Category: experience
Quotes of Category: experience
We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared. book-quotechildrenexperienceobscurityTo care means first of all to empty our own cup and to allow the other to come close to us. It means to take away the many barriers which prevent us from entering into communion with the other. When we dare to care, then we discover that nothing human is foreign to us, but that all the hatred and love, cruelty and compassion, fear and joy can be found in our own hearts. When we dare to care, we have to confess that when others kill, I could have killed too. When others torture, I could have done the same. When others heal, I could have healed too. And when others give life, I could have done the same. Then we experience that we can be present to the soldier who kills, to the guard who pesters, to the young man who plays as if life has no end, and to the old man who stopped playing out of fear for death.By the honest recognition and confession of our human sameness, we can participate in the care of God who came, not to the powerful but powerless, not to be different but the same, not to take our pain away but to share it. Through this participation we can open our hearts to each other and form a new community. book-quoteexperiencecommunityempathyOr we'll go that way. Or we'll walk on the highways now, and we'll have time to putthings into ourselves. And some day, after it sets in us a long time, it'll come out ofour hands and our mouths. And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will beright. We'll just start walking today and see the world and the way the world walksaround and talks, the way it really looks. I want to see everything now. And whilenone of it will be me when it goes in, after a while it'll all gather together inside and it'llbe me. Look at the world out there, my God, my God, look at it out there, outside me,out there beyond my face and the only way to really touch it is to put it where it'sfinally me, where it's in the blood, where it pumps around a thousand times tenthousand a day. I get hold of it so it'll never run off. I'll hold on to the world tight someday. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning. book-quotetravelinspirationallife
