Beloved Teacher Quotes

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The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in "Lonesome Dove" and had nightmares about slavery in "Beloved" and walked the streets of Dublin in "Ulysses" and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in "A Prayer for Owen Meany." I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career, all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language.
Pat Conroy
In any event, parents never underestimated the abilities of their own children. Quite the reverse. Sometimes it was well nigh impossible for a teacher to convince the proud father or mother that their beloved offspring was a complete nitwit.
Roald Dahl (Matilda)
Come to me said the world. I was standing in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal— I can finally say long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty the healer, the teacher— death cannot harm me more than you have harmed me, my beloved life.
Louise Glück (Averno)
The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters. How to ignite the first spark of the will o'the wisp, the Jack o'lantern, the ignis fatuus [foolish fire] beloved of poets, which lights up one source of history and then another, zigzagging across the marsh, connecting and linking and writing bright words across the dark face of the present. There's no phrase I can come up that will encapsulate in a winning sound-bite why history matters. We know that history matters, we know that it is thrilling, absorbing, fascinating, delightful and infuriating, that it is life. Yet I can't help wondering if it's a bit like being a Wagnerite; you just have to get used to the fact that some people are never going to listen.
Stephen Fry (Making History)
Having lost his mother, father, brother, an grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history—his home—the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf… The escape from reality was, he felt—especially right after the war—a worthy challenge… The pain of his loss—though he would never have spoken of it in those terms—was always with him in those days, a cold smooth ball lodged in his chest, just behind his sternum. For that half hour spent in the dappled shade of the Douglas firs, reading Betty and Veronica, the icy ball had melted away without him even noticing. That was the magic—not the apparent magic of a silk-hatted card-palmer, or the bold, brute trickery of the escape artist, but the genuine magic of art. It was a mark of how fucked-up and broken was the world—the reality—that had swallowed his home and his family that such a feat of escape, by no means easy to pull off, should remain so universally despised.
Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay)
Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to be and stay what I was [...] School teacher changed me. I was something else and that something else was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub. (Paul D.)
Toni Morrison (Beloved)
Brothers and sisters, one of the great consolations of this Easter season is that because Jesus walked such a long, lonely path utterly alone, we do not have to do so. His solitary journey brought great company for our little version of that path—the merciful care of our Father in Heaven, the unfailing companionship of this Beloved Son, the consummate gift of the Holy Ghost, angels in heaven family members on both sides of the veil, prophets and apostles, teachers, leaders, friends. All of these and more have been given as companions for our mortal journey because of the Atonement of Jesus Christ and the Restoration of His gospel. Trumpeted from the summit of Calvary is the truth that we will never be left alone nor unaided, even sometimes we may feel that we are. Truly the Redeemer of us all said: “I will not leave you comfortless: [My Father and] I will come to you [and abide with you].
Jeffrey R. Holland
She had been Zoya’s teacher, feared and beloved, powerful beyond measure. “I watched her throw herself from a mountaintop. She sacrificed herself to stop you. Was that her martyrdom?” The Darkling said nothing. Zoya couldn’t stop herself. “Grigori was eaten by a bear. Elizaveta was drawn and quartered. Still, they returned. There are stories whispered in the Elbjen mountains of the Dark Mother. She crowds in when the nights grow long. She steals the heat from kitchen fires.” “Liar.” “Maybe. We all have stories to tell.
Leigh Bardugo (Rule of Wolves (King of Scars, #2))
Progress in science is governed by the laws of repulsion, every step forward is made by refutation of prevalent errors and false theories. Faust was an artist thanks to the inspiring example of his teachers. Forward steps in art are governed by the law of attraction, are the result of the imitation of and admiration for beloved predecessors.
Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago)
The world of literature has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language. Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in Lonesome Dove and had nightmares about slavery in Beloved and walked the streets of Dublin in Ulysses and made up a hundred stories in The Arabian Nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in A Prayer for Owen Meany. I've been in ten thousand cities and have introduced myself to a hundred thousand strangers in my exuberant reading career
Pat Conroy
Another couplet states, “Without attending any school and without even learning to read, my beloved has become the teacher of thousands of Madrasahs by his mere indications.
Muhammad Zakariya Kandhlawi (Faza’il e Durood)
The disciples have lost their beloved teacher and when he returns to console them, he reminds them that he has already given them, in the shared breaking of bread, a way to conjure his presence among them again and again.
Kate Cooper (Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women)
Before you say anything censorious about anyone, ask yourself three questions: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? If the answer to any one of these is even a qualified no, you’d best be quiet.” And she remembered it. Miss
Helen Epstein (Miss DeLay: portrait of beloved violin teacher Dorothy DeLay)
Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history—his home—the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, in his life, from ropes, chains, boxes, bags, and crates, from handcuffs and shackles, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him, from crashed airplanes and an opiate addiction and from an entire frozen continent intent on causing his death. The escape from reality was, he felt—especially right after the war—a worthy challenge.
Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay)
The letter is only an aid to philosophical communication, the actual essence of which consists in arousing a particular train of thought. Someone speaking thinks and produces—someone listening reflects—and reproduces. Words are a deceptive medium for what is already though—unreliable vehicles of a particular, specific stimulus. The true teacher is a guide. If the pupil genuinely desires truth it requires only a hint to show him how to find what he is seeking. Accordingly the representation of philosophy consists purely of themes—of initial propositions—principles. It exists only for autonomous lovers of truth. The analytical exposition of the theme is only for those who are sluggish or unpracticed. The latter must learn thereby how to fly and keep themselves moving in a particular direction. Attentiveness is a centripetal force. The effective relation between that which is directed and the object of direction begins with the given direction. If we hold fast to this direction we are apodictically certain of reaching the goal that has been set. True collaboration in philosophy then is a common movement toward a beloved world—whereby we relieve each other in the most advanced outpost, a movement that demands the greatest effort against the resisting element within which we are flying.
Novalis (Philosophical Writings)
1 One went to the door of the Beloved and knocked. A voice asked: “Who is there?” He answered: “It is I.” The voice said: “There is no room here for me and thee.” The door was shut. After a year of solitude and deprivation this man returned to the door of the Beloved. He knocked. A voice from within asked: “Who is there?” The man said: “It is Thou.” The door was opened for him. 2 The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere, they’re in each other all along. 3 Love is from the infinite, and will remain until eternity. The seeker of love escapes the chains of birth and death. Tomorrow, when resurrection comes, The heart that is not in love will fail the test. 4 When your chest is free of your limiting ego, Then you will see the ageless Beloved. You can not see yourself without a mirror; Look at the Beloved, He is the brightest mirror. 5 Your love lifts my soul from the body to the sky And you lift me up out of the two worlds. I want your sun to reach my raindrops, So your heat can raise my soul upward like a cloud. 6 There is a candle in the heart of man, waiting to be kindled. In separation from the Friend, there is a cut waiting to be stitched. O, you who are ignorant of endurance and the burning fire of love– Love comes of its own free will, it can’t be learned in any school. 7 There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired, as a child in school memorizes facts and concepts from books and from what the teacher says, collecting information from the traditional sciences as well as from the new sciences. With such intelligence you rise in the world. You get ranked ahead or behind others in regard to your competence in retaining information. You stroll with this intelligence in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more marks on your preserving tablets. There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you. A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the center of the chest. This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid, and it doesn’t move from outside to inside through conduits of plumbing-learning. This second knowing is a fountainhead from within you, moving out.
Rumi (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi)
Dear Rejection, Failure, Disappointment, Hopelessness, Struggle, Joy, Success, Purpose and my most beloved Life. Happy Teacher’s Day Thanks n Hugs
PRATISH R NAIR
[T]he more critical lesson I learned that day is still one too many kids never figure out: don't be shy about making a teacher of any willing party who knows what he or she is doing.
Sonia Sotomayor (My Beloved World)
The day Stamp Paid saw the two backs through the window and then hurried down the steps, he believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed, like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of, including Baby, had lived a livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood.
