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.
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.
From The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks. New York: HarperCollins, 1995, p. 103.
God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each note is a need coming through one of us,
a passion, a longing-pain.
Remember the lips
where the wind-breath originated,
and let your note be clear.
Don’t try to end it.
Be your note.
I’ll show you how it’s enough.
Carmina Gadelica, quoted in Esther de Waal, The Celtic Way of Prayer: The Recovery of the Religious Imagination. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003, p.33-4.
God, kindle Thou in my heart within
A flame of love to my neighbor,
To my foe, to my friend, to my kindred all,
To the brave, to the knave, to the thrall,
O Son of the loveliest Mary,
From the lowliest thing that liveth,
To the Name that is highest of all.
O Son of the loveliest Mary,
From the lowliest thing that liveth,
To the Name that is highest of all.
Marie-Louise von Franz, Creation Myths. Boston: Shambhala, 1995, pp. 11-12.
One of Jung’s students asked him, “I am now seventy and you are eighty years old. Won’t you tell me what your thoughts are on life after death?” Jung’s answer was, “It won’t help you when you are lying on your deathbed to recall, ‘Jung said this or that.’ You must have your own ideas about it. You have to have your own myth. To have your own myth means to have suffered and struggled with a question until an answer has come to you from the depths of your soul. That does not imply that this is the definitive truth, but rather that this truth which has come is relevant for oneself as one now is, and believing in this truth helps one to feel well.”
Ann & Barry Ulanov, Cinderella & Her Sisters: The Envied and the Envying. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1983, p.121.
Even the saints must not be envied or emulated here. Even their most daring deeds must not be coveted to replace our own little timid acts and to make us into mirrors of their majesty. Their daring is theirs, not ours. Their renunciation, if that is the mark of their holiness, is for them, not for us.
Esther de Waal, The Celtic Way of Prayer: The Recovery of the Religious Imagination. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003, p.8.
The word peregrinatio is almost untranslatable, but its essence is caught in the ninth-century story of three Irishmen drifting over the sea from Ireland for seven days, in coracles without oars, coming ashore in Cornwall and then being brought to the court of King Alfred. When he asked them where they had come from and where they were going they answered that they “stole away because we wanted for the love of God to be on pilgrimage, we cared not where”. This wonderful response and this amazing undertaking comes out of the inspirational character of early Irish spirituality. It shows at once how misleading is that word “pilgrimage” and how very different indeed is the Celtic peregrinatio from the pilgrimages of the Middle Ages or the present day. There is no specific end or goal such as that of reaching a shrine or a holy place which allows the pilgrim at the end of the journey to return home with a sense of a mission accomplished. Peregrinatio is not undertaken at the suggestion of some monastic abbot or superior but because of an inner prompting in those who set out, a passionate conviction that they must undertake what was essentially an inner journey. Ready to go wherever the Spirit might take them, seeing themselves as hospites mundi “guests of the world”, what they are seeking is the place of their resurrection, the resurrected self, the true self in Christ, which is for all of us our true home.
