Gerald May Quotes

There is a desire within each of us, in the deep center of ourselves that we call our heart. We were born with it, it is never completely satisfied, and it never dies. We are often unaware of it, but it is always awake. It is the Human desire for Love. Every person in this Earth yearns to love, to be loved, to know love. Our true identity, our reason for being is to be found in this desire. Love is the "why" of life, why we are functioning at all. I am convinced it is the fundamental energy of the human spirit. the fuel on which we run, the wellspring of our vitality. And grace, which is the flowing, creative activity, of love itself, is what makes all goodness possible. Love should come first, it should be the beginning of, and the reason for everything.

The passion for revenge should never blind you to the pragmatics of the situation. There are some people who are so blighted by their past, so warped by experience and the pull of that silken cord, that they never free themselves of the shadows that live in the time machine... And if there is a kind thought due them, it may be found contained in the words of the late Gerald Kersh, who wrote:"... there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armour, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.

Beyond the East the sunrise, beyond the West the sea, And East and West the wanderlust that will not let me be; It works in me like madness, dear, to bid me say good-by! For the seas call and the stars call, and oh, the call of the sky! I know not where the white road runs, nor what the blue hills are, But man can have the sun for friend, and for his guide a star; And there's no end of voyaging when once the voice is heard, For the river calls and the road calls, and oh, the call of a bird! Yonder the long horizon lies, and there by night and day The old ships draw to home again, the young ships sail away; And come I may, but go I must, and if men ask you why, You may put the blame on the stars and the sun and the white road and the sky!

Peace is not something you can force on anything or anyone... much less upon one's own mind. It is like trying to quiet the ocean by pressing upon the waves. Sanity lies in somehow opening to the chaos, allowing anxiety, moving deeply into the tumult, diving into the waves, where underneath, within, peace simply is.

Maybe, sometimes, in the midst of things going terribly wrong, something is going just right.

What you don't know may not hurt you, but what you don't remember always does.

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, Before we too into Dust descend; Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie, Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and - sans End!

In explaining the growth of his faith, psychiatrist Gerald May writes, "I know that God is loving and that God’s loving is trustworthy. I know this directly, through the experience of my life. There have been plenty of times of doubt, especially when I used to believe that trusting God's goodness meant I would not be hurt. But having been hurt quite a bit, I know God's goodness goes deeper than all pleasure and pain it embraces them both." Ruthless Trust, pg 22

There is a fundamental reason why we look at the sky with wonder and longing—for the same reason that we stand, hour after hour, gazing at the distant swell of the open ocean. There is something like an ancient wisdom, encoded and tucked away in our DNA, that knows its point of origin as surely as a salmon knows its creek. Intellectually, we may not want to return there, but the genes know, and long for their origins—their home in the salty depths. But if the seas are our immediate source, the penultimate source is certainly the heavens… The spectacular truth is—and this is something that your DNA has known all along—the very atoms of your body—the iron, calcium, phosphorus, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and on and on—were initially forged in long-dead stars. This is why, when you stand outside under a moonless, country sky, you feel some ineffable tugging at your innards. We are star stuff. Keep looking up.

We cling to things, people, beliefs, and behaviors not because we love them, but because we are terrified of losing them.

It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most human beings live only for the gratification of it. ARISTOTLE

True love is like some infinite way of being that we become part of: a flowing energy of willingness, an eternal yes resounding with every heartbeat.

This deepening of love is the real purpose of the dark night of the soul. The dark night helps us become who we are created to be: lovers of God and one another.

Consciousness may be seen as the haughty and restless second cousin of morphology. Memory is its mistress, perception its somewhat abused wife, logic its housekeeper, and language its poorly paid secretary

Love is Letting go of fear Love itself Remains constant only the particular body from whom we sometimes expect it may change

Life is not a matter of reaching a stagnant end point, but is rather an ongoing process in which one, hopefully and with grace, grows ever more deeply in love.

Only in the pauses between things, in the brief contemplative spaces of just being, can we catch a glimpse of love itself.

Many of the old understandings to which I had been addicted were stripped away, leaving a desertlike spaciousness where my customary props and securities no longer existed. Grace was able to flow into this emptiness, and something new was able to grow. Fresh understandings took root, and the insights that emerged were clearer, simpler, and more beautiful.

the dark night of the soul is an ongoing transition from compulsively trying to control one’s life toward a trusting freedom and openness to God and the real situations of life.

The dawn is an awakening to a deepening realization of who we really are in and with God and the world, and of what has been going on within us in the night.

Liberation, whether experienced pleasurably or painfully, always involves relinquishment, some kind of loss.

But one thing is certain: the process of freedom is one of subtraction—we are left more empty than when we began.

Love cannot be a means to any end. Love does not promise success, power, achievement, health, recovery, satisfaction, peace of mind, fulfillment, or any other prizes. Love is an end in itself, a beginning in itself. Love exists only for love. The invitation of love is not a proposal for self-improvement or any other kind of achievement. Love is beyond success and failure, doing well or doing poorly. There is not even a right and wrong way. Love is a gift. One can never be proud of being in love. One can only be grateful.

God darkens our awareness in order to keep us safe. When we cannot chart our own course, we become vulnerable to God’s protection, and the darkness becomes a “guiding night,” a “night more kindly than the dawn.”5

People are almost always safe from ghosts and ghouls and the living dead in daylight, and they're usually safe from them at night if they're with others, but when a person is alone in the dark, all bets are off. Men and women alone in the dark are like open doors, Jessie, and if they call out or scream for help, who knows what dread things may answer? Who knows what some men and women have seen in the hour of their solitary deaths? Is it so hard to believe that some of them may have died of fear, no matter what the words on the death certificates say?

When we are really given to the why of life, the hows begin to flow.

We may yearn to “let go and let God,” but it usually doesn’t happen until we have exhausted our own efforts.

Similarly, grace seeks us but will not control us. Saint Augustine once said that God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them. If our hands are full, they are full of the things to which we are addicted. And not only our hands, but also our hearts, minds, and attention are clogged with addiction. Our addictions fill up the spaces within us, spaces where grace might flow.

The dark night is a profoundly good thing. It is an ongoing spiritual process in which we are liberated from attachments and compulsions and empowered to live and love more freely.

He must go unprotected that he may be constantly changed.

The glory of God is a human being fully alive. —Ireneaus1

Well," said Larry with dignity, "it may give you pleasure to be woken at half-past three in the morning by a pigeon who seems intent on pushing his rectum into your eye...

In a spiritual sense, the objects of our attachments and addictions become idols. We give them our time, energy, and attention whether we want to or not, even—and often especially—when we are struggling to rid ourselves of them. We want to be free, compassionate, and happy, but in the face of our attachments we are clinging, grasping, and fearfully self-absorbed.

Joy is the reaction one has to the full appreciation of Being. It is one’s response to finding one’s rightful, rooted place in life, and it can happen only when one knows through and through that absolutely nothing is being denied or otherwise shut out of awareness.

We know in our hearts that choosing love is choosing life and freedom; saying yes to love’s invitation is the only way to lasting meaning and real worth. But our minds are likely to have a different opinion. The parts of our minds that are addicted to efficiency will make us doubt our desire. They will demand to know why we want to risk being hurt in the cause of love. What purpose will it serve? What function? Would it not be better to seek safety and security and simply hope for a little joy now and then, a few touches of caring along the way?

it is the discovery of the depths of weakness, the power of grace, and the price of both. Moreover, what takes place in the desert is not simply difficult travel and adventurous learning; it is repentance and conversion, the transformation of mixed motivations into purified desire, the greening of desert into garden through the living water of grace.

If we are honest, I think we have to admit that we will likely try to sabotage any movement toward true freedom. If we really knew what we were called to relinquish on this journey, our defenses would never allow us to take the first step. Sometimes the only way we can enter the deeper dimensions of the journey is by being unable to see where we’re going.

The darkness of the night implies nothing sinister, only that the liberation takes place in hidden ways, beneath our knowledge and understanding.

*No matter how strange it may look, most people are actually trying to be helpful.* That

It is not that they are unconcerned with social liberation and justice, but that they are convinced such transformation will happen only through the changing of individual hearts.

The word comes from Latin roots com and templum, “with” and “temple.

I don’t want no part of this crazy love.” Right on, Paul. You may be short, but you ain’t dumb.

To strengthen our faith and deepen our testimony to the point that we can successfully endure to the end, we must know for ourselves with a surety that: God is our Heavenly Father, and we are His literal children. He and His Beloved Son want us to be happy and eventually come to a fulness of joy. They know us intimately and love us infinitely. They want to bless us, and they actually take great joy in doing -so. I am deeply convinced that this is the bedrock of which Christ spoke. And if we build our house on this rock, we can withstand the rains, the storms, and the floods that may come our way. With this testimony, we will endure. Without it, we are-vulnerable.

It is impossible for anyone to adequately express the deep movements of love within the spiritual life. It cannot be done by words, by art, or by any way other than the love with which one lives one’s life.

I am just like you. My immediate response to most situations is with reactions of attachment, defensiveness, judgment, control, and analysis. I am better at calculating than contemplating. Let’s admit that we all start there. The False Self seems to have the “first gaze” at almost everything. The first gaze is seldom compassionate. It is too busy weighing and feeling itself: “How will this affect me?” or “How can I get back in control of this situation?” This leads us to an implosion, a self-preoccupation that cannot enter into communion with the other or the moment. In other words, we first feel our feelings before we can relate to the situation and emotion of the other. Only after God has taught us how to live “undefended,” can we immediately stand with and for the other, and in the present moment. It takes lots of practice. On my better days, when I am “open, undefended, and immediately present,” as Gerald May says, I can sometimes begin with a contemplative mind and heart. Often I can get there later and even end there, but it is usually a second gaze. The True Self seems to always be ridden and blinded by the defensive needs of the False Self. It is an hour-by-hour battle, at least for me. I can see why all spiritual traditions insist on daily prayer, in fact, morning, midday, evening, and before we go to bed, too! Otherwise, I can assume that I am back in the cruise control of small and personal self-interest, the pitiable and fragile “Richard self.

Pausing an instant on the threshold before she vanished from their sight, she looked backward, and fixing on Gerald the strange glance he remembered well, she said in her penetrating voice, "Is not the last scene better than the first?

No one would speak, so Terence took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and said, "My liege?" "Yes, Terence?" "Twenty years ago I decided I would die for you. I may not be able to do that tomorrow, but if I can't, I can at least die beside you.

Ah, you may sit under them, yes. They cast a good shadow, cold as well-water; but that's the trouble, they tempt you to sleep. And you must never, for any reason, sleep beneath a cypress.' He paused, stroked his moustache, waited for me to ask why, and then went on: 'Why? Why? Because if you did you would be changed when you woke. Yes, the black cypresses, they are dangerous. While you sleep, their roots grow into your brains and steal them, and when you wake up you are mad, head as empty as a whistle.' I asked whether it was only the cypress that could do that or did it apply to other trees. 'No, only the cypress,' said the old man, peering up fiercely at the trees above me as though to see whether they were listening; 'only the cypress is the thief of intelligence. So be warned, little lord, and don't sleep here.

Right Relationship With Life Itself Gerald May, a dear and now deceased friend of mine, said in his very wise book Addiction and Grace that addiction uses up our spiritual desire. It drains away our deepest and true desire, that inner flow and life force which makes us “long and pant for running streams” (Psalm 42). Spiritual desire is the drive that God put in us from the beginning, for total satisfaction, for home, for heaven, for divine union, and it just got displaced onto the wrong object. It has been a frequent experience of mine to find that many people in recovery often have a unique and very acute spiritual sense; more than most people, I would say. It just got frustrated early and aimed in a wrong direction. Wild need and desire took off before boundaries, strong identity, impulse control, and deep God experience were in place.2

A sense of balance within spaciousness remains within such people, like a window between infinity and the world of everyday experience. They are not only wiser and humbler because of their addictions; they are also more available. Through their spaciousness, they are continually invited homeward.

The spiritual life for Teresa and John has nothing to do with actually getting closer to God. It is instead a journey of consciousness. Union with God is neither acquired nor received; it is realized, and in that sense it is something that can be yearned for, sought after, and—with God’s grace—found.

Every plainsman knows he has to find his place. The man who stays in his native district wishes he had arrived there after a long journey. And the man who travels begins to fear that he may not find a fitting end to his journey. I've spent my life trying to see my own place as a journey I never made.

But they are trials and tests for our own growth, not for God to find out how good we are. God knows that we are good; it is for us to discover that goodness. As we have seen, the tests of attachment, by bringing us to our knees in humility, may show us the way of goodness and allow us to choose that goodness with our whole being. We

When our lives are congruent with the Lord’s will, we are empowered spiritually. Remember what Joseph Smith was taught in Liberty Jail? If we let ‘virtue garnish [our] thoughts unceasingly; then shall [our] confidence wax strong in the presence of God’ (D&C 121:45). That is what we want as we seek to strengthen our faith. We want our confidence to be strong in God’s presence. We don’t want to shrink away because we are filled with shame. We want the kind of faith that caused Amanda Barnes Smith to immediately ask God for help in a time of extreme need. She did so in full confidence that He would answer because by then she had been hated and persecuted for His name’s sake. And so she knew her life was pleasing to her Heavenly Father! I believe this is what Paul meant when he said, ‘let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need’ (Hebrews 4:16). That kind of confidence, that kind of boldness comes from having actual knowledge we are living as God would have us live, doing what God would have us do. Here is another reason why these tender mercies and divine signatures are so important to us. They not only teach us about God’s nature, which strengthens our faith, but they are also a confirming witness that god is pleased with us—sometimes even delighted with us.

We can perform service to others for a variety of reasons. We can do good deeds because of fear, guilt, or the desire to inflate our egos. But if we really want to be loving, if we truly wish to respond to the call of justice and freedom, we must first have the courage to look into our own emptiness. We must somehow even come to love it.

In laboratories, we can see the results of experiments but we can’t follow the reactions that lead to those results. The paths of those reactions may reside outside the physical measurements of length, width, height, and time. Physics has entered the metaphysical, the realm beyond the physically perceivable, in the fullest sense of that word.

Hope can sometimes be an elusive thing, and occasionally it must come to us with pain. But it is there, irrevocably. Like freedom, hope is a child of grace, and grace cannot be stopped. I refer once more to Saint Paul, a man who, I am convinced, understood addiction: “Hope will not be denied, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.

Guilt says, “If only you had done it better.” Shame says, “If only you had been better.

Inside us all, in the depths of our winters, things are going on, things we will have no clue of until spring comes, and perhaps not even then.

responsibility means respecting ourselves and those around us. In the nature of systems, all our addictive behaviors affect other people.

Press forward with all diligence so that you may claim the promises of the Lord.

May Shamash the Sun God grant you success in your endeavor.

Regardless of when and how it happens, the dark night of the soul is the transition from bondage to freedom in prayer and in every other aspect of life.

the dark night is nothing other than our ongoing relationship with the Divine.

Thus God calls us, invites us, and even commands us, but God does not control our response. We alone bear responsibility for the choices we make.

Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”11

Resolutions mean willpower, willpower means achievement, achievement means success and failure, and the whole sequence means losing an appreciation of the gift. I have learned two sure things in the struggle between my desire for love and the oppression of my attachments. The first is that God is absolutely trustworthy. The second is that resolutions are absolutely not.

when rightly practiced, asceticism is the human component of the mysterious incarnate intimacy of human intention and divine grace which holds the only real hope of victory over attachment. Like

The active night of the spirit is characterized by similar disciplines and restraints applied to the intellect, memory, will, and imagination. John’s primary example here is of practicing the virtues. He says that the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love) are instrumental in freeing the spirit from its attachments. Faith darkens and empties the intellect, hope frees the memory, and love liberates the will.

Whatever else may come to pass, I do not think that on the Day of Direst Judgement any race other than the Welsh, or any other language, will give answer to the Supreme Judge of all from this small corner of the earth.

He was also worried about May, who was desperately ill and not likely to recover. He realized that she was fated to follow Trixie and Sylvia, and that he would soon be alone, without one member of the du Maurier family left.

For God has comforted Zion, and will take pity on all her waste places; Turning her wilderness into an Eden, her desert into the garden of God. Joy and gladness will be found in her, and thanksgiving, and the sounds of singing.”12

I think the greater danger is that those who think they understand the process [of overcoming our attachments] are likely to try to make it happen on their own by engaging in false austerities and love-denying self-deprivations. They will not wait for God's timing; they will rush ahead of grace. I have seen it happen when ascetic practices have become overinstitutionalized, and I have engaged in it myself when I thought I could engineer my own salvation. It does not work.

Constance FitzGerald, a contemporary Carmelite authority on John’s theology, points out John’s assertion that this divine inflow is the “loving Wisdom of God.” Specifically, she says, it is the active presence of Jesus Christ as Wisdom, as divine Sophia. Thus, “Dark night is not primarily some thing, an impersonal darkness like a difficult situation or distressful psychological condition, but someone, a presence leaving an indelible imprint on the human spirit and consequently on one’s entire life.”21

Testing may convincingly demonstrate the presence of bugs, but can never demonstrate their absence."- Edsger W. Dijkstra, Computing Pioneer (1930–2002), "Programming as a discipline of mathematical nature," Am. Math. Monthly, 81 (1974), No. 6, pp. 608–12.

In classrooms and living rooms across the globe, an agnostic or an atheist may be heard to strenuously argue, 'But the Bible is just a book.' Similar arguments may be raised against other holy books. But they all are too ironic, by half. A book is the Bible.

The greatest commandments are not obligations at all, but affirmations of grace. They are promises that with our willing assent, grace will make possible the triumph of full, unfettered love within us. Our assent, our yes, finally comes from nothing other than our own yearning, from passion itself. It may surface temporarily as desire for self-improvement, functional efficiency, moral virtue, or social justice, but ultimately it will take us beyond and beneath all such ends. Love will bring us to our ever-present beginning, where our only reason for saying yes is simply that we want to. Here it is only our plain desire that makes true assent possible: the desire to respond to a larger love already given, the desire to love and to be loved and to be fully, consciously present in love as an end in itself. It is a matter of simple caring, our hearts aching for the fullness of love for no other reason than its own essential goodness. In this simple, exquisite longing, awakening in each precious moment, we know who we really are. It is a likeness of God.

In spiritual direction, however, there has to be an ongoing awareness that anything can happen; that the Holy Spirit is already affecting the person; and that one must participate in this work through careful discernment and support. here again, it is necessary to walk the fierce path of free will and dependence. We must always claim the freedom we have been given; to do otherwise would devalue our humanity. But at the same time, we will increasingly recognize the extreme inadequacy of personal will and knowledge in figuring out what life is or how we should live it. As we grow in wisdom, we also grow in the realization of our utter dependence upon the Lord in all things. it seems to me, then, that in its purest human form spiritual direction is a journey towards more freely and deeply choosing to surrender to God.

