Ruben L.F. Habito

“To contemplate the Cross of Christ, a long-standing mode of Christian prayer and spiritual practice, is not a sadistic or masochistic enterprise that relishes the sight of suffering. Rather, it enables one to open to a spiritual experience of plunging into the lot of suffering humankind, as Christ did on the Cross. It is also a call to behold and see as one’s own the concrete ways in which living beings suffer or are made to suffer in our present day and age—to look at the poverty and hunger, at the destitution and deprivation, at the discrimination and oppression, at the various forms of structural, physical, and all kinds of violence that desecrate this sacred gift of human life.”
― Ruben L.F. Habito, Living Zen, Loving God

“What is the root of this separation from our basic goodness, which is the divine Goodness? Is it not our preoccupation with our narrow selves? Is it not our attachments and selfish desires and our pursuit of disparate objects that we think will make us happy, but which only make us more miserable? This is at the root of our misery: We tend to look at things and view them as “objects” separate from us. This way of looking at things divides us at the core of our being.”
― Ruben L.F. Habito, Living Zen, Loving God