Every artistic creation is an attempt to recover something of the original sense of order, of right proportion. Our capacity for wonder, for awe, our sense of the magical and the sacred, has its source here—in what we can call a state of grace, equilibrium. I suppose that what we refer to as sacred is so because of some primal relation between ourselves and the world. We feel that a part of our being is hallowed or blessed by this, that some acts of ours enhance this feeling, while others violate it.
Quotations
Creators on Creating
With the word creative we stand under a mystery. And from time to time that mystery, as if it were a sun, sends down upon one head or another, a sudden shaft of light—by grace, one feels, rather than deserving, for it always is something given, free, unsought, unexpected. It is useless, possibly even profane, to ask for an explanation.
There is a Season
When we grow radishes in a small container in a city apartment, we participate in creation. We sustain the globe. When we sweep the street in front of a house in the dirtiest city in the country, we bring new order to the universe. We tidy the Garden of Eden. We make God's world new again. When we repair what has been broken or paint what is old or give away what we have earned that is above and beyond our own sustenance, we stoop down and scoop up the earth and breathe into it new life again, as God did one morning in time only to watch it unfold, unfold, and unfold through the ages.
Art and the Creative Unconscious
The creative process is generation and birth as well as transformation and rebirth. The perpetual self-renewal and the dependence on grace of the person who opens to create are a human parallel to the eternal rebirth of all that is created.
Intuition
You do not have to be in some setting hallowed by greatness, or in the presence of an artist honored around the world, for art to move you. Art can work its magic any time you are in the presence of a work created by someone who has gone inside the act of creation to become what they are creating. When this takes place, time stands still, and if our hearts are open to this experience, our spirits soar and our imaginations are unfettered.
In the future, creativity will be meaningful only if it is relevant to all humanity.
The Rose of the World
Creative work, like love, is not an exclusive gift bestowed on only a chosen few. A few now possess sanctity and moral vision, heroism and wisdom, genius and talent. But all that is merely activation of the potential dormant within every soul. A sea of love, an unexhaustible wellspring of creativity, bubbles behind the consciousness of each one of us. . . . All creative work that is done in its own name and for its own sake is divine in nature. Through it, people elevate themselves and fill their own hearts and the hearts of those around them with God.
Christ of the Celts
The whole cosmos is a Self-giving of God. And we will find our place in the great dance only to the extent that we love.
I had found a kind of serenity, a new maturity . . . I didn't feel better or stronger than anyone else but it seemed no longer important whether everyone loved me or not—more important now was for me to love them. Feeling that way turns your whole life around; living becomes the act of giving.
The Prophet
Love gives naught but itself and takes
naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love . . .
Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh
There is the same difference in a person before and after he or she is in love as there is in an unlighted lamp and one that is burning. The lamp was there and it was a good lamp, but now it is shedding light too and that is its real function.
Transformations: Awakening to the Sacred in Ourselves
Real love is always difficult, as the German poet Rilke said, because "it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become a world, to become a world in himself for the sake of another, it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances." Eventually, love forces us to turn within. In the Symposium, his meditation on love, Plato called love a child of fullness and emptiness, suggesting that there is a kind of desolation built into every love. There comes a moment in the progress of most loves when lovers feel isolated and unfulfilled, because they have discovered that they cannot find real and enduring meaning by reaching outside themselves, clinging to their lover. . . They may see that it is only by daring to open to the silence at the center of themselves that they can begin to feel the presence of the One whom they have been searching for all along.
Love, like a flame, cannot fail to give out light.
Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.
Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility . . . though weary, it is not tired . . . though alarmed, it is not confounded . . .
Walking With Wisdom
Blessed are those whose hands and heart
have maintained justice,
who have lived in accordance with
the laws of Love;
those faithful to Love Consciousness
will hear the good counsel, the
guidance of Wisdom in their hearts.
The fruits of integrity, justice,
sharing, and compassion
bear only blessing.
