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Where there is love there is God

It’s not that I’m afraid of solitude, I just don’t know how to live without love

Can it be that he has such a love of destruction and chaos because he is instinctively afraid of achieving the goal and completing the edifice he is creating?

And so the standards of cheapness and convenience, which are irresistibly simplifying and therefore inevitably exploitive, have been substituted for the standard of health (of both people and land), which would enforce consideration of essential complexities.

One of the most troubling characteristics of the specialist mentality is its use of money as a kind of proxy, its willingness to transmute the powers and functions of life into money.

What happens under the rule of specialization is that, though society becomes more and more intricate, it has less and less structure. It becomes more and more organized, but less and less orderly. The community disintegrates because it loses the necessary understandings, forms, and enactments of the relations among materials and processes, principles and actions…

The disease of the modern character is specialization…The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite standpoint—that of individual persons. We then begin to see the grotesquery—indeed, the impossibility—of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness.

The reason is simple: to live undestructively in an economy that is overwhelmingly destructive would require of any one of us, or of any small group of us, a great deal more work than we have yet been able to do. How could we divorce ourselves completely and yet responsibly from the technologies and powers that are destroying our planet?

But the care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy and, after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it, and to foster its renewal, is our only legitimate hope.

To reduce or shortcut the intimacy of the body’s involvement in the making of a work of art (that is, of any artifice, anything made by art) inevitably risks reducing the work of art and the art itself.

Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social responsibility.

If the use of the computer is a new idea, then the new idea is not to use one.

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. All things of grace and beauty such that no one holds them to one’s heart have a common providence in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes . So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.

He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget something’s, done you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

what we need is here. And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here.

So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it.

We are more together than we know, how else could we keep on discovering we are more together than we thought? You are the known way leading always to the unknown, and you are the known place to which the unknown is always leading me back.

Sometimes our life reminds me of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing and in that opening a house, an orchard and a garden, comfortable shades, and flowers red and yellow in the sun, a pattern made in the light for the light to return to.

Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthlessness of its object is never really what matters.

time must be properly budgeted for the gathering of inner strength and resolve in order to compensate for one’s weaknesses when spiritual warfare begins.

Praying looks just like grief

It is not easy for me to be a Christian, to believe twenty-four hours a day all that I want to believe. I stray, and then my stories pull her back if I listen to them carefully… my stories affect my Christianity, restore me, shake me by the scruff on the neck, and pull this straying sinner into an awesome faith.

Their time on the wilderness seems like a specific moment of divine Providence within the whole providential regime of Creation.

That is how life goes—we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord’s. I need to bear this in mind.

As you read this, I hope you will understand that when I speak of the long nights that preceded these days of my happiness, I do not remember grief and loneliness so much as I do peace and comfort — grief, but never without comfort; loneliness, but never without peace. Almost never.

I’m writing this part to tell you if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle.