I certainly don’t believe in a heavenly holiday camp filled with harp-playing, hymn-singing and perpetual church services – or any other kind of everlasting torment!
Dave Tomlinson, How to Be a Bad Christian … and a Better Human Being
Quite!
At all costs avoid success
Be anything you like …, but at all costs avoid one thing: success …. If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.
Thomas Merton, Love and Living
Multitasking and the divided self
Multitasking is the drive to be more than we are, to control more than we do, to extend our power and our effectiveness. Such practice yields a divided self, with full attention given to nothing.
This again is from Walter Brueggemann’s Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to a Culture of Now. ‘Full attention given to nothing’ – as a teacher I’d say this is one of the most debilitating faults of our 24/7 society.
Giving up control
Love is giving up control. It’s surrendering the desire to control the other person. The two – love and controlling power over the other person – are mutually exclusive. If we are serious about loving someone, we have to surrender all of the desires within us to manipulate the relationship.
Rob Bell, Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality
The mind and the senses
They had been brought up in a tradition that told them in one way or another that the life of the mind and the life of the senses were separate and, indeed, inimical; they had believed, without ever having really thought about it, that one had to be chosen at some expense of the other. That the one could intensify the other had never occurred to them …
From Stoner by John Williams
Very sad – and, one suspects, all too often so very true.
Scars
Nobody who has opened up new paths leaves without scars on his body.
Pope Francis, as quoted in Paul Vallely, Pope Francis: Untying the Knots
Karl Möller 