I do not think we can ever adequately define or understand love; I do not think we were ever meant to. We are meant to participate in love without really comprehending it. We are meant to give ourselves, live ourselves into love’s mystery. It is the same for all important things in life; there is a mystery within them that our definitions and understandings cannot grasp. Definitions and understandings are images and concepts created by our brains to symbolize what is real. Our thoughts about something are never the thing itself. Further, when we think logically about something, our thoughts come sequentially – one after another. Reality is not confined to such linearity; it keeps happening all at once in each instant. The best our thoughts can do is try to keep a little running commentary in rapid, breathless sequence. . . A certain asceticism of mind, a gentle intellectual restraint, is needed to appreciate the important things in life. To be open to the truth of love, we must relinquish our frozen comprehensions and begin instead to appreciate. To comprehend is to grasp; to appreciate is to value. Appreciation is gentle seeing, soft acknowledgement, reverent perception. Appreciation can be a pleasant valuing: being awed by a night sky, touched by a symphony, or moved by a caress without needing to understand why. It can also be painful: feeling someone’s suffering, being shocked by loss or disaster without comprehending the reason. Appreciation itself is a kind of love; it is our direct human responsiveness, valuing what we cannot grasp. Love, the life of our heart, is not what we think. It is always ready to surprise us, to take us beyond our understandings into a reality that is both insecure and wonderful.

We are addicted to fulfilment, to the eradication of all emptiness. . . . swallowed the cultural myth that says, “if you are well-adjusted, and if you are living your life properly, you will feel fulfilled, satisfied, content, and serene.” If you are not satisfied and fulfilled, there is something wrong with you. . . . . . The myth of fulfilment makes us miss the most beautiful aspect of our human souls: our emptiness, our incompleteness, our radical yearning for love. We were never meant to be completely fulfilled; we were meant to taste it, to long for it, and to grow toward it. In this way we participate in love becoming life, life becoming love. To miss our emptiness is, finally, to miss our hope. Emptiness, yearning, incompleteness: these unpleasant words hold a hope for incomprehensible beauty. It is precisely in these seemingly abhorrent qualities of ourselves – qualities that we spend most of our time trying to fix or deny – that the very thing we most long for can be found: hope for the human spirit, freedom for love. This is a secret known by those who have had the courage to face their own emptiness. The secret of being in love, of falling in love with life as it is meant to be, is to befriend our yearning instead of avoiding it, to live into our longing rather than trying to resolve it, to enter the spaciousness of our emptiness instead of trying to fill it up. It has taken me a long time to learn this secret, and I continue to forget it many times each day.

I do not understand my own behavior; I do not act as I mean to, but I do the things that I hate. Though the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not; the good thing I want to do, I never do; the evil thing which I do not want—that is what I do.”2 In writing these words, Paul was talking about sin. Theologically, sin is what turns us away from love—away from love for ourselves, away from love for one another, and away from love for God. When I look at this problem psychologically, I see two forces that are responsible: repression and addiction. We all suffer from both repression and addiction. Of the two, repression is by far the milder one. Repression

If a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling,” Freud wrote, “he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings success with it.” The reverse might also be said, and a man who has been denied maternal esteem has also been denied that easy confidence, that wonderful feeling of triumph, with which the mother’s darling automatically greets every morning. If he does manage to achieve success, he often views it not as a gift, not as a birthright, but as a loan, and for the rest of his life he worries that it may be snatched away and given to someone more deserving. The emotional cost, the tension and the anxiety, may be considerable. Such

Ardent love-making on the stage Gerald considered very bad theatre. He did not attempt it himself, and strongly discouraged it in others. ‘Must you kiss her as though you were having steak and onions for lunch?’ he would say. ‘It may be what you feel, but it’s damned unattractive from the front row of the stalls. Can’t you just say, “I love you,” and yawn, and light a cigarette and walk away? Unfortunately, nobody was able to do this quite as he did it himself. He had methods of his own. He seldom kissed women on the stage, unless it was on the back of the neck or the top of the head, and then he would generally slap them on the face afterwards, and say, ‘You old funny, with your ugly mug,’ and walk away talking of something else as though he did not care.

An Englishman’s Home happened twenty-five years ago, and the war that it prophesied has come and gone. So much has happened since, so many things have changed; people have grown old, and have forgotten, and are dead; the realities of the true war were perhaps more terrible than Guy’s imagined invasion, and the little play that stirred the whole of England in 1909 may seem inadequate and pathetic today.

The Invitation of Love If we want to set the relationship between efficiency and love in its rightful order, we must go beyond laws and proclamations. If we desire a more loving society, we individual persons must return to the deepest common sense of our hearts; we must claim love as our true treasure. Then comes the difficult part: we must try to live according to our desire in the moment-by-moment experiences of our lives.