365 Prescriptions for the Soul
The greatest truth I know about life is that love is the answer. If you ask me what the question is, I will tell you it is every question you could ever ask. Love is always the answer to every question and problem. We are here to love and be loved and learn a few things in the process. I can never be wrong when I choose to love. Love rewards me by bringing meaning to my life.
My interior life is a walk through darkness with the God within who leads us beyond and out of ourselves to become a vessel of Divine Love let loose upon the world.
The Holy Spirit is our harpist, and all strings which are touched by Love must sound.
When I say, "Love yourself," this is for those who have never gone inside, because they always can. . . . They are bound to understand only a language of duality. Love yourself—that means you are dividing yourself into two, the lover and the loved. You may not have thought about it, but if you go inside you will not love yourself, you will be love.
Love is the only force that can make things one without destroying them.
Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons
We hunger to be known and understood. We hunger to be loved. We hunger to be at peace inside our own skins. We hunger not just to be fed these things but, often without realizing it, we hunger to feed others these things because they too are starving for them. We hunger not just to be loved but to love, not just to be forgiven but to forgive, not just to be known and understood for all the good times and bad times that for better for worse have made us who we are, but to know and understand each other to the same point of seeing that, in the last analysis, we all have the same good times, the same bad times, and that for that very reason there is no such thing in all the world as anyone who is really a stranger.
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
Lumen Christi . . . Holy Wisdom
Light dwells deep within each of us
ready to radiate forth
as our will freely surrenders
in alignment with our soul's purpose.
We are here on Earth to lift and deepen
our own awareness and that of creation:
co-partners in the Divine Plan
for the divinization of all creation.
Seek within and find the Source
of Love and Light.
Shine in unity with all whose joy
is to co-birth as a light
in the world.
Quiet Pilgrimage
"Live up to the light that you have and more will be given to you" is a familiar Quaker saying. Indifference and inattentiveness dim the light, overzealousness causes it to flicker. William Penn warned against "running before we are sent." We can seldom be absolutely sure that we are following the light: psychology has taught us that the voice of the unconscious self may take on a spurious resemblance to a divine call. We can only do the best we know at the time and trust that the Spirit, the Eternal Goodness, Reality, The Christ Within, God -- the name seems to me to matter little -- may be able to make use of the willingness alone, as if just wishing to be sensitive to the light removed some obstacle to the movement of the divine in human affairs.
Your life is something opaque, not transparent, as long as you look at it in an ordinary human way. But if you hold it up against the light of God's goodness, it shines and turns transparent, radiant and bright. And then you ask yourself in amazement: Is this really my own life I see before me?
As we become purer channels for God's light, we develop an appetite for the sweetness that is possible in this world. A miracle worker is not geared toward fighting the world that is, but toward creating the world that could be
Canto IV
Thus the Light rains, thus pours,
the liquid and rushing crystal
beneath the knees of the gods.
Light gives of itself freely, filling all available space. It does not seek anything in return; it asks not whether you are friend or foe. It gives of itself and is not thereby diminished.
So Quietly the Earth
The canyon bleeds, then deepens
and darkens ...
A sliver of white moon in the east.
Thin Light spills into the gorge
and the river sings an ancient song.
At the edge of shadow, night:
dark stone, pine scent, water,
cascading Light.
The Old Curiosity Shop
The flowers that sleep by night opened their gentle eyes and turned them to the day. The light, creation's mind, was everywhere, and all things owned its power.
You must not think of the light of the sun as the true Light of God. It is a reflection of the true Light. That other Light, that we can neither know nor comprehend, is so subtle, so highly potent that, for us . . . it is darkness.
Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.
