Gerald G. May > Quotes

“There is a desire within each of us,
in the deep center of ourselves
that we call our heart.
We were born with it,
it is never completely satisfied,
and it never dies.
We are often unaware of it,
but it is always awake.

It is the Human desire for Love.
Every person in this Earth yearns to love,
to be loved, to know love.
Our true identity, our reason for being
is to be found in this desire.

Love is the "why" of life,
why we are functioning at all.
I am convinced
it is the fundamental energy
of the human spirit.
the fuel on which we run,
the wellspring of our vitality.

And grace,
which is the flowing,
creative activity, of love itself,
is what makes all goodness possible.

Love should come first,
it should be the beginning of,
and the reason for everything.”
― Gerald May, Living in Love

“Peace is not something you can force on anything or anyone... much less upon one's own mind. It is like trying to quiet the ocean by pressing upon the waves. Sanity lies in somehow opening to the chaos, allowing anxiety, moving deeply into the tumult, diving into the waves, where underneath, within, peace simply is.”
― Gerald May, Simply Sane: The Spirituality of Mental Health

“Maybe, sometimes, in the midst of things going terribly wrong, something is going just right.”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness

“Love cannot be a means to any end. Love does not promise success, power, achievement, health, recovery, satisfaction, peace of mind, fulfillment, or any other prizes. Love is an end in itself, a beginning in itself. Love exists only for love. The invitation of love is not a proposal for self-improvement or any other kind of achievement. Love is beyond success and failure, doing well or doing poorly. There is not even a right and wrong way. Love is a gift. One can never be proud of being in love. One can only be grateful.”
― Gerald G. May, The Awakened Heart: Opening Yourself to the Love You Need

“We cling to things, people, beliefs, and behaviors not because we love them, but because we are terrified of losing them.”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness

“Many of the old understandings to which I had been addicted were stripped away, leaving a desertlike spaciousness where my customary props and securities no longer existed. Grace was able to flow into this emptiness, and something new was able to grow. Fresh understandings took root, and the insights that emerged were clearer, simpler, and more beautiful.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“Similarly, grace seeks us but will not control us. Saint Augustine once said that God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them. If our hands are full, they are full of the things to which we are addicted. And not only our hands, but also our hearts, minds, and attention are clogged with addiction. Our addictions fill up the spaces within us, spaces where grace might flow.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“This deepening of love is the real purpose of the dark night of the soul. The dark night helps us become who we are created to be: lovers of God and one another.”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness

“True love is like some infinite way of being that we become part of: a flowing energy of willingness, an eternal yes resounding with every heartbeat.”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness

“It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most human beings live only for the gratification of it. ARISTOTLE”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“We know in our hearts that choosing love is choosing life and freedom; saying yes to love’s invitation is the only way to lasting meaning and real worth. But our minds are likely to have a different opinion. The parts of our minds that are addicted to efficiency will make us doubt our desire. They will demand to know why we want to risk being hurt in the cause of love. What purpose will it serve? What function? Would it not be better to seek safety and security and simply hope for a little joy now and then, a few touches of caring along the way?”
― Gerald G. May, The Awakened Heart: Opening Yourself to the Love You Need

“Life is not a matter of reaching a stagnant end point, but is rather an ongoing process in which one, hopefully and with grace, grows ever more deeply in love.”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness

“Only in the pauses between things, in the brief contemplative spaces of just being, can we catch a glimpse of love itself.”
― Gerald G. May, The Awakened Heart: Opening Yourself to the Love You Need

“In a spiritual sense, the objects of our attachments and addictions become idols. We give them our time, energy, and attention whether we want to or not, even—and often especially—when we are struggling to rid ourselves of them. We want to be free, compassionate, and happy, but in the face of our attachments we are clinging, grasping, and fearfully self-absorbed.”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness

“I do not think we can ever adequately define or understand love; I do not think we were ever meant to. We are meant to participate in love without really comprehending it. We are meant to give ourselves, live ourselves into love’s mystery.

It is the same for all important things in life; there is a mystery within them that our definitions and understandings cannot grasp. Definitions and understandings are images and concepts created by our brains to symbolize what is real. Our thoughts about something are never the thing itself. Further, when we think logically about something, our thoughts come sequentially – one after another. Reality is not confined to such linearity; it keeps happening all at once in each instant. The best our thoughts can do is try to keep a little running commentary in rapid, breathless sequence. . .

A certain asceticism of mind, a gentle intellectual restraint, is needed to appreciate the important things in life. To be open to the truth of love, we must relinquish our frozen comprehensions and begin instead to appreciate. To comprehend is to grasp; to appreciate is to value. Appreciation is gentle seeing, soft acknowledgement, reverent perception. Appreciation can be a pleasant valuing: being awed by a night sky, touched by a symphony, or moved by a caress without needing to understand why. It can also be painful: feeling someone’s suffering, being shocked by loss or disaster without comprehending the reason. Appreciation itself is a kind of love; it is our direct human responsiveness, valuing what we cannot grasp. Love, the life of our heart, is not what we think. It is always ready to surprise us, to take us beyond our understandings into a reality that is both insecure and wonderful.”
― Gerald G. May, The Awakened Heart: Opening Yourself to the Love You Need

“Liberation, whether experienced pleasurably or painfully, always involves relinquishment, some kind of loss.”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness

“But one thing is certain: the process of freedom is one of subtraction—we are left more empty than when we began.”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness

“We are addicted to fulfilment, to the eradication of all emptiness. . . . swallowed the cultural myth that says, “if you are well-adjusted, and if you are living your life properly, you will feel fulfilled, satisfied, content, and serene.” If you are not satisfied and fulfilled, there is something wrong with you. . .

