Thought Provoking Quotes
Various quotes related to Blessing Based Spiritual Nurture and Holy Listening

Listening

….”Listening, we’re learning, can be a potent tool in dealing with these [on dying] touchy issues. What do you hope for? What worries you most? Whom can you turn to for support? It sounds simple, but, unfortunately, physicians often lack good listening skills. One study found that residents who were discussing do-not-resuscitate orders with patients talked nearly 80 percent of the time.

Close listening might reveal that some patient’s greatest existential fear is not of dying but of never having lived at all. Encourage them, our professors say, to tell stories….”

from “The Time Before Dying” 
U.S. News and World Report , April 2004 

Fingerprints of God

Roy Larson, former religion writer for the Chicago Sun Times, like a wistful character in a John Updike novel, kept examining the world for the fingerprints of God. Quoting Abraham Heschel, he said he was more likely to find God's fingerprints on a kitchen table than on a holy altar.

"Supernatural splendor" is found in "ordinary acts". The place to look for "spiritual substance is in everyday existence", where even the most simple deeds can be "full of wonder".

"Why is it, Rabbi", asked the student, "that no one nowadays sees God?"

The reply, "People are not willing to look that low."

adapted from Engaging in Transcendence - The Church's Ministry and Covenant with Children Barbara Kimes Myers and William R. Myers
 

G.K. Chesterton on Childhood
from the late 1800’s 

Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes
To roar to the resounding plain,
And the whole heaven shouts and shakes,
For God himself is born again,
And we are little children walking
        Through snow and rain...
-From the poem, “The Wise Men”

Have a myriad children been quickened,
Have a myriad children grown old,
Grown gross and unloved and embittered
Grown cunning and savage and cold?
God abides in a terrible patience,
Unangered, unworn,
And again for the child that was squandered
        A child is born.
-From “The Nativity”

"Now children and adults are both fanciful at times; but that is not what, in my mind and memory, distinguishes adults from children. Mine is a memory of a sort of white light on everything, cutting things out very clearly, and rather emphasizing their solidity. The point is that the white light had a sort of wonder in it, as if the world were as new as myself; but not that the world was anything but a real world."

 Abraham J. Heschel on Prayer

To pray is to take notice of the wonder, to regain the sense of the mystery that animates all beings, the divine margin in attainments.

Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living. It is all we can offer in return for the mystery by which we live. Who is worthy to be present at the constant unfolding of time?

Amid the meditation of mountains, the humility of flowers, wiser than all alphabets, clouds that die constantly for the sake of beauty, we are hating, hunting, hurting.

Suddenly we feel ashamed of our clashes and complaints in the face of the tacit greatness in nature. It is so embarrassing to live! How strange we are in the world, and how  presumptuous our doings.

Only one response can maintain us: gratefulness for witnessing the wonder, for the gift of our unearned right to serve, to adore and to fulfill. It is gratefulness which makes the soul great.