Toni Morrison (Beloved: Pulitzer Prize Winner (Vintage International))
It's like she's pulling Post-it notes out of her hair and lecturing from them, one of my peers once complained about the teaching style of my beloved teacher Mary Ann Caws. ...Ditto Eileen Myles, who tells a great story about a student at UC San Diego once complaining that her lecturing style was like 'throwing a pizza at us.' My feeling is, you should be so lucky to get a pizza in the face from Eileen Myles, or a Post-it note plucked from the nest of Mary Ann Caws's hair.
Maggie Nelson (The Argonauts)
Even the educated colored: the long-schooled people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there.
Toni Morrison (Beloved)
For Ibn ’Arabi, whose most beloved teacher Abu Madyan was identified as being the stone, the continual revelation of God’s word is a living, breathing creation. Those highest saints, who are known as the malamatiyya, the blameworthy of this world, the ‘hidden’ or kafirun of God are the embodiment of all the systems of concealment and disclosure, jafr, ta’wil, taqqiyah, et al. The Qur’an is not just a book, it is a person. The texts of al-Kimia are not simple words which when put together produce magical formulas, they are alive.
John Eberly (Al-Kimia: The Mystical Islamic Essence of the Sacred Art of Alchemy)
Most such criticism and confrontation, usually made impulsively in anger or annoyance, does more to increase the amount of confusion in the world than the amount of enlightenment. For the truly loving person the act of criticism or confrontation does not come easily; to such a person it is evident that the act has great potential for arrogance. To confront one’s beloved is to assume a position of moral or intellectual superiority over the loved one, at least so far as the issue at hand is concerned. Yet genuine love recognizes and respects the unique individuality and separate identity of the other person. (I will say more about this later.) The truly loving person, valuing the uniqueness and differentness of his or her beloved, will be reluctant indeed to assume, “I am right, you are wrong; I know better than you what is good for you.” But the reality of life is such that at times one person does know better than the other what is good for the other, and in actuality is in a position of superior knowledge or wisdom in regard to the matter at hand. Under these circumstances the wiser of the two does in fact have an obligation to confront the other with the problem. The loving person, therefore, is frequently in a dilemma, caught between a loving respect for the beloved’s own path in life and a responsibility to exercise loving leadership when the beloved appears to need such leadership. The dilemma can be resolved only by painstaking self-scrutiny, in which the lover examines stringently the worth of his or her “wisdom” and the motives behind this need to assume leadership. “Do I really see things clearly or am I operating on murky assumptions? Do I really understand my beloved? Could it not be that the path my beloved is taking is wise and that my perception of it as unwise is the result of limited vision on my part? Am I being self-serving in believing that my beloved needs redirection?” These are questions that those who truly love must continually ask themselves. This self-scrutiny, as objective as possible, is the essence of humility or meekness. In the words of an anonymous fourteenth-century British monk and spiritual teacher, “Meekness in itself is nothing else than a true knowing and feeling of
M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
I Am Not in Here I have a disciple in Vietnam who wants to build a stupa for my ashes when I die. He and others want to include a plaque with the words “Here lies my beloved teacher.” I told them not to waste the temple land. “Do not put me in a small pot and put me in there!” I said. “I don’t want to continue like that. It would be better to scatter the ashes outside to help the trees to grow.” I suggested that, if they still insist on building a stupa, they have the plaque say, “I am not in here.” But in case people don’t get it, they could add a second plaque, “I am not out there either.” If people still don’t understand, then you can write on the third and last plaque, “I may be found in your way of breathing and walking.” This body of mine will disintegrate, but my actions will continue me. In my daily life, I always practice to see my continuation all around me. We don’t need to wait until the total dissolution of this body to continue—we continue in every moment. If you think that I am only this body, then you have not truly seen me. When you look at my friends, you see my continuation. When you see someone walking with mindfulness and compassion, you know he is my continuation. I don’t see why we have to say “I will die,” because I can already see myself in you, in other people, and in future generations. Even when the cloud is not there, it continues as snow or rain. It is impossible for a cloud to die. It can become rain or ice, but it cannot become nothing. The cloud does not need to have a soul in order to continue. There’s no beginning and no end. I will never die. There will be a dissolution of this body, but that does not mean my death. I will continue, always.
Thich Nhat Hanh (At Home in the World: Stories and Essential Teachings from a Monk's Life)
You see that God deems it right to take from me any claim to merit for what you call my devotion to you. I have promised to remain forever with you, and now I could not break my promise if I would. The treasure will be no more mine than yours, and neither of us will quit this prison. But my real treasure is not that, my dear friend, which awaits me beneath the somber rocks of Monte Cristo, it is your presence, our living together five or six hours a day, in spite of our jailers; it is the rays of intelligence you have elicited from my brain, the languages you have implanted in my memory, and which have taken root there with all of their philological ramifications. These different sciences that you have made so easy to me by the depth of the knowledge you possess of them, and the clearness of the principles to which you have reduced them – this is my treasure, my beloved friend, and with this you have made me rich and happy. Believe me, and take comfort, this is better for me than tons of gold and cases of diamonds, even were they not as problematical as the clouds we see in the morning floating over the sea, which we take for terra firma, and which evaporate and vanish as we draw near to them. To have you as long as possible near me, to hear your eloquent speech, -- which embellishes my mind, strengthens my soul, and makes my whole frame capable of great and terrible things, if I should ever be free, -- so fills my whole existence, that the despair to which I was just on the point of yielding when I knew you, has no longer any hold over me; this – this is my fortune – not chimerical, but actual. I owe you my real good, my present happiness; and all the sovereigns of the earth, even Caesar Borgia himself, could not deprive me of this.
Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo)
Assent, therefore, and pour no ridicule on the Son of God; obey not the Pharisaic teachers, and scoff not at the King of Israel, as the rulers of your synagogues teach you to do after your prayers: for if he that touches those who are not pleasing Zechariah 2:8 to God, is as one that touches the apple of God's eye, how much more so is he that touches His beloved!
Justin Martyr (Dialogue with Trypho)
My Beloved Grateful for you and me for parallel universes and for I, we and thee I am grateful for the infinite skies blessings in disguise burning infinite grace for which I need not even chase Blessings that are blessed Mother Earth, Father Sky two and four-legged winged ones Bless you Bless me fly with me and fly within me For now I see it is you, within me.
Ulonda Faye (Sutras of the Heart: Spiritual Poetry to Nourish the Soul)
The truth is that we never know from whom we originally get the ideas and beliefs that shape us, those that make a deep impression on us and which we adopt as a guide, those we retain without intending to and make our own. From a great-grandparent, a grandparent, a parent, not necessarily ours? From a distant teacher we never knew and who taught the one we did know? From a mother, from a nursemaid who looked after her as a child? From the ex-husband of our beloved, from a ġe-bryd-guma we never met? From a few books we never read and from an age through which we never lived? Yes, it's incredible how much people say, how much they discuss and recount and write down, this is a wearisome world of ceaseless transmission, and thus we are born with the work already far advanced but condemned to the knowledge that nothing is ever entirely finished, and thus we carry-like a faint booming in our heads-the exhausting accumulated voices of the countless centuries, believing naively that some of those thoughts and stories are new, never before heard or read, but how could that be, when ever since they acquired the gift of speech people have never stopped endlessly telling stories and, sooner or later, everything is told, the interesting and the trivial, the private and the public, the intimate and the superfluous, what should remain hidden and what will one day inevitably be broadcast, sorrows and joys and resentments, certainties and conjectures, the imagined and the factual, persuasions and suspicions, grievances and flattery and plans for revenge, great feats and humiliations, what fills us with pride and what shames us utterly, what appeared to be a secret and what begged to remain so, the normal and the unconfessable and the horrific and the obvious, the substantial-falling in love-and the insignificant-falling in love. Without even giving it a second thought, we go and we tell.
Javier Marías (Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (Your Face Tomorrow, #3))
What work it must be, to have a daughter. My own mother, I remembered as guarded, anxious, easily distracted. I didn’t want to become her. I wanted to be, as a teacher, and as a woman, some version of Mother Roberta: attentive, wise, beloved. But tough, too, the way she was—full of conviction. The sort of person you’d think about as you fell asleep, comforted to remember that in this world of bad luck and rising sea levels and impossible pain, at least, thank God, there was her.