. . . The myth of fulfilment makes us miss the most beautiful aspect of our human souls: our emptiness, our incompleteness, our radical yearning for love. We were never meant to be completely fulfilled; we were meant to taste it, to long for it, and to grow toward it. In this way we participate in love becoming life, life becoming love. To miss our emptiness is, finally, to miss our hope.

Emptiness, yearning, incompleteness: these unpleasant words hold a hope for incomprehensible beauty. It is precisely in these seemingly abhorrent qualities of ourselves – qualities that we spend most of our time trying to fix or deny – that the very thing we most long for can be found: hope for the human spirit, freedom for love.

This is a secret known by those who have had the courage to face their own emptiness. The secret of being in love, of falling in love with life as it is meant to be, is to befriend our yearning instead of avoiding it, to live into our longing rather than trying to resolve it, to enter the spaciousness of our emptiness instead of trying to fill it up.

It has taken me a long time to learn this secret, and I continue to forget it many times each day.”
― Gerald G. May, The Awakened Heart: Opening Yourself to the Love You Need

“The dawn is an awakening to a deepening realization of who we really are in and with God and the world, and of what has been going on within us in the night.”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness

“it is the discovery of the depths of weakness, the power of grace, and the price of both. Moreover, what takes place in the desert is not simply difficult travel and adventurous learning; it is repentance and conversion, the transformation of mixed motivations into purified desire, the greening of desert into garden through the living water of grace.”
― Gerald G. May, Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions

“God darkens our awareness in order to keep us safe. When we cannot chart our own course, we become vulnerable to God’s protection, and the darkness becomes a “guiding night,” a “night more kindly than the dawn.”5”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness

“the dark night of the soul is an ongoing transition from compulsively trying to control one’s life toward a trusting freedom and openness to God and the real situations of life.”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness

“Joy is the reaction one has to the full appreciation of Being. It is one’s response to finding one’s rightful, rooted place in life, and it can happen only when one knows through and through that absolutely nothing is being denied or otherwise shut out of awareness.”
― Gerald G. May, Will and Spirit: A Rich and Intelligent Exploration of the Relationship Between Psychological and Spiritual Growth

“When we are really given to the why of life, the hows begin to flow.”
― Gerald G. May, The Awakened Heart: Opening Yourself to the Love You Need

“The greatest commandments are not obligations at all, but affirmations of grace. They are promises that with our willing assent, grace will make possible the triumph of full, unfettered love within us.

Our assent, our yes, finally comes from nothing other than our own yearning, from passion itself. It may surface temporarily as desire for self-improvement, functional efficiency, moral virtue, or social justice, but ultimately it will take us beyond and beneath all such ends. Love will bring us to our ever-present beginning, where our only reason for saying yes is simply that we want to.

Here it is only our plain desire that makes true assent possible: the desire to respond to a larger love already given, the desire to love and to be loved and to be fully, consciously present in love as an end in itself. It is a matter of simple caring, our hearts aching for the fullness of love for no other reason than its own essential goodness. In this simple, exquisite longing, awakening in each precious moment, we know who we really are. It is a likeness of God.”
― Gerald G. May, The Awakened Heart: Opening Yourself to the Love You Need

“We may yearn to “let go and let God,” but it usually doesn’t happen until we have exhausted our own efforts.”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness

“If we are honest, I think we have to admit that we will likely try to sabotage any movement toward true freedom. If we really knew what we were called to relinquish on this journey, our defenses would never allow us to take the first step. Sometimes the only way we can enter the deeper dimensions of the journey is by being unable to see where we’re going.”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness

“The glory of God is a human being fully alive. —Ireneaus1”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness

“In spiritual direction, however, there has to be an ongoing awareness that anything can happen; that the Holy Spirit is already affecting the person; and that one must participate in this work through careful discernment and support. here again, it is necessary to walk the fierce path of free will and dependence. We must always claim the freedom we have been given; to do otherwise would devalue our humanity. But at the same time, we will increasingly recognize the extreme inadequacy of personal will and knowledge in figuring out what life is or how we should live it. As we grow in wisdom, we also grow in the realization of our utter dependence upon the Lord in all things. it seems to me, then, that in its purest human form spiritual direction is a journey towards more freely and deeply choosing to surrender to God.”
― Gerald G. May, Care of Mind/Care of Spirit: A Psychiatrist Explores Spirtual Direction

“The dark night is a profoundly good thing. It is an ongoing spiritual process in which we are liberated from attachments and compulsions and empowered to live and love more freely.”
― Gerald G. May, The Dark Night of the Soul: A Deep Dive into the Shadow Side of Spirituality, Embracing Disorientation, Doubt, and Despair for Authentic Spiritual Growth and Wholeness