The door opened and Muriel came into the room. She looked round her a moment, smiling; and, instead of the powdered little actress she had expected, Mummie saw a tall slim girl, with light brown hair and no paint on her face, dressed simply in good clothes, a girl with wide-apart eyes who looked right amongst the furniture from New Grove House and Kicky’s drawings on the wall, and the books and the rugs. As Mummie went to greet her, Muriel ran forward and took her hands and kissed her, and said, ‘I am so glad to be here with you all’; then looked a little troubled, and lowered her voice, glancing towards the door, and said, ‘I’m in such a way about Gerald, he is starting one of his horrid colds.’ Mummie looked at the girls and smiled, Trixie nodded her head, and Sylvia and May leant back with a sigh of relief. The ewee lamb was safe in the fold at last.

It is to my comfort that I entertain stories of ghosts, of discarnate spirits, of angels, of relatives returning to this realm to speak to us... speaking to us in our thoughts and in our dreams. I take comfort in these because no matter how advanced we humans may be... no matter how civilized, how cultured, there will always be some aspect of the spiritual realm that not even the greatest living genius can truly comprehend or explain.

Excessive preoccupation with psyche and evil - either from supportive or antagonistic standpoints - fosters a degree of self-consciousness and self-importance that is very likely to eclipse the ever-present mystery of God's truth. Discernments are essential, but it is not at all necessary or helpful to become attached to making them. If possible, it is best to see psychological phenomena such as dreams, fantasies, images, and thoughts as manifestations of God's potential in the same way that nature, art, relationships, and all other phenomena are. Gazing into an empty, blue sky, kneeling in prayer in a cathedral, and recalling memories associated with a dream can all be worthwhile spiritual explorations. The can also all be distractions from spiritual exploration. The beauty of the sky or the cathedral can create an absorption with sensate experience, just as dream analysis can create ego-absorption.

Before, one needed God as the agent of recovery, the divine dispenser of grace. Now this need is developing into a love for God as God’s self. This is a beautiful happening, but it brings with it a new relinquishment that can feel deeply threatening. Along with the sweetness of emerging love comes a certain shakiness about recovery. Recovery is no longer the single most important thing in life. Something else has taken its place, and the fear of relapse grows.

Being in love, however, is something we say yes to. It is a willing yielding into love’s presence. It is a conscious easing of defenses. When we accept the presence of love and give ourselves to it, we glimpse immense freedom and spaciousness. There is room to move around, unencumbered by fear and doubt. Being in love is like a breath of liberation for our spirits. It awakens our passion and inspires a vitality within us that we never knew we had. Love always seeks freedom; love wants to play.

It is no accident that contemplatives use the language of romance to describe awakening to the great yearning of life. . . The contemplatives say there is a level at which all our hearts are always saying yes to love, regardless of how dulled or preoccupied our conscious minds are and regardless of how unloving our actions may be. . . I find it immensely reassuring to know that deep within myself, and within all my sisters and brothers, something is always and irrevocably saying yes to love, wanting to grow into fulfilment. It helps me be more compassionate with myself and others when we fail so miserably at loving one another. It also reminds me that the journey toward greater love is not something to be instilled in people; it is already there to be tended, nurtured, and affirmed. Brother Lawrence, in a parenthetical line in The Practice of the Presence of God, said, “People would be very surprised if they knew what their souls said to God sometimes.” Moments of contemplation, moments of realizing being in love, are times when the sporadic consciousness of our minds approaches the constant wakefulness of our hearts.

We are so busy, so occupied with many little things, that we are blind to the one great thing. Only in the pauses between things, in the brief contemplative spaces of just being, can we catch a glimpse of love itself. Even then, we often feel so unfree that we think we are unworthy of love. But the glimpses keep coming. In the momentary emptiness when an addictive need is not yet satisfied, in encountering a situation in which we do not know what to do, in finding ourselves giving or receiving a touch of tenderness for no reason at all, in the spontaneous eruption of laughter, another small space opens. The invitation is given again. Time and time again we ignore the invitations and fill the spaces immediately, dulling our consciousness with drivenness. But love continues, hoping to catch us in a willing moment. Thousands of little spaces come each day. They exist between each choice we make and the next, after each thought is completed and before the next begins, between each breath and the next, in every hunger or wanting, whenever something wakes us up to presence. Now and then, through some mysterious interweaving of divine grace and human willingness, we see what is in the space and do not run away. We become aware of our hearts’ response and are given the most wonderful experience of freedom . . .