Claire Luchette (Agatha of Little Neon)
IN SCHOOL. "I used to go to a bright school Where Youth and Frolic taught in turn; But idle scholar that I was, I liked to play, I would not learn; So the Great Teacher did ordain That I should try the School of Pain. "One of the infant class I am With little, easy lessons, set In a great book; the higher class Have harder ones than I, and yet I find mine hard, and can't restrain My tears while studying thus with Pain. "There are two Teachers in the school, One has a gentle voice and low, And smiles upon her scholars, as She softly passes to and fro. Her name is Love; 'tis very plain She shuns the sharper teacher, Pain. "Or so I sometimes think; and then, At other times, they meet and kiss, And look so strangely like, that I Am puzzled to tell how it is, Or whence the change which makes it vain To guess if it be--Love or Pain. "They tell me if I study well, And learn my lessons, I shall be Moved upward to that higher class Where dear Love teaches constantly; And I work hard, in hopes to gain Reward, and get away from Pain. "Yet Pain is sometimes kind, and helps Me on when I am very dull; I thank him often in my heart; But Love is far more beautiful; Under her tender, gentle reign I must learn faster than of Pain. "So I will do my very best, Nor chide the clock, nor call it slow; That when the Teacher calls me up To see if I am fit to go, I may to Love's high class attain, And bid a sweet good-by to Pain.
Susan Coolidge (What Katy Did)
A friend of mine who spent years in India with a great teacher from the ancient forest tradition tells a moving story... Years after his beloved teacher had died, he was back in India staying at the home of his guru's most devoted Indian disciple. "I must show you something," the disciple said to my friend one day. "This is what he left for me." My friend was excited, of course. Any trace of his teacher was nectar to him. He watched as the elderly man opened the creaking doors of an ancient wooden wardrobe and took something from the back of the bottom shelf. It was wrapped in an old, dirty cloth. "Do you see?" he asked my friend. "No. See what?" The disciple unwrapped the object, revealing an old, beat-up aluminum pot, the kind of ordinary pot one sees in every Indian kitchen. Looking deeply into my friend's eyes, he told him, "He left this for me when he went away. Do you see? Do you see?" "No, Dada," he replied. "I don't see." According to my friend, Dada looked at him even more intensely, this time with a mad glint in his eyes. "You don't have to shine," he said. "You don't have to shine." He rewrapped the pot and put it back on the bottom shelf of the wardrobe. My friend had received the most important teaching... He did not have to transform himself in the way he imagined: He just had to learn to be kind to himself. If he could hold himself with the care Dada showed while clutching the old pot, it would be enough. His ordinary self, wrapped in all of its primitive agony, was precious too.
Epstein Mark
The Master's Eyes Shining with Secrets Those bells ringing on the mist-covered mountain signify that the Master of the Temple is dead. The fact of the matter is that the monks there finally killed him. It seems that a few years ago the Master of the Temple began to exhibit some odd and very unpleasant forms of behavior. He apparently lost all sense of earthly decorum, even losing control over his own body. At one point an extra head sprouted from the side of the Master's neck, and this ugly little thing started to issue all sorts of commands and instructions to the monks which only their lofty sense of decency and order prevented them from carrying out. Eventually the Master of the Temple was confined to a small room in an isolated part of the monastery. There, this once wise and beloved teacher was looked after like an animal. For several years the monks put up with the noises he made, the diverse shapes he took. Finally, they killed him. It is whispered among students of enlightenment that one may achieve a state of being in which enlightenment itself loses all meaning, with the consequence that one thereby becomes subject to all manner of strange destinies. And the monks? After the assassination they scattered in all directions. Some hid out in other monasteries, while others went back to live among the everyday inhabitants of this earth. But it was not as if they could escape their past by fleeing it, no more than they could rid themselves of their old master by killing him. For even after the death of his material self, the Master of the Temple sought out those who were once under his guidance; and upon these unhappy disciples he now bestowed, somewhat insistently, his terrible illumination.
Thomas Ligotti (Noctuary)
Having lost his mother, father, brother, an grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history—his home—the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, in his life, from ropes, chains, boxes, bags and crates, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him, from crashed airplanes and an opiate addiction and from an entire frozen continent intent on causing his death. The escape from reality was, he felt—especially right after the war—a worthy challenge. He would remember for the rest of his life a peaceful half hour spent reading a copy of 'Betty and Veronica' that he had found in a service-station rest room: lying down with it under a fir tree, in a sun-slanting forest outside of Medford, Oregon, wholly absorbed into that primary-colored world of bad gags, heavy ink lines, Shakespearean farce, and the deep, almost Oriental mistery of the two big-toothed wasp-waisted goddess-girls, light and dark, entangled forever in the enmity of their friendship. The pain of his loss—though he would never have spoken of it in those terms—was always with him in those days, a cold smooth ball lodged in his chest, just behind his sternum. For that half hour spent in the dappled shade of the Douglas firs, reading Betty and Veronica, the icy ball had melted away without him even noticing. That was magic—not the apparent magic of a silk-hatted card-palmer, or the bold, brute trickery of the escape artist, but the genuine magic of art. It was a mark of how fucked-up and broken was the world—the reality—that had swallowed his home and his family that such a feat of escape, by no means easy to pull off, should remain so universally despised.
Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay)
As painful as it was, reading about sexual violence toward Black women and girls helped me with necessary creative depictions. My book could not have been written without Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye as well as Beloved, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple—this last book is so special to me because Ms. Walker is a native of Eatonton, Georgia, the home of my maternal ancestors. (My mother was one of Ms. Walker’s teachers.) My mother—Trellie James Jeffers—published an early germinal essay about colorism in the Black community, “The Black Black Woman and the Black Middle Class,” which allowed me to witness (vicariously) intra-racist sexism in African American communities. Another essay by her, “From the Old Slave Shack: Memoirs of a Teacher,” offers historical background about Mama’s experiences attending segregated schools in Eatonton, Georgia, in the 1930s and 1940s, before attending Spelman College in 1951.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois)
The day Stamp Paid saw the two backs through the window and then hurried down the steps, he believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed, like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of, including Baby, had lived a livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, he thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own.
Toni Morrison (Beloved)
Eventually the girl-child will turn away from the Spirit-filled One. Her original spirituality will become confined within the acceptable lines of religion. She will be taught the right way to imagine and name god. “He” will be mediated to her through words, images, stories, and myths shaped, written, and spoken by men. She will adopt the god she is given. It is too dangerous to rebel. If she dares to venture out of the lines by communing with the spirit of a tree, the mysterious night sky, or her grandma, she will be labeled heretic, backslide, or witch. She is told: Prideful One, your grandma is not god; neither is your favorite star or rock. God has only one name and face. You shall have no gods before him. God is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He is found in the church, heavens, and holy book, not in you. God is the god of the fathers and sons; the daughters have no say in the matter. As it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be. The Spirit-Filled One falls asleep. Occasionally she awakens to remind the girl-child-turned-woman of what she once knew. These periodic reminders are painful. The woman fills her life with distractions so she will not hear the quiet inner voice, calling her to return home. Years later, new teachers enter the woman's life—a therapist, a self-help group, a support circle, a beloved friend, or perhaps this workbook. They remind her of what she once knew: Spirit-filled One, your grandma is god and so are your favorite star and rock. God has many names and many faces. God is Mother, Daughter, and Wise Old Crone. She is found in your mothers, in your daughters, and in you. She is Mother of all Living and blessed are her daughters. You are girl-woman made in her image. The spirit of the universe pulsates through you.
