Ashtyn DeRoin

“Keep practicing until it lives inside you; then it will seem foolishly easy to the unpracticed. — BILL HOLM, “FRIED CHICKEN IN ICELAND”
― Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“Listening to the faint heartbeat of the dying Rabbi is a powerful stimulus to the recovery of passion. It is a sound like no other. The Crucified says, “Confess your sin so that I may reveal Myself to you as lover, teacher, and friend, that fear may depart and your heart can stir once again with passion.” His word is addressed both to those filled with a sense of self-importance and to those crushed with a sense of self-worthlessness. Both are preoccupied with themselves. Both claim a godlike status, because their full attention is riveted either on their prominence or their insignificance. They are isolated and alienated in their self-absorption. The release from chronic egocentricity starts with letting Christ love them where they are. Consider John Cobb’s words: The spiritual man can love only . . . when he knows himself already loved in his self-preoccupation. Only if man finds that he is already accepted in his sin and sickness, can he accept his own self-preoccupation as it is; and only then can his psychic economy be opened toward others, to accept them as they are—not in order to save himself, but because he doesn’t need to save himself. We love only because we are first loved.[9]”
― Brennan Manning, Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

“Still, there's no denying that in some sense I 'feel better,' and with that comes at once a short of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one's unhappiness.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

“What we work out in our journals we don’t take out on family and friends.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed