That's an interesting question, Steph.
Like Cacky, I hope I'm interpreting it properly.
I was raised as an Anglican, and I consider myself a Christian and a pretty good person. I try to live an ethical life, and I make real efforts to be kind and giving to other people. To place other people's needs above my own.
I do require an enormous amount of time alone. I'm a real introvert, and if I'd been selfish while knowing then what I know now about myself, I would have chosen to remain single. And not had children.
I mentioned to one of my neighbours (he's a nice man, but a real hedonist) the other day that I would have loved to have been an independant war correspondent or something similar.
He said to me, "Then do it! You don't have to ask anyone else's permission!"
I was flabbergasted. What an idea! I mean, I've deliberately made sacrifices in my life. Yes, I could up and leave my family and be true to myself. But my love for them is too great to do something so selfish. If staying means missing out on something in life because of my love for another, then so be it.
What was the question again?
Oh, yes. So, my best times are when I'm alone. I'm closest to myself then, and hence, closet to God. It's my introspective time. Put me on a mountain top for a year, and I might be a little closer to finding myself and to closing the gap between God and me.
But everyday life is so very busy, that it's difficult to find that healing time.
So I find God in little things... often in the written word. And the words are not necessarily related to the Christian faith. Passages and quotes by great men and women. Words that confirm the path I've chosen to take.
And yes, I'm definitely still looking. I don't think we can afford to stop looking. That's death.
"Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing."
Denis Waitley
“I’m honored to be the object of so much venom from all the wrong people, you get the sense that you might be doing something right.”
Michael Moore
"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or
the prize in a treasure hunt.
Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own
past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience on
humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and
understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and
people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice
something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them
together into that pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has
dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of
success or failure is of less account."
John Gardner
"Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me learn from you, love you, bless you before you depart. Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. Let me hold you while I may, for it may not always be so. One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky and want, more than all the world, your return."
Mary Jean Iron
"The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!"
Thomas Merton
"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for..........." John Keating
Tourists
Visits of condolence is all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel's Tomb and Herzl's Tomb
And on Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust after our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.
Once I sat on the steps by agate at David's Tower, I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. "You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head."
"But he's moving, he's moving!" I said to myself: redemption will come only if their guide tells them, "You see that arch from the Roman period? It's not important: but next to it, left and down a bit, there sits a man who's bought fruit and vegetables for his family."
Yehuda Amichai
Question:For Discussion/Thought/Journaling