Patricia Lynn Reilly (A Deeper Wisdom: The 12 Steps from a Woman's Perspective)
The Buddha, too, goes into the forest and has conferences there with the leading gurus of his day. Then he goes past them and, after a season of trials and search, comes to the bo tree, the tree of illumination, where he, likewise, undergoes three temptations. The first is of lust, the second of fear, and the third of submission to public opinion, doing as told. In the first temptation, the Lord of Lust displayed his three beautiful daughters before the Buddha. Their names were Desire, Fulfillment, and Regrets - Future, Present, and Past. But the Buddha, who had already disengaged himself from attachment to his sensual character, was not moved. Then the Lord of Lust turned himself into the Lord of Death and flung at the Buddha all the weapons of an army of monsters. But the Buddha had found himself that still point within, which is of eternity, untouched by time. So again, he was not moved, and the weapons flung at him turned into flowers of worship. Finally the Lord of Lust and Death transformed himself into the Lord of Social Duty and argued, "Young man, haven't you read the morning papers? Don't you know what there is to be done today?" The Buddha responded by simply touching the earth with the tips of the fingers of his right hand. Then the voice of the goddess mother of the universe was heard, like thunder rolling on the horizon, saying, "This, my beloved son, has already so given of himself to the world that there is no one here to be ordered about. Give up this nonsense." Whereupon the elephant on which the Lord of Social Duty was riding bowed in worship of the Buddha, and the entire company of the Antagonist dissolved like a dream. That night, the Buddha achieved illumination, and for the next fifty years remained in the world as teacher of the way to the extinction of the bondages of egoism. p171-2
Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth)
It is in the heart that the mystery of spiritual conception takes place. This is not the physical heart but what the Sufis call the heart of hearts. The heart of hearts is the heart of the Self which is on the right side of the physical body. In the moment of spiritual conception a special energy is infused into this heart which makes it spin in a particular way. I once had a vision in which my heart was cut open with a knife, taken out and breathed upon—the dust was blown off—and then spun. My teacher did not interpret this inner happening but said that I would come to understand it. Years later I heard her say to someone else that once the heart has been spun in this way it remains spinning for the rest of that person’s incarnation. The divine energy of the Self vibrates at a higher frequency to our ordinary human self. Through the spinning of the heart, the higher consciousness of the Self is able to be integrated into the lower vehicles, into the denser dimensions of the human being. All the wayfarer’s spiritual work has been a preparation for this moment, and from now on the work will be to give birth to this seed of consciousness, to attune one’s waking consciousness to the higher vibrations of the Self that are now spinning within the heart. This is the gradual process of awakening to the consciousness of the heart, opening the eye of the heart through which the Beloved is able to experience His creation. Sufis are known as “a brotherhood of migrants who ‘keep watch’ on the world and for the world,” because through the open eye of His lovers’ hearts the Beloved keeps watch on the world. Through His lovers’ hearts humanity is kept attuned to the Beloved. Just as a single heart is spun when the individual is ready to contain the higher energy of the Self, so does this same process happen with a group. When the group has a central core bonded together in love then its collective heart, its central core of light, is spun. In order to help this process, groups of souls that have been bonded together in past lifetimes are forming specific groups. They hold the spiritual core of the group that allows many others to be included in this dynamic unfolding. The spinning hearts of the lovers of God are forming the map made of points of light which I referred to in the previous chapter. At this time His lovers are being positioned around the planet. Some have already been positioned. Some are moving to physical locations while others are having their hearts awakened to this hidden purpose. Slowly this map is being unfolded, and in certain important places lovers are forming clusters of points of light. Certain spiritual groups have been formed or are being formed to contain these clusters as dynamic centers of light. When this map of light around the world is fully unfolded it will be able to contain and transform the energy structure of the planet. It has the potential to be the bond that will enable the world soul, the anima mundi, to be impregnated with a higher consciousness. The hearts of His lovers form part of the hidden heart of the world. As this map is unfolding so their spinning hearts can open the heart of the world. At this moment in cosmic time the planet is being aligned with its inner source, allowing the world to be infused with a certain cosmic energy that can dramatically speed up the evolution of this planet. If the heart of the world opens, it can receive this frequency of cosmic energy and directly implant it into the hearts of people. This would alter human life more than we could imagine. It is to help in this opening of the heart that many old souls have incarnated at this particular time and are working together. (p. 36 - 38)
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (The Bond with the Beloved: The Mystical Relationship of the Lover & the Beloved)
There is a powerful difference between picturing an image that does not relate to you, and recalling something specific that you are connected with. When memory experts memorize something that is idle or vain, they’re only attempting to picture an image that does not relate to them. They don’t have to daily apply the digits of mathematical pi to live by them. They don’t have to apply the Declaration of Independence in a practical day to day life. As if Americans say when living life, “As it is written in the Declaration of Independence.” So they teach you how to memorize things idly, where as it is better to make a heartfelt connection with the word of God. Therefore Beloved, read the scriptures first and have a full connection with it before you memorize. As we stated before, it is good to memorize what is speaking out to you in the scriptures. Where God is speaking to you and teaching you in the word is the best place to memorize. It makes an emotional connection with you, and it’s applicable to your life in the here and now. Seeing that it is immediately applicable to your life you’ll be able to make an emotional connection with what you are memorizing. As a result, when you are past these teachings and have full understanding, even years in the future you’ll still remember the scripture because it made an emotional connection with you. Much like reminiscing over the cottage experience, every time the topic is brought up you’ll have waves of scripture rushing to you for practical application. Therefore in this method we are seeking to make memorizing the scriptures an experience and not merely a task or a goal for godliness. When it is relevant to experiences there is more for the mind to grasp onto the memory with thereby giving greater longevity to the memory itself. Similar to the peg method where you create an image for the mind to have more to grasp onto, you are using an already existing “image” so to speak, that the mind will grasp onto harder. But why does it grasp harder? Because it isn’t something silly thought of by oneself but it is an ongoing experience that led to a reminiscent memory. Therefore memorize what God is speaking to you and what has strong meaning to you. Whatever jumps out at you from the pages is what the Lord wants you to be memorizing. Therefore as a good pupil and good student, memorize what the Lord your Teacher is giving you to memorize. In school we do not memorize anything but what the teacher gives us, otherwise it would serve no purpose. Likewise it serves a greater purpose to memorize what God is giving you in the here and now, versus memorizing something that is not applying to you at this moment. Yes, all the word of God applies to your life and it always will. But certain things are speaking true to the immediate lesson in life and thus the scriptures speak out to you, and seem alive. Therefore memorize the words that are alive and you will have a continuous living memory of the word of God.
