less spiritually seductive ideologies such as materialism, hedonism, and narcissism. This latter triumvirate mobilizes the spirit of most moderns, but in the end betrays them by failing to connect them to what is healing or innately satisfying. Without a “vertical” sense of participation in divinity, humankind is condemned to a sterile, “horizontal” existence, circling its own absurdity and ending in its own annihilation.”
“We must examine what we envy or dislike in others and acknowledge those very things in ourselves. This helps to prevent our blaming or envying others for what we have not done ourselves.”
“Spiritual crises happen to us every day. Most of them are sufficiently low grade, devoid of enduring consequences, so we pay no attention and keep on rolling. A spiritual crisis occurs when our identity, our roles, our values, or our road map are substantially called into question, prove ineffective, or are overwhelmed by experience that cannot be contained by our understandings of self and world.”
“Though inland far we be, Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us hither.”
William Wordsworth