People in our modern developed world are ambivalent about . . . spaciousness. On the one hand, we long for space . . . On the other hand, we are liable to become very uncomfortable when such spaces do open up. . . . Today many of us have been so conditioned by efficiency that such times feel unproductive, irresponsible, lazy, even selfish. . . . We somehow must realign our attitudes toward spaciousness. We must begin to see it as presence rather than absence, friend instead of enemy. This is the most important practical challenge we face in being consciously in love. It will not be easy, because we have come to associate space with fear, emptiness with negativity, lack of fulfilment with dysfunction. . . . We are addicted to fulfilment, to the eradication of all emptiness.

Arminius, appealing to Lactantius, held that: 'To recommend faith to others, we must make it the subject of persuasion, and not of compulsion'. He insisted that the true religion from Christ does not deteriorate into dissention. In the exercise of Christian liberty there will be sincere and honest differences. These differences cannot and should not be stamped out by means of coercion. In confronting the Scripture, Christians should be able to agree on what is necessary for salvation. But when mutual consent and agreement cannot be obtained on some articles, 'then the right hand of fellowship should be extended by both parties'. Each party should 'acknowledge the other for partakers of the same faith and fellow-heirs of the same salvation, although they may hold different sentiments concerning the nature of faith and the manner of salvation'.

It is a good rule of thumb for spiritual directors to ask themselves, What truly constitutes our spiritual concern here? Am I really being attentive to the Lord in this? What things are getting in the way of our simple, humble intention towards the working of the Holy Spirit in this person's life? All human experience can be said to be spiritual in the largest sense, but spiritual direction should deal primarily with those qualities that seem most clearly and specifically spiritual, those that reveal the presence or leadings of God, or evidence of grace, working most directly in a person's life. This becomes increasingly important as spiritual direction progresses over time with any given individual. In the course of spiritual maturation, concern with superficial psychological experience must give way to a much more basic concern for the discernment of good and evil.

Ideally, work is consecrated. It is something that happens within the present moment . . . Ideally, work is just another beautiful form of joining the cosmic sparkle. But this is an ideal. . . . I worked as a psychiatrist in public institutions . . . for nearly 20 years. During the last 12 of those years, I was consciously trying to be mindful of love, to practice the presence of God. It was the most frustrating thing I ever tried to do. . . . as soon as I entered the ward everything changed. I was immediately kidnapped. I was gone: away from the present, away from any sense of love or its source, away from even appreciating my own being. . . Looking back, it seems clear that I went into my sense of responsibility for the diagnosis and care of the patients. . . . And there was so much paperwork! Most days I would remain forgetful until my work was done and I was driving home. Then I would remember, and such sadness would fill me. Where had I been? How could I have allowed myself to be so captured? I can remember driving home one day after I had spent a long time feeling helpless with a very disturbed patient. I actually slapped myself in the face when I realized I could have been praying for her and praying for myself instead of just worrying about what to do. I tried everything . . . and still it did not “work”. . . . It stopped only when I left the psychiatric institutions and started working full-time with Shalem. . . . I go into this detail because what I am saying does not apply only to psychiatric institutions. It applies, to some extent, to almost every institution we have. It applies to education and social work, to government and business, and to religious institutions as well. People are stuck in all these places, and they can neither get out of them nor find a loving quality of presence within them. Love demands defenselessness, and in many if not most of our workplaces that is just too high a price.

Classic Eastern and Western spiritual traditions identify three ways of approaching life: the way of action, the way of knowing, and the way of feeling. It is assumed that a full life involves all three, but at any given time a person tends to prefer one. It is not important to do psychological gymnastics to figure out which orientation you might have. It is critical, however, to recognize that neither love nor anything else of consequence can rightfully be reduced to one narrow vision. Love is feeling – tenderness, caring, and longing – but it is also much more. Love is action – kindness, charity, and commitment – and again, it is much more. Love is knowing – openness of attitude, realization of connectedness, expansion of attention beyond ourselves – and still it is more. . . In both Eastern and Western spirituality, there is a fourth way, an appreciation that embraces action, feeling, and knowing and also seeks the “more” that love always is. . . In the West, it is called the contemplative way. Contemplative moments can happen in crisis, excitement, and great activity, or in quiet stillness and simple appreciation. However it happens, contemplation and immerses us in the reality of the moment. We are no longer standing apart and reflecting upon our experience, we are vitally, consciously involved with what is going on. Everything is more clear, more real than it usually is. . . . Contemplative appreciation is the fullest possible realization of love. The contemplative moments that come to us all as flashes of immediate presence or glimpses of the way life yearns to be lived. They are hints of the vast, graceful gift of love that has already been given to the family of humanity. The contemplative heart says, “only open your hands, receive the gift.” This does not mean we can control contemplation or that we can be contemplative at will. It is a gift that we can accept only as it is given. But it is given far more frequently, for more steadily than we could ever imagine.