Adam Houge (How To Memorize The Bible Quick And Easy In 5 Simple Steps)
marriage born out of love so was the forbidden fruit in the garden forbidden outside the intimacy and love with relationship with God. You see, Adam and Eve were permitted to possess everything in the Garden of Eden except the fruit of one tree. Oral tradition teaches that this forbidden fruit wasn’t off limits to man, but only to Adam or Eve without the intimate presence and love with a relationship with God. This fruit was designed by God to be the bedroom so to speak with God and shared personally between two people, God and His beloved. Just as a husband and wife will share the fruits of their intimacy in a bedroom totally alone with no one around watching or listening, so God created this tree with its fruits to be shared with Himself and Adam alone or Eve alone. Sin did not occur until Eve shared the fruit with Adam, then she was sharing the one thing she was not allowed to share with her husband, that fruit that was meant for her and God alone. The penalty for Eve and her female descendants was that her “desire will be for her husband but he will rule over her. (Genesis 3:16).” This is another study in Hebrew but basically what it means is that a woman will try to gain from her husband that special love that only God can give. If she turns to her husband for it she will become frustrated and perhaps angry with her husband because He will be unable to give her what she deeply desires, something only God can give. Her husband will “rule over her
Chaim Bentorah (Hebrew Word Study: A Hebrew Teacher Finds Rest in the Heart of God)
the word desirable. Of course, we learn later just how seductive that can be. Early rabbinic literature showed a sexual connotation to chamed as chamdam, using it as a reference to a lustful person. Chimmud is even blunter as a reference to a sexual appetite. As a verb chamed means to be excited or hot. Hebrew Jewish grammarian David Kimhi (Radak) states that it is no coincidence that the word cham (hot), makes up two thirds of the root. He points out that lechem chamudot is taken by some to mean fresh, hot tasty bread. So what I am drawing from this? Is Solomon’s beloved saying she is sitting under the apple tree with one hot number? Well, there is much more to my research on this verse that I cannot put into a short study, so I am leaving open a number of gaps, but let me just share my conclusion on Song of Solomon 2:3. The young lover is making a very distinct play on the word chamed by bringing it into association with the apple tree among the trees of the woods. This is a direct reference to the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden. She sits under her beloved’s shadow with covertness or chamed eating this forbidden fruit. You see the word chamed ultimately has the idea of intimacy or totally possessing and consuming something. This fruit is not forbidden so long as she consumes it within the bounds of intimacy born out of love with her beloved. Just as a sexual relationship is forbidden outside
Chaim Bentorah (Hebrew Word Study: A Hebrew Teacher Finds Rest in the Heart of God)
Whom I Desired (Chimadeti) SONG OF SOLOMON 2:3: “As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.” As I was reading this passage in my Hebrew Bible I was struck by the word chimadeti (great delight). That word was strangely out of place in this sweet romantic verse. I was intrigued as to how our English translators had handled this word. I first went to your friend and mine, the King James Version which rendered it as “great delight.” This seemed to be the good cowardly way out. Other modern translations said the same. Some simply rendered it as “delight.” One translation was a little braver and said “with whom I desired”. But the version with the most guts rendered this word as have I raptured. What caught my attention in the use of the word chimadeti is that it is used only once in the Song of Solomon and its rooted in the same word that is used in Exodus 20:17: “Thou shalt not covet.” If you ever go to a synagogue and glance at the Ten Commandments above the ark and scroll down to the 10th commandment you will see in Hebrew Script the words “Lo
Chaim Bentorah (Hebrew Word Study: A Hebrew Teacher Finds Rest in the Heart of God)
Without the belief in the resurrection the Christian faith could not have come into being. The disciples would have remained crushed and defeated men. Even had they continued to remember Jesus as their beloved teacher, His crucifixion would have forever silenced any hopes of His being the Messiah. The cross would have remained the sad and shameful end of His career. The origin of Christianity therefore hinges on the belief of the early disciples that God had raised Jesus from the dead. 3
Kenneth W. Craig (The Big Picture of the Bible)
My Portion // PS. 142:5 My Maker, my Husband ISAIAH 54:5 My Well beloved S. OF S. 1:13, KJV My Savior // 2 PET. 3:18 My Hope // 1 TIM. 1:1 My Brother // MK. 3:35 My Helper // HEB. 13:6 My Physician //JER. 8:22 My Healer // LK. 9:11) My Refiner and my Purifier // MAL. 3:3 My Lord and Master JN. 13:13, KJV My Servant // LK. 12:37) My Example // JN. 13:15 My Teacher // JN. 3:2 My Shepherd // PS. 23:1 My Keeper // JN. 17:12 My Feeder // EZK. 34:23 My Leader // IS. 40:11 My Restorer // PS. 23:3 My Restingplace // JER. 50:6 My Meat and my Drink JN. 6:55, KJV My Passover // 1 COR. 5:7 My Peace // EPH. 2:14, My Wisdom, my Righteousness, my Sanctification, my Redemption
Anonymous
CIRCUIT BREAKER MEDITATION First, settle into your body and your breath, as described in the Basic Mindfulness Meditation in Chapter 3. Invite yourself to move slowly through the meditation exercise, taking your time with each step. Bring your awareness to your jaw and your mouth. Allow your tongue to relax inside your mouth and let your jaw open slightly. Feel your breath passing easily through your relaxed throat. When you feel ready, gently place your hand on your heart, in the center of your chest. Place your other hand on your lower belly, below your navel. Imagine your hands getting warmer, the tiny capillaries and arteries relaxing just a bit to allow warmth to flow into them. Breathe gently and deeply, imagining the breath going into your heart and your belly. With each breath, invite yourself to also breathe into your heart and your belly any sense of goodness, safety, trust, acceptance, or ease that you’re able to bring to mind. Once that’s steady, call to mind a moment of being with someone who loves you unconditionally, someone you feel completely safe with. This may not always be a partner or a parent or a child. Those relationships can be so complex and the feelings can be mixed. It may be, for example, a good friend or a trusted teacher. It may be your therapist, your grandmother, a third-grade teacher, or a beloved pet. Pets are great. As you remember feeling safe and loved with this person or pet, see if you can feel the feelings and sensations that come up with that memory in your body. Allow yourself to really savor these feelings of warmth, safety, trust, and love in your body. When that feeling is steady, gently release the image for now and simply bathe in the feeling for 30 seconds or so. As always, when you’re done with your formal practice, gently and gradually bring yourself back into the room and into the stream of
Marsha Lucas (Rewire Your Brain For Love: Creating Vibrant Relationships Using the Science of Mindfulness)
None of us is absolutely captive by our times. We are all free to receive everything God offers. It does not matter if your teachers, your friends, or your culture all fail to live up to the conditions which allow God to reveal Himself to them. Each one of us is still free to walk the path back to the presence of God, just as Enos did. For
Denver Carlos Snuffer Jr. (Beloved Enos)
A mujaheddin fighter once told me that fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives. But these twelve are always disguised, and we can never know which one is which until we’ve loved them, left them, or fought them. Khader was one of my twelve, but his disguise was always the best. In those abandoned, angry days, as my grieving heart limped into numbing despair, I began to think of him as my enemy; my beloved enemy. And
Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram)
The brief story of the supper at Emmaus carries within it a number of core principles of the Christian life as Luke understands it. First, the idea that one comes to know Christ through acts of generosity to other human beings. It is because of their kindness to a stranger that the disciples find the beloved teacher whom they had lost. Second, there is the idea that they can conjure his presence in prayer and in communal acts such as the breaking of bread - by remembering his life, death, and resurrection - even in an undistinguished house in an anonymous village. The simple acts of generosity and community in daily life are the acts that make real the living presence of Jesus.
Kate Cooper (Band of Angels: The Forgotten World of Early Christian Women)
After Zeidy’s heavy footfalls fade down the stairs, and I watch from my second-floor bedroom window as my grandparents get into the taxi, I slide the book out from under the mattress and place it reverently on my desk. The pages are made of waxy, translucent paper, and they are each packed with text: the original words of the Talmud as well as the English translation, and the rabbinical discourse that fills up the bottom half of each page. I like the discussions best, records of the conversations the ancient rabbis held about each holy phrase in the Talmud. On the sixty-fifth page the rabbis are arguing about King David and his ill-gotten wife Bathsheba, a mysterious biblical tale about which I’ve always been curious. From the fragments mentioned, it appears that Bathsheba was already married when David laid his eyes upon her, but he was so attracted to her that he deliberately sent her husband, Uriah, to the front lines so that he would be killed in war, leaving Bathsheba free to remarry. Afterward, when David had finally taken poor Bathsheba as his lawful wife, he looked into her eyes and saw in the mirror of her pupils the face of his own sin and was repulsed. After that, David refused to see Bathsheba again, and she lived the rest of her life in the king’s harem, ignored and forgotten. I now see why I’m not allowed to read the Talmud. My teachers have always told me, “David had no sins. David was a saint. It is forbidden to cast aspersions on God’s beloved son and anointed leader.” Is this the same illustrious ancestor the Talmud is referring to? Not only did David cavort with his many wives, but he had unmarried female companions as well, I discover. They are called concubines. I whisper aloud this new word, con-cu-bine, and it doesn’t sound illicit, the way it should, it only makes me think of a tall, stately tree. The concubine tree. I picture beautiful women dangling from its branches. Con-cu-bine. Bathsheba wasn’t a concubine because David honored her by taking her as his wife, but the Talmud says she was the only woman David chose who wasn’t a virgin. I think of the beautiful woman on the olive oil bottle, the extra-virgin. The rabbis say that God only intended virgins for David and that his holiness would have been defiled had he stayed with Bathsheba, who had already been married. King David is the yardstick, they say, against whom we are all measured in heaven. Really, how bad can my small stash of English books be, next to concubines? I am not aware at this moment that I have lost my innocence. I will realize it many years later. One day I will look back and understand that just as there was a moment in my life when I realized where my power lay, there was also a specific moment when I stopped believing in authority just for its own sake and started coming to my own conclusions about the world I lived in.
Deborah Feldman (Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots)
Not every experiment is a success. That’s the nature of doing science.” The nature of doing many things, I might add: success is its own reward, but failure is a great teacher too, and not to be feared.
