Lectio Divina - Seventy-Eight

Ann Belford Ulanov, The Living God and Our Living Psyche: What Christians Can Learn from Carl Jung. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008, Kindle location 820.

The psyche wants to be whole, which does not mean perfect, but that all parts are brought in. God wants all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, not just the parts we choose. This is coming home, taking acceptance all the way down. The shameful secret, the hidden manipulation, even the murderous intent and, as well, the undared talent and buried tenderness, also get a seat at the table.

Lectio Divina - Seventy-Seven

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions, 1961, pp. 80-81.

We do not go into the desert to escape people but to learn how to find them; we do not leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good. But this is only a secondary end.

The one end that includes all others is the love of God.

. . . the truest solitude is not something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you; it is an abyss opening up in the center of your own soul.

And this abyss of interior solitude is a hunger that will never be satisfied with any created thing.

The only way to find solitude is by hunger and thirst and sorrow and poverty and desire, and the man who has found solitude is empty, as if he had been emptied by death.

He has advanced beyond all horizons. There are no directions left in which he can travel. This is a country whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. You do not find it by traveling but by standing still.

Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

Lectio Divina - Seventy-Six

Dag Hammarskjold, quoted in W.H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book. New York: Viking, 1970, p. 174.

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

Lectio Divina - Seventy-Five

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey. Boston: Little, Brown, 1961, p. 172.

The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-Consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who’ll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty Weltschmerzen and Professor Tuppers go away and never come back. And by God, if you have intelligence enough to see that -- and you do -- and yet you refuse to see it, then you’re misusing the prayer, you’re using it to ask for a world full of dolls and saints and no Professor Tuppers.