Status Updates From A Paixão Segundo G.H.

what the fuck am i reading?? it’s so strange (complimentary) and i’ve highlighted so much that i think this book might change me

We suffer from being so little hungry, though our small hunger is enough for us to deeply miss the pleasure we would have if our hunger were greater. We only drink as much milk as the body needs, and of the flower we only see as far as our eyes and their flat fullness go. The more we need, the more God exists.

If we only know very little of God, that is because we need little: we only have of Him whatever is inevitably enough for us, we only have of God whatever fits inside us. (Nostalgia is not for the God we are missing, it is the nostalgia for ourselves who are not enough; we miss our impossible grandeur—my unreachable present is my paradise lost.)

It is not for us that the cow's milk flows, but we drink it. The flower was not made for us to look at it or for us to smell its fragrance, and we look at it and smell it. The Milky Way does not exist for us to know of its existence, but we know of it. And we know God. And what we need from Him, we elicit. (I don't know what I am calling God, but thus he may be called.)

Whatever I do with the plea and the want—that will be the life I will have made from my life.

And his kingdom, my love, is also of this world.
And so I was realizing that the divine promise of life is already being honored, and that it always was. Before, only once in a while, I was reminded, in an instantaneous and immediately shunned vision, that the promise is not only for the future, it is yesterday and it is permanently today.

The news I am getting from my self sounds cataclysmic to me, and once again nearly demonic. But it is only out of fear. It is fear. Since relinquishing hope means that I shall have to start living, and not just promise myself life. And this is the greatest fright I can have. I used to hope. But the God is today: his kingdom already began.

The present is the face today of the God. And if I postpone the face of reality until after my death—it's out of guile, because I prefer to be dead when it is time to see Him and that way I think I shall not really see Him, just as I only have the courage to really dream when I sleep.

I am not speaking of the future, I am speaking of a permanent present. And that means that hope does not exist because it is no longer a postponed future, it is today. Because the God does not promise. He is much greater than that: He is, and never stops being. We are the ones who cannot stand this always present light, and so we promise it for later,

...the neutral of the God is so great and vital that I, unable to stand the cell of the God, I had humanized it. I know it is horribly dangerous to discover now that the God has the power of the impersonal—because I know, oh, I know! that it's as if that meant the destruction of the plea!

I could not understand and you could not understand that dispensing with hope—really means action, and today.

One shouldn't say that hope is not necessary, because that could transform itself, since I am weak, into a destructive weapon. And for yourself, into a useful weapon of destruction.

Hope for me was postponement. I had never let my soul free, and had quickly organized myself as a person because it is too risky to lose the form. But I now see what was really happening to me: I had so little faith that I had invented merely the future, I believed so little in whatever exists that I was delaying the present for a promise and for a future.

All the world is in a state of grace. A person is only struck down by sweetness when realizing that we are in grace, the gift is feeling that we are in grace, and few risk recognizing that within themselves.

The truth is what it is—and, exactly because it is immutably what it is, it must be our great security, just as having desired our father or mother is so inevitable that it must have been our foundation.

I still don't know how to comfort myself about the truth.
But—sit with me for a moment—the greatest lack of belief in the truth of humanization would be to think that the truth would destroy humanization. Wait for me, wait: I know that later I'll know how to fit all this into daily practicality, don't forget that I too need a daily life!

...if I hadn't needed so much of myself to shape my life, I would already have had life!