Sonia Sotomayor (My Beloved World)
There was a time when love filled his heart, but no more. Once Sam had sought enlightenment and thought he'd found its path on an Ashram outside Los Angeles. Once Sam had a teacher in whom he believed without reservation, who had helped him discover the inner resonances of the divine within himself. Sam had read that one could become a completely God-realized being and was awed and inspired by this perfection he saw in his teacher. As Sam progressed, his guru became more than his teacher, he became his beloved friend. Sam grew in stature and recognition in the community of spiritual seekers gathered about the guru. Sam's utter admiration made the truth more painful still when he discovered that advancement within the order was not by merit alone but that several of the higher ranking members had been conferred their status in exchange for sexual favors and that the donations made to the center went first and foremost toward the material enrichment of the leader. Life for Sam then lost its reason. He had no faith in any human being not even himself. He certainly had no faith left for the merciful and benevolent God that allowed his loving devotee to fall into the hands of such a charlatan. Sam was deeply disillusioned and heartbroken. He walked out of the center that day with no possessions, no money, no beliefs. His great spiritual quest had brought him here to New York, a homeless man living in a makeshift shanty under the overpass of the Long Island Expressway. Sam was numb inside. He did not think about his guru; he could not bear to think about the guru. Therefore, he hid his great pain deep inside himself.
Laurence Galian (The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis)
He came to love adversity as an unsentimental but beloved teacher.
Michael D. O'Brien (Strangers and Sojourners)
Spiritual knowledge is not in learning something; it is in discovering something, so to speak, in breaking the fetters of the false consciousness and allowing the soul to unfold itself with light and power. What does the word spiritual really mean? Spiritual is spirit-conscious. When a person is conscious of his body, he cannot be spiritual. He is like a king who does not know his kingdom. The moment he is conscious of being a king, he is a king. Every soul is born a king—afterwards he becomes a slave. Every soul is born with kingly possibility—by this wicked world it is taken away. This is told in symbolic stories, as in the story of Rama, from whom his beloved Sita was taken away. Every soul has to conquer this, has to fight for this kingdom. In that fight the spiritual kingdom is attained. No one will fight for you, neither your teacher nor anybody else. Yes, those who are more evolved than you can help you, but you have to fight your battle, your way to that spiritual goal.
Hazrat Inayat Khan (The Heart of Sufism: Essential Writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan)
In the very beginning of her life, the girl-child has direct access to the spirit of life. It is as near to her as the breath that fills her. And it connects her to everything. She is not alone. Her spirit is one with the spirit of her beloved grandmother, her favorite rock, tree, and star. She develops her own methods for contacting the spirit in all things. She climbs a tree and sits in its branches, listening. She loves the woods and listens there too. She has a special friend—a rock. She gives it a name and eats her lunch with it whenever she can. She keeps the window open next to her bed even on the coldest of nights. She loves the fresh air on her face. She pulls the covers tight around her chin and listens to the mysterious night sky. She believes that her grandmother is present even though everyone else says she is dead. Each night, she drapes the curtain over her shoulders for privacy, looks out the window near her bed, listens for Grandma and then says silent prayers to her. Her imagination is free for a time. She does not need priest or teacher to describe god to her. Spirit erupts spontaneously in colorful and unique expressions. God is Grandma, the twinkling evening star, the gentle breeze that washes across her face, the peaceful quiet darkness after everyone has fallen asleep, and all the colors of the rainbow. And because she is a girl, her experience and expression of spirit is uniquely feminine. The spirit of the universe pulsates through her. She is full of herself.
Patricia Lynn Reilly (A Deeper Wisdom: The 12 Steps from a Woman's Perspective)
From a medical standpoint, the third and the most probable explanation is that Jesus was indeed dead, and what his disciples experienced were mere hallucinations evoked by the grief over the loss of their beloved teacher. It is clinically known as “Post-Bereavement Hallucinations Experiences” or PBHE.
Abhijit Naskar (Neurons of Jesus: Mind of A Teacher, Spouse & Thinker)
The enthusiasm which induced a priest, notary, and teacher like Knox to carry a claymore in defence of a beloved teacher, Wishart, seems more appropriate to a man of about thirty than a man of forty, and, so far, supports the opinion that, in 1545, Knox was only thirty years of age. 
Andrew Lang (John Knox and the Reformation)
Van Til, Steen’s beloved teacher, claimed, however, that only the Reformed tradition can provide the rightful context for the subject of common grace. After all, for Rome and the Arminian “it is a foregone conclusion that there are large areas of life on which the believer and the unbeliever agree without difference.”76
William D. Dennison (In Defense of the Eschaton: Essays in Reformed Apologetics)
You let me sing, you lifted me up, you have my soul a beam to travel on. You folded your distance back into my heart. You drew the tears back to my eyes. You hid me in the mountain of your word. You gave the injury a tongue to heal itself. You covered my head with my teacher's care, you bound my arm with my grandfather's strength. O beloved speaking, O comfort whispering in the terror, unspeakable explanation of the smoke and cruelty, undo the self-conspiracy, let me dare the boldness of joy.
Leonard Cohen (Book of Mercy)
As the first week of term sped by, the two new girls settled down in their own ways. Lucy was moderately good at most of her lessons, and well behaved enough not to attract any unwelcome attention from the teachers, most of the time.However, when she became bored she had a habit of day-dreaming about riding off across the fields on Sandy, and this earned her a ticking off from Miss Peters and the stern Mam’zelle Rougier on several occasions. On the whole, though, Lucy was very happy at Malory Towers and enjoyed life there. She and Julie got on very well indeed, and, as Five Oaks was only a few minutes walk from the school, the two of them managed to slip over there every day to check on their beloved horses and enjoy a ride together.
Enid Blyton (Malory Towers Collection 3: Books 7-9 (Malory Towers Collections and Gift books Book 12))
Vipula had said, ‘That is why words are not enough. We need grammar to string words into sentences, put everything in context. Sometimes even sentences fail to capture what we are trying to say. Prose is useless when speaking to the beloved. We need poetry.’ Jayanta had interjected then, ‘Words don’t matter, only feelings do.’ ‘And how do we communicate feelings without words?’ Mandhata had asked. In response, Jayanta had smiled and touched his brother, his eyes full of tenderness. Vipula watched Jayanta take his brother by the hand into the garden, and show him blue butterflies hovering over yellow flowers. Beauty of the world. Love between brothers. The affection of a teacher. All experienced without anything being spoken.
Devdutt Pattanaik (The Pregnant King)
(Kana has been talking about her Uncles with her friends at school and her teacher, Mr. Yokoyama, has called her dad in because he’s concerned that it’s not an appropriate topic for school children and that she may be bullied for it in the future because “her situation at home is a bit unusual”) Yaichi: Yokoyama-san, are you concerned that she’s being raised by a single father? Yokoyama: Uhhh… Yaichi: I appreciate your concern, but it’s really unnecessary. You don’t need to be concerned about a single parent household. At least, no more so than for any other student. Yokoyama: No, I meant… Yaichi: Also, about Kana, if there is anything that makes her different, I… wouldn’t make her change on account of other people. As for the foreigner staying with us, he is my brother’s husband, and Kana’s Uncle. I see absolutely no reason to stop her from talking about her beloved uncle to her friends. If Kana is ever bullied for any of this, I would hope that, as her teacher, you would reprimand the bullies, and not the bullied child for being different.
Gengoroh Tagame (My Brother's Husband, Volume 2 (Otouto no Otto, #3-4))
The goal of the ministry is the maturity of the saints. Paul expressed that clearly in Ephesians 4:11-13: “[Christ] gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fulness of Christ.” That goal was shared by Epaphras, the founder of the Colossian church: “Epaphras, who is one of your number, a bondslave of Jesus Christ, sends you his greetings, always laboring earnestly for you in his prayers, that you may stand perfect and fully assured in all the will of God” (Col. 4:12). Our aim is not merely to win people to Christ, but to bring them to spiritual maturity. They will then be able to reproduce their faith in others. In 2 Timothy 2:2 Paul charged Timothy, “The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, these entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.” To be complete, or mature, is to be like Christ. Although all Christians strive for that lofty end, no one on earth has arrived there yet (cf. Phil. 3:12). Every believer, however, will one day attain it. “Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we shall be. We know that, when He appears, we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him just as He is” (1 John 3:2). Christians move toward maturity by feeding on God’s Word: “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). The Colossian heretics believed perfection was only for the elite, a view shared by many others throughout history. The American journalist Walter Lippmann wrote, As yet, no teacher has ever appeared who was wise enough to know how to teach his wisdom to all mankind. In fact, the great teachers have attempted nothing so Utopian. They were quite well aware how difficult for most men is wisdom, and they have confessedly stated that the perfect life was for the select few. In contrast, Christ offers spiritual maturity to every man and woman.
