Relationship with Myself and Others

REAL LISTENING
We can love only those human beings to whom we listen—and love is the heart of the spiritual way. No one can ever learn to listen to God or to the spiritual who has not first learned to listen to human beings. The one who cannot listen cannot love either another or God.... On another level, real listening is a kind of prayer, for as we listen, we penetrate through the human ego and hear the Spirit of God, which dwells in the heart of everyone. Real listening is a religious experience. Often, when I have listened deeply to another, I have the same sense of awe as when I have entered into a holy place and communed with the heart of being itself.
- Morton Kelsey Through Defeat to Victory

CONSIDER YOUR NEIGHBORS
Consider your neighbors not just at one particular phase of their existence but through all the stages of their life.
-Brother Roger No Greater Love

WE CANNOT LOVE ISSUES
We cannot love issues, but we can love people. And the love of people reveals to us the way to deal with issues.
-Henri Nouwen Seeds of Hope

BE KIND
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.
-Philo of Alexandria

ONE GREAT HOUSEHOLD
An inner truth always has a corresponding outer reality. Our interdependence is woven through the fabric of the universe. The painful, fearful, wonderful message of the modern world is that we are members one of the other, and that we cannot live if we are not in communion with each other…. The world, even for the hard of learning, is turning out to be one great household — every woman, my sister, every man, my brother.
- Elizabeth O'Connor The New Community

ASTONISHING LIGHT
I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.
- Hafiz

PRECISELY WHO YOU ARE
Humility consists in being precisely the person you actually are before God.
- Thomas Merton

THE DUTY OF THE MOMENT
The duty of the moment is what you should be doing at any given time, in whatever place God has put you. You may not have Christ in a homeless person at your door, but you may have a little child. If you have a child, your duty of the moment may be to change a dirty diaper. So you do it. But you don't just change that diaper, you change it to the best of your ability, with great love for both God and that child.... There are all kinds of good...things you can do, but whatever they are, you have to realize that there is always the duty of the moment to be done. And it must be done, because the duty of the moment is the duty of God.
- Catherine Doherty

GROWING PAINS
It will become more and more evident as we go forward that it is pointless to become angry or to get hurt by people who, like us, are suffering from the pains of growing up.
- Bill Wilson Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

CHRIST VISIBLE
A mouse and a frog meet every morning on the river bank. They sit on the ground and talk. Each morning, the second they see each other, they open easily, telling stories and dreams and secrets, empty of any fear or suspicious holding back. To watch and listen to those two is to understand how, as it's written, sometimes when two beings come together, Christ becomes visible.
- Rumi
The Essential Rumi, trans lated by Coleman Barks

BEING ARTISTIC
There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
- Vincent Van Gogh Letters of Van Gogh