PARADOXICAL

A world without love is a world without God.

Living my life to the fullest calls for dying to self. (from Malou)

Preaching is to much avail, but practice is far more effective. A godly life is the strongest argument you can offer the skeptic. Hosea Ballou (via Mel)

The way upwards is the way downwards - from the golden saying of Br. Jairus, St. Francis' companion (via Malou)

View a negative experience in your life like how you look at a photo's negative. "A single negative" can create an unlimited number of positive prints. -? (via Joseph)

For me, to be a saint is to be myself, becuase the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. -Merton

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” - Thomas Merton

“The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt” - from Merton

"He became what we are that He might make us what He is." ... Saint Athanasius, 295-373

“Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.”
Henri Nouwen quote

"Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity." - The Inner Voice of Love

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares." - Out of Solitude

We always have a choice to live the moment as a cause of resentment or as a cause for joy.” (Here and Now, by Nouwen)

One of the most satisfying aspects of writing is that it can open in us deep wells of hidden treasures that are beautiful for us as well as for others to see.” (Bread for the Journey, by Nouwen )

The man whose prayer is so pure that he never asks God for anything does not know who God is, and does not know who he is himself: for he does not know his own need of God. -Nouwen

God's presence is often a hidden presence. -Nouwen

The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error. Thomas Merton

The great illusion of leadership is to think that a person can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there. - Nouwen, The Wounded Healer

posted by Resty Odon  # 5:31 PM