John F. MacArthur Jr. (Colossians and Philemon MacArthur New Testament Commentary (MacArthur New Testament Commentary Series Book 22))
Understand, the relationship of the mother adds some component to you, relationship of the father adds some component to you, relationship of the teacher adds some component to you, relationship of the friend adds some component to you, relationship of the beloved adds some component to you. Each relationship adds something to you. Even the relationship of the enemy adds some component to you; the intelligence to defend you is added. Understand, gambhira is put in your body language by your enemies. Even the relationship of the enemy adds something to you.
The SPH Nithyananda
She’d be different,” Belinda said. “She’s a little intimidating,” I said. “Like a strict teacher that you learn to adore.” “Exactly,” said Belinda. “Like you,” I said. “Intimidating for years, and then beloved.
Michelle Huneven (Search)
BELOVED, DO not believe every spirit [speaking through a self-proclaimed prophet]; instead test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets and teachers have gone out into the world.
Joyce Meyer (Battlefield of the Mind Bible: Renew Your Mind Through the Power of God's Word)
On the sixty-fifth page the rabbis are arguing about King David and his ill-gotten wife Bathsheba, a mysterious biblical tale about which I’ve always been curious. From the fragments mentioned, it appears that Bathsheba was already married when David laid his eyes upon her, but he was so attracted to her that he deliberately sent her husband, Uriah, to the front lines so that he would be killed in war, leaving Bathsheba free to remarry. Afterward, when David had finally taken poor Bathsheba as his lawful wife, he looked into her eyes and saw in the mirror of her pupils the face of his own sin and was repulsed. After that, David refused to see Bathsheba again, and she lived the rest of her life in the king’s harem, ignored and forgotten. I now see why I’m not allowed to read the Talmud. My teachers have always told me, “David had no sins. David was a saint. It is forbidden to cast aspersions on God’s beloved son and anointed leader.” Is this the same illustrious ancestor the Talmud is referring to? Not only did David cavort with his many wives, but he had unmarried female companions as well, I discover. They are called concubines. I whisper aloud this new word, con-cu-bine, and it doesn’t sound illicit, the way it should, it only makes me think of a tall, stately tree. The concubine tree. I picture beautiful women dangling from its branches. Con-cu-bine. Bathsheba wasn’t a concubine because David honored her by taking her as his wife, but the Talmud says she was the only woman David chose who wasn’t a virgin. I think of the beautiful woman on the olive oil bottle, the extra-virgin. The rabbis say that God only intended virgins for David and that his holiness would have been defiled had he stayed with Bathsheba, who had already been married. King David is the yardstick, they say, against whom we are all measured in heaven. Really, how bad can my small stash of English books be, next to concubines? I am not aware at this moment that I have lost my innocence. I will realize it many years later. One day I will look back and understand that just as there was a moment in my life when I realized where my power lay, there was also a specific moment when I stopped believing in authority just for its own sake and started coming to my own conclusions about the world I lived in.
Deborah Feldman (Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots)
This is why we need a spiritual revolution! The solutions to the global pandemics that face us as a species don’t lie in the halls of government but in every human heart and soul. Jesus asked us to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” The Buddha once said, “Whoever would think, on the basis of a body like this, to exalt himself or disparage another: What is that if not blindness?” The Quran states, “Allah loveth the just dealers.” Baha’u’llah writes, “Let your heart burn with loving-kindness for all who may cross your path.” The Hindu teacher Sri M says, “Love is a many-splendored entity.… You want to give, want to sacrifice your personal convenience for the sake of your beloved.… I plead, please, that we fall in love with humanity as a whole.” In Judaism, tikkun olam refers to the divine prerogative, or a type of aleinu (our duty), toward repairing the world.
Rainn Wilson (Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution)
Behind my house where satsang is held there is a forest with animals, birds, stones and trees. Several satsang participants have reported that they have had beautiful meeting with deers, birds and other animals after satsang. They say that it is like the animals are attracted to the the spiritual energy from satsang. The animals, birds and trees are in tune with existence, they are part of existence and they have never been separated, so they are attracted to the satsang energy which they want to be a natural part of.  Animals, birds, trees and nature should be loved and respected. There are a constant evolution, and loving and respecting the animals, the birds, the trees and the nature shows that we can be loving and respectful towards their future evolution.  We are all part of the same life and evolution, and these animals, birds and trees are part of existence just as we are. When man hunts animals for enjoyment, manis simply ignorant and not respecting animals.  A former girlfriend used to say a little sour that I was one of these people that children and animals loved. She said it a little sour because she also wanted to be one of these people.  When the animals,birds and trees becomes attracted to the satsang energy, it becomes obvious that it is time for meditators to spend more time in contact with animals, birds, trees  and nature. That can help us to learn the secret of existence as the animals, birds and trees are still in tune with existence. They are not separate from existence, which man is in his egoistic effort has separated himself from existence. Therefore to mix with animals, birds and trees and to have the whole universe as friends will help meditators to learn the secret of existence. It will teach usthat we are also part of nature and if nature stops cooperating with us, we will simply be dead.  I was adopted by afamily of deers, where the mother proudly showed me her three small children. Deva Emanuel commented that it is astonishing that it is possible to come in contact with these wild animals.  I also found Padma, my beloved friend from many lives and a participant in satsang,several times out in nature before satsang in deep silence, prayer and oneness with nature.  The condemnation against animals, birds. trees and nature is part of the human ego, but animals, birds, trees and nature have so much to teach us. Just look at a cat, who knows the secret of how to relax. Cats are meditative animals. There is not a better teacher in how to relax than cats. Look at a cat sitting, how meditatively he sits. Look at him, how meditative he is. He is just sitting and meditating, one with existence.   Animals, birds and trees also have feelings and a soul. They are part of the divine. The divine is not just in man, the divine is in the animals ,the birds, the trees and nature. The divine is the basic center in everything. 
Swami Dhyan Giten (Meditation: A Love Affair with the Whole - Thousand and One Flowers of Silence, Love, Joy, Truth, Freedom, Beauty and the Divine)
I have never felt closer to God than when he has tears running down his face. I don't delight in this, but by this, I know that I am seen […] And when God bears witness to our suffering, it is not for his consumption or to demonstrate something. My gramma used to wonder what this all was teaching her, a rhetoric she absorbed from the church. But it seems cruel to believe that God would require grief to make a truth known. I refuse to believe we need to dissect our pain in search of purpose. Sometimes shit is just shit. It's okay to say so. I think when God bears witness to our lament, we discover that we are not calling out to a teacher but inviting God as a nurturer—a mother who hears her child crying in the night. She wakes, rises, and comes to the place where we lie. She rushes her holy warmth against our flesh and says, I'm here.
Cole Arthur Riley (This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us)
the passages where Irenaeus speaks of the John who, by context, is understood to be the son of Zebedee, that there is nothing ‘to suggest that this John is the same person as John of Ephesus, the Beloved Disciple and author of the Gospel’.42 There really is no sense of character given to the son of Zebedee in any of the places where he is mentioned, nothing of the personal affection Irenaeus shows when writing about the teacher
John Behr (John the Theologian and his Paschal Gospel: A Prologue to Theology)
Solitude can be a profound teacher. It can teach us how to hold ourselves—how to affirm ourselves and listen. How much is the sound of your own voice worth? And yet, we were made for belonging. Maybe you’ve heard it said that you need to learn how to be alone before you can be with someone. I say you have to learn how to be with and part of something in order to know how to be alone. I think it is only out of a deep anchoring in community that one can be free to explore the solitary.