Homeostasis is necessary for life. It provides a stable home base, a resting place from which the body can respond to the surrounding world. . . In the service of homeostasis, addiction acts upon the human spirit like gravity upon a planetary body, seeking to hold it within a stable orbit against the planet’s own centrifugal striving for the stars. In this way, our most natural addictions safeguard the essentials of life. They are part of love, but they are pure function, unadulterated efficiency, nothing but inhibition. For the spirit seeking freedom of love, as for the planet seeking the stars, the gravity of addiction is a painful price to pay for safety. If homeostasis were the end of things, that end would surely be Sheol: stagnation and death. With no stretching, reaching, opening, or yearning to counteract our gravity, we would collapse in upon ourselves like stars becoming black holes. Often we do try to choose that option. We choose safety over freedom; we entrench ourselves in inertia. We dull and occupy ourselves so completely that we stifle our desire, anesthetize our yearning, restrict the energy of our passion. This does not remove us from the ongoing birth of creation, but it deadens us to it. . . We all opt for safety on occasion . . . Most of us choose it more than we would like to admit. Some of us choose it continually. . . . Love does not permit homeostasis to be the end of things. If we so choose, whatever stability we have can be the source of endless beginnings. Our equilibrium can be gestation rather than stagnation. Homeostasis can be the place where we wake up to our yearnings, however painful, and claim them as our own. . . We can say yes to the invitation of love and begin to open up and reach out again. Each time we say yes we upset our stability. We sacrifice our serenity. We risk our safety. We become vulnerable to being hurt. And creation shines more brightly. . . Each human yes contributes a priceless breath of freedom to the endlessly birthing universe.

You will also be tempted to try to hold onto a sense of presence, to make a steady state of it. It will not work. If you are lucky, you’ll just miss the moment and be frustrated. If you are successful in holding on, things will be much worse. At some point you will discover that what you are holding is not real; it is something you yourself have contrived. You will also discover that you have been suppressing and deceiving yourself in order to keep it. . . . In trying to maintain a state, we are naturally expressing our deep desire for wakeful presence in love. But it is a wrong way of expressing it. This way becomes willful so quickly and insidiously that we lose touch with our relationship with grace . . . And grace, thank God, is not dependent upon our state of mind. Some traditions would disagree with my advice. Much of the spirituality of the early Christian desert, for example, advised using all one’s mental strength to hold onto remembrance of Christ. Some Hindu and Buddhist disciplines encourage a similar forcefulness. Such effortful concentration may have a place in monastic settings and can be helpful as a temporary mental stretch before yielding into simple presence. But I do not recommend it as a steady diet for people who live in the world of families, homes, and workplaces. I have tried it myself, and it only created great trouble for me. I became depressed and irritable inside and absolutely obnoxious around friends and family. . . . I suggest you become familiar with the feeling you have inside when you make a resolution or strive to cling to something . . . Get to know the feeling well, so that whenever you feel it you can stop what you’re doing, take a breath, relax, yield a little, and let your real self turn to the real God. . . Seek to encourage yourself instead of manipulating yourself. Cultivate your receptivity to the little interior glances instead of grasping for them. Live, love, and yearn with unbearable passion, but don’t try to make it happen and don’t try to hold on when it does happen.

We may need to consider a little abstinence from our automatic, reflexive responses of being helpful to others. For some of us, doing this may feel very threatening; to identify our addictions of helpfulness is to challenge the ways we habitually express love – it comes close to challenging our love itself. . . . Let us go back for a moment and look at that tiny, perhaps almost nonexistent space between feeling a person’s pain and doing something in response to it. It is not easy to just be with the pain of another, to feel it as your own. No wonder we are likely to jump into our habitual responses so quickly. As soon as we start doing something for or to the suffering person, we can minimize the bare agony of feeling that person’s pain. It is like that everywhere; our addicted doings act as minor anaesthesia. . . . Sometimes, perhaps often, taking the space will feel like an absence of response. We may fear the person will think we don’t care because we are not immediately hopping like popcorn to do something helpful. And sometimes the response that is authentically invited will never appear overtly helpful. Perhaps we are just invited to pray, silently in the background, or just to be present without saying a word or offering even a touch. Sometimes love even invites us to leave a person alone. Such responses are not too good for our egos; the suffering person is unlikely to come and thank us for our lack of involvement. But love does not ask for credit, nor does it permit ego-gratification as the motive for response. Authentic loving responsiveness calls for a kind of fasting from being helpful. Real helpfulness requires a relinquishment of our caretaking reflexes. It demands not only that we stay present with the un-anaesthetized pain of the person or situation, but that we also risk appearing to be uncaring. It further asks us to be unknowing. Right there in the centre of a situation that screams for action, we must admit that we really don’t know what to do. Finally, it invites us to turn our consciousness toward the exact point where our hearts are already looking: to the source of love. There, and only there, is the wellspring of authentic responsiveness found.