Any chance you get, please read and then re-read Weil's spiritual classic, "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God."
You'll find it here: http://www.hagiasophiaclassical.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Right-Use-of-School-Studies-Simone-Weil.pdf
Every time that a man has, with a pure heart, called upon Osiris, Dionysus, Buddha, the Tao, etc., the Son of God has answered him by sending the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit has acted upon his soul, not by inciting him to abandon his religious tradition, but by bestowing upon him light— and in the best of cases the fullness of light — in the heart of that same religious tradition. … It is, therefore, useless to send out missions to prevail upon the peoples of Asia, Africa or Oceania to enter the Church.
Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest
It is given to very few spirits to discover that things and beings exist.
Simone Weil
To walk with tender assent is to walk steely as a mountain in cloud, your delight concurring with heaven.
I Ching, Hexagram 10, “Walking”
The sound of water says what I think.
Chuang Tzu 370-287 BC
What the river says, that is what I say.
Wm Stafford, 1914-1993
"Who inside Daddy gave Mommy the flowers?"
Rody, age 4
My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.
Emerson
Great power, not clinging to power, has true power.
Lao Tzu
We have ways within each other
that can never be said by anyone.
-- Rumi
The way that can be told
is not the eternal way.
-- Lao Tsu
My heart can take on any form: a meadow for gazelles, a cloister for monks; for the idols, sacred ground; Ka’aba for the circling pilgrim. The tablets of the Torah, the scrolls of the Koran. My creed is love. Wherever its caravan turns along the way, that is my belief, my faith.
Ibn Arabi 1165-1240
Who is it we spend our whole lives loving?
Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray. Rumi
Everything only connected by "and" and "and." Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.) Open the heavy book. Why couldn't we have seen this old Nativity while we were at it? --the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light, an undisturbed, unbreathing flame, colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw, and, lulled within, a family with pets, --and looked and looked our infant sight away. Elizabeth Bishop
Somewhere there is a love for what isn’t yet, as Kuehlewind put it, that it might become.
In the end, we are always looking for the kingdom of God.
-- R. Steiner, lecture of Oct 7, 1922
What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with this extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was.
Here, there is no spot
that doesn't look right at you.
You must change your life.
-- Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo"
Remember: We capitalize LORD by virtue of a translation tradition, from Hebrew into English.... More on that in weeks to come!
The eye through which I see God is the eye through which God sees me.
-- Meister Eckhart