Cole Arthur Riley (This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us)
The seekers of the path of love begin with a realization that love is One, and that love flows from God through humanity and back to God. Therefore the poetry they compose also reflects this journey. In reading mystical love poetry of this tradition, it is hard to determine whether a particular poem is meant for a tender young beloved, for the writer’s husband or wife, for a spiritual teacher, for the Prophet Muhammad, or for God. The truth of the matter is that it is typically written for all of them, and all at once. This ambiguity is a trait of this mingled and mingling radical love, one that unites and unifies the lover and beloved, earth and heaven, male and female, the human and the divine.
Omid Safi
Moving from teaching university students to living with mentally handicapped people was, for me at least, a step toward the platform where the father embraces his kneeling son. Step from bystander to participant, from judge to repentant sinner, from teacher about love to being loved as the beloved. It is also the place where I have to let go of all I most want to hold on to. It is the place that confronts me with the fact that truly accepting love, forgiveness, and healing is often much harder than giving it. It is the place beyond earning, deserving, and rewarding. It is the place of surrender and complete trust. Each little step toward the center seemed like an impossible demand, a demand requiring me to let go one more time from wanting to be in control, to give up one more time the desire to predict life, to die one more time to the fear of not knowing where it all will lead, and to surrender one more time to a love that knows no limits. And still, I knew that I would never be able to live the great commandment to love without allowing myself to be loved without conditions or prerequisites.
Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming)
It is not unusual to be drawn into a love relationship with a person we hurt in the distant past in an attempt to heal. The problem is that instead of healing an ancient wound, most often we end up reinjuring each other. That person who once burned you at the stake for your beliefs in a Christian or pagan god, and whom you confuse for your beloved, ends up lighting the kindling under you once again. And you’re left wondering why you are choking from the smoke of the relationship. When you are sure that you have met your dream lover, your soul mate, and every cell in your body is quivering with excitement, run away as fast as you can. Unless, of course, you are ready to sign up for another lesson in the school of emotional storms. We never got the best parents, only the right parents for us. We never got the best spouse, only the right spouse. The sooner we recognize this the faster we will be able to move on to more interesting engagements with the world. Learning to love the people you do not necessarily approve of or agree with is a challenge, but they are often our greatest teachers. They hold the mirror up to us so we can see hidden and neglected parts of ourselves in them. As for your soul mate, accept that you will never find that person perfectly designed to your romantic specifications. They do not exist. But know that you can become the right partner. This will only happen once you stop looking for him or her.
Alberto Villoldo (The Heart of the Shaman: Stories and Practices of the Luminous Warrior)
All your life you tried to be good enough for somebody else, and you left yourself last. You sacrificed your personal freedom to live according to somebody else’s point of view. You tried to be good enough for your mother, your father, your teachers, your beloved, your children, your religion, and society. After trying for so many years, you try to be good enough for yourself, and you find out that you’re not good enough for yourself.
Miguel Ruiz (The Fifth Agreement: A Practical Guide to Self-Mastery (A Toltec Wisdom Book))
Dear God, this evening I thank you for teaching me sacred lessons through this school of my circumstances. I trust you, my beloved teacher. Amen.
Bethany House Publishers (Moments of Peace for the Evening)
Little idea about my teacher: 1. First and foremost My Parents (Both are equal). 2. Next to all my respected teachers who taught me subjective as well practical knowledge, and help me to shape up as a responsible person. 3. Next to all my seniors and elder people who guided me in the path of progress time to time throughout my journey. 4. Next to all my beloved family and friends who are always stood along with me, no matter the time what it was? 5. Next to those entire know-unknown persons who has passed through journey and taught few lessons, tips. 6. Next is the nature, just see it, feel it & learn it. 7. Last but not least kids/children’s- a lot of things, no worry, smiles, happiness, this is the best part of this journey. So it’s time to Salute the Real Commanders of our Life HAPPY TEACHERS DAY Original from: Amit Gupta
Amit Gupta
Is it not manifest that the employing so many of our preachers in these agencies and professorships is one of the great causes why we have such a scarcity of preachers to fill the regular work? Moreover, these presidents, professors, agents, and editors get a greater amount of pay, and get it more certainly, too, than a traveling preacher, who has to breast every storm, and often falls very far short of his disciplinary allowance. Here is a great temptation to those who are qualified to fill those high offices to seek them, and give up the regular work of preaching and trying to save souls. And is it not manifest to every candid observer that very few of those young men who believe they were called of God to preach the Gospel, and are persuaded to go to a college or a Biblical institute, the better to qualify them for the great work of the ministry, ever go into the regular traveling ministry? The reason as plainly this: having quieted their consciences with the flattering unction of obtaining a sanctified education, while they have neglected the duty of regularly preaching Jesus to dying sinners, their moral sensibilities are blunted, and they see an opening prospect of getting better pay as teachers in high schools or other institutions of learning, and from the prospect of gain they are easily persuaded that they can meet their moral obligations in disseminating sanctified learning. Thus, as sure as a leaden ball tends to the earth in obedience to the laws of gravity, just so sure our present modus operandi tends to a congregational ministry, And if this course is pursued a little longer, the Methodist Church will bid a long, long farewell to her beloved itinerancy, to which we, under God, owe almost every thing that is intrinsically valuable in Methodism.
Peter Cartwright (The Autobiography of Peter Cartwright)
We know not the days but await the days' discovery of us. We feel not the hours lest they pass us too slowly. We discover not our friends, nor our homes, nor our teachers, before they leave us. And we love not our duties, nor our passions, until they have loved us first. When our tiny seeds of courage, cared for diligently, present us with a harvest of bravery, then we can face those days, those hours, those beloved beings and beloved things, and feel their power deepest.
Neena Jaydon (Storms and Stars)
But the more critical lesson I learned that day is still one too many kids never figure out: don’t be shy about making a teacher of any willing party who knows what he or she is doing.
Sonia Sotomayor (My Beloved World)
Oneness in Everything Facing our darkness we struggle towards the light. Finally, worn away by the conflict the ego surrenders and we are taken beyond these opposites. Just as we first awoke to the pain of separation and the darkness of the lover's imperfection, so do we awaken to the higher consciousness of the Self that experiences the oneness in everything. People often have dreams of the teacher acting in an improper way, swearing in a church, smoking in a meditation room, in order to shock them into an awareness of this higher reality. The perfect man embraces both his own imperfection and also that of mankind. This is illustrated in the story of Jami who was mistaken for a thief. On being asked if he was a thief the saint replied, 'What am I not?
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (The Bond with the Beloved: The Mystical Relationship of the Lover & the Beloved)
There was once an artistically talented teenager who felt unrequited love for a girl in his art class. It so happened that his beloved’s artwork was particularly bad, so bad, in fact, that it was often quietly mocked. One day the boy overheard two classmates laughing about how bad her artwork was. But just then she entered the room, and they quickly changed the subject. After a couple of minutes, the two classmates started playing a cruel game where they praised her for her artistic abilities. She protested, but the classmates kept insisting that she had real talent and should think about exhibiting something in the end-of-year art show. A week later she pulled the lovelorn boy to one side and asked for some advice about a painting. He jumped at the chance to talk with her, and while the work was terrible, he praised it profusely. To his horror, the praise he lavished on it convinced her to enter the painting in the school art exhibition. Because of his love, he didn’t want her to be humiliated, so the day before the show he went into the room holding all the submissions and stole her painting along with a couple of others. Once the theft was discovered, the art teacher quickly worked out who was guilty and pulled the boy out of class. Before suspending him, the teacher asked why he’d stolen the paintings. “That’s easy,” replied the boy. “I wanted to win the prize and so stole the best work.” News quickly spread around the school that the girl had created a masterpiece that might have won the prize if allowed to compete.
Peter Rollins (The Divine Magician: The Disappearance of Religion and the Discovery of Faith)
success is its own reward, but failure is a great teacher too, and not to be feared.
Sonia Sotomayor (My Beloved World)
Seeking a teacher is just ego seeking a reprieve. Giving oneself over to a teacher or a teaching or the Beloved Guru or whatever is all about staying asleep, not waking up. First rule in this business; you are completely on your own.
Anonymous