Quotes for Reflection
World Peace Prayer
Lead me from death to life, from falsehood to truth.
Lead me from despair to hope, form fear to trust.
Lead me from hate to love, from war to peace.
Let peace fill our hearts, our world, our universe.
Hope
Hope can and will come from the least suspected quarters, whether in the secret corners of our own hearts or of others. C. Stulhmueller, C.P.
Love
Where love rules there is no will to power. Carl Jung
Miracles
When we live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Thich Nhat Hanh
Vision
Let us share the vision, and make it possible for great love to arise. Thich Nhat Hanh
Love
The day will come, when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness the energies of LOVE and on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered FIRE! Teilhard de Chardin.
Five Core Principles Love Uses in Love
1. Love and be safe. 2. Listen gently. 3. Accept others in the moment. 4. Respect all life. 5. Forgive. Love looks for similarities.
Fear Based Approaches That the Ego Uses in Life
1. Control your surroundings and be safe. 2. Analyze all situations. 3. Use the past to judge. 4. Dominate the environment. 5. If you feel threatened, attack. Fear looks for differences and separations.
Dorothy Stang, SND 1931-2005 Mystic, Prophet, Martyr of the Amazon
The death of the forest is the end of our life.
Julie Billiart
Better mistakes than paralysis.
Stephen Levine
Mindfulness is knowing what you are doing while you are doing it—experiencing your life not as an afterthought but as a living presence.
Clarity is mindfulness plus love. Each sustains the other.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Everybody can be great. Because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t need to know Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory in thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
Joyce Rupp
Lent (a retreat) most often is referred to as “a time of renewal.” I prefer “a period of recovery.” In A new Earth: Awakening to Your life’s Purpose, Eckhart Tolle emphasizes: “You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.” Lent (our workshop) offers the opportunity to recover that goodness, to allow it (our goodness) to surface in thought, word and action….
In other words, help me recover kindness, generosity, forgiveness, patience, understanding and other innate gifts of mine that get buried in constant family and work responsibilities. Guide me in sorting through the debris of self-preoccupation and cultural duplicity.
Play
An antidote for suffering, play is healing and restorative. At its essence, play is free, dissolves conflicts, and builds connections. Life-giving, play leads us to appreciation and gratefulness.
When we play we discover our deepest self is seeded in creativity and generativity. Play is an act of restoration and remembering. Solitary and contemplative, or active and communal, play can occur anytime, anywhere. Planned, or utterly spontaneous, play brings us into the present moment, embodied in time and place… Across gender, race, age, ethnicity, socio-economic status and geographical location, all people and creatures play-play heals….We engage our senses and body, becoming refreshed and renewed.
Playing can be a catalyst for spiritual vitality to burgeon forth within each of us. It is through a spirituality of play-interacting with matter-that we encounter the sacred, one another, and our deepest self. Play is a gateway to skip through to increase our ability to be present, to heal, and to grow in gratefulness. Who will accompany you in your next play date? How do you play? Pegge Bernecker
Prayer
There are as many ways to pray as there are moments in life. Sometimes we seek out a quiet spot to be alone. Sometimes we look for a friend and want to be together. Sometimes we like a book, sometimes we prefer music. Sometimes we want to sing out with hundreds, sometimes only whisper with a few. Sometimes we want to say it with a deep silence. In all these moments, we gradually make our lives more a prayer, and we open our hands to be led by God (the Holy) even to places we would rather not go.
Henri Nouwen