Casper Ter Kuile Quotes

In the midst of a crisis of isolation, where loneliness leads to deaths of despair, being truly connected isn’t a luxury. It’s a lifesaver.

Tradition is living and active,” Merton writes, “but convention is passive and dead.

That's what this book is all about--taking things we do every day and layering meaning and ritual onto them, even experiences as ordinary as reading or eating--by thinking of them as spiritual practices.

my hope is that you’ll join me in choosing a text of your own to treat as sacred—something you already love, that you already find yourself turning to again and again. We can all benefit from the ancient practices of sacred reading.

Pilgrimages of any scale follow the same broad architecture with three phases. The first is the setting of a purpose or intention. This might be healing, marking a loss, asking for forgiveness, exploring a new life phase or transition, or simply reconnecting with joy. It might even be simply the intention of adventure—creating space in which unexpected new thoughts, friendships, or experiences might emerge.

Institutions have turned mysteries into dogmas. They've lost the lightness of touch to translate the timeless wisdom into relevant teaching.

And here is the paradoxical secret: connection and isolation are bound to each other. I am confident that without my experience as a lonely closeted teenager at a boys’ boarding school, I wouldn’t be as passionate about deep connection today. We simply cannot know connection without also experiencing disconnection. There is nothing wrong with you when you feel that vast emptiness. Nothing you need to change. Nothing to fix. But there is one thing to do. Remember. Remember that both are true. The vast emptiness and the eternal connection. The sense of total aloneness and the interdependent belovedness. It is the paradox in which we live. And all of the practices and stories and strategies that we’ve explored in this book are simply there to help you, in moments of joy and sadness, overwhelm and barrenness, to remember.

And the true story that we told about ourselves six months ago may no longer be true today. We need one another to help us reexamine the words coming out of our mouth, to reflect on what is happening with our bodies and spirits

We have so many rehearsed stories about who we are,” says Lennon. “And the true story that we told about ourselves six months ago may no longer be true today. We need one another to help us reexamine the words coming out of our mouth, to reflect on what is happening with our bodies and spirits.

When we’re in the rhythm of the collective, we can be freed of our isolationist perspective. For a brief period of time, the lie of our separateness is exposed, and we remember that we are wholly connected to one another. It’s not that our individuality disappears, but that we are no longer blinded by individualism.

How might I find deeper happiness? The science points to an answer in the abstract: Find more community. Deepen your connections with others. Be with others in meaningful ways. Find rituals to organize your life. It will boost your happiness, give you greater joy, and even add ten years to your life expectancy, science suggests.

I am convinced we are in the midst of a paradigm shift. That what used to hold us in community no longer works. That the spiritual offerings of yesteryear no longer help us thrive. And that, just like stargazers of the sixteenth century had to reimagine the cosmos by placing the sun at the center of the solar system, so we need to fundamentally rethink what it means for something to be sacred. Paradigm shifts like this happen for two reasons. First, because there is new evidence that refutes previously held assumptions--think of how Charles Darwin's _Origin of Species_ transformed our understanding of evolutionary biology and the historical accuracy of the Bible, for example. Second, because older theories prove irrelevant to new questions that people start asking. And that's what is happening today. In this time of rapid religious and relational change, a new landscape of meaning-making and community is emerging--and the traditional structures of spirituality are struggling to keep up with what our lives look like.

Prayer is like a workshop for the soul.

All the while, the breakneck speed of change ushered in by the internet and consumer capitalism is reshaping the entire spiritual and community landscape. Nearly everyone I know feels as if they are falling short of some predefined standard that is completely out of reach so that our near-constant state of not feeling we are enough frustrates our enjoyment of moments that could and should be meaningful. These structural inequities literally steal our joy.

Disconnection sours the sweet things in life and makes any hardship nearly unbearable.

The great environmental activist John Seed embodies this when he says, “I try to remember that it’s not me, John, trying to protect the rainforest. Rather, I am part of the rainforest protecting itself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into human thinking

In a conversation with Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg recorded in 1998, he explained, “I can’t believe in any of this stuff about creating community. I think the whole project of trying to build community is misplaced. I think community is. It is ontologically there. So, the project is more about awakening.” For him, connection is remembered, or revealed, because we are already “dangerously involved with each other in an incredibly intimate but unseen way.” That’s what it means to be human. Connection just is. We are each connected to every other thing.

The word “sacred” itself comes from the Latin sacrare, which means to consecrate or dedicate. And to consecrate means to declare or make something holy. So the sacredness is in the doing, and that means we have enormous agency to make “sacred” happen ourselves.

I often say to myself that the work is not done, and yet it is still time to stop.

Sabbath isn’t a time to catch up on tasks. Nor is it simply a time of rest to prepare for a busy week. It is a time to revel in the beauty and delight of simply being. The sabbath “is not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor,” Heschel writes. “The sabbath is a day for the sake of life. . . . The sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of sabbath.

Finally, the study concluded that good relationships don’t just protect our bodies; they protect our brains. When we feel like we can count on other people in times of need, our memory stays intact for longer.

I love technology—but I feel like I’m constantly responding to everyone and not really responding to myself.

It suggests that reading is not just something we can do to escape the world, but rather that it can help us live more deeply in it, that we can read our favorite books not just as novels, but as instructive and inspirational texts that can teach us about ourselves and how we live.

We just need to be clear about our intention (what are we inviting into this moment?), bring it our attention (coming back to being present in this moment), and make space for repetition (coming back to this practice time and again). In this way, rituals make the invisible connections that make life meaningful, visible.

Meanwhile, in How We Gather, a recent report on the spiritual life of young people, Angie Thurston and Casper ter Kuile write, “As traditional religion struggles to attract young people, millennials are looking elsewhere with increasing urgency.