Remembering
And now above and beyond the birds' song, Andy hears a more distant singing, whether of voices or instruments, sounds or words, he cannot tell. It is at first faint, and then stronger, filling the sky and touching the ground, and the birds answer it. He understands presently that he is hearing the light; he is hearing the sun, which now has risen, though from the valley it is not yet visible. The light's music resounds and shines in the air and over the countryside, drawing everything into the infinite, sensed but mysterious pattern of its harmony. From every tree and leaf, grass blade, stone, bird, and beast, it is answered and again answers. The creatures sing back their names. But more than their names. They sing their being. The world sings. The sky sings back. It is one song, the song of the many members of one love, the whole song sung and to be sung, resounding, in each of its moments. And it is light.
Peace Pilgrim
For light I go directly to the Source of light, not to any of the reflections.
Hymn of the Universe
Far from light emerging gradually out of the womb of our darkness, it is the Light, existing before all else was made which, patiently, surely, eliminates our darkness. As for creatures, of ourselves, we are but emptiness and obscurity. . . . Radiant Word, Blazing Power . . . reach us simultaneously through all that is most immense and most inward within us and around us.
The beating heart of the universe is holy joy.
Finding Joy
Joy has the power to open our hearts, remove fear, instill hope, and foster healing. Joy leads us to wisdom, because it connects us to all we are -- our mind, heart, power, and spirit. Joy stimulates our immune system, increases our energy, and gives us mental clarity. It helps us heighten our level of consciousness so we can more readily tap our inner wisdom. Instead of agonizing over decisions, we become more able to simply listen within and know what to do.
Weavings
Joy is a piercing desire, a mystical longing both painful and sweet: a kind of homesickness for a home we scarcely remember.
For this joy is close to you,
it is in you!
None of you has a spirit so heavy
nor an intelligence so feeble,
none of you is so far from God
not to be able to find this joy
in God.
The Prison Angel
"You sense the pure joy from her. And it's nice to touch that. Because we're all so skeptical -- I know I am. But even the skeptics begin to believe in God just because she's so happy. And it's not like she's preaching. This woman is just joy and happiness, period. . . . The first time you meet her, you think she's not real, not normal. But in twenty years I've never seen her change. There's an exuberance about her relationship with God, her relationship with people. Just joy, happiness, love. It's what we're born to be, and wish we could be."
Soul of Eternity, Body of Time
We know joy when we are happy to take from life what is given. When we experience the joy of the soul and higher states of consciousness, this joy is the essence of completion and fulfillment. There is nothing that can add to it or take away from it. Joy is our natural state.
The only true joy on earth is to escape from the prison of our own fake self and enter by Love into union with the Life who dwells and sings with the essence of every creature and in the core of our own souls.
One Hundred Poems
Dance, my heart! Dance today with joy.
The strains of love fill the days and the
nights with music, and the world is
listening to its melodies.
Made with joy, life and death dance to
the rhythm of this music. The hills
and the sea and the earth dance.
The world of man dances in laughter and tears.
Why put on the robe of the monk, and
live aloof from the world in lonely pride?
Behold! My heart dances in the delight of
a hundred arts; and the Creator
is well pleased.
Psalms for Prayer
I praise You in the silence
of my heart,
for your steadfast love,
O my Beloved;
I offer prayers of gratitude
O Holy One of the universe .
My heart leaps for joy, as
I whisper to You
in the night --
my soul also, which You
renew within me.
Joy is wisdom, time an endless song.
Mystical Dogs
Barnaby was like a mood, a fragrance of the harmonious inner life, permeating everything with which he came into contact. He knew sorrow and he knew joy, and he held them in a delicate balance of serenity and peace. He knew how to respond equally joyfully to an invitation to walk or talk or sit together, which seems to me to be a particular kind of training in grace -- a willingness to respond easily and happily to even the most modest adventure together. Perhaps it could be said that within his framework of being a dog, he lived life as a spiritual exercise.
Always, when we are still, we may hear the song of Life pouring joyously through our consciousness. We have only to listen, for it is always there. If we would catch the vision of the joy meant to be ours, we must dry our tears, lay aside our fears, and think from the inspirational center within us, which is nothing less than the Divine singing its song of life.
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy
We see into the life of things.
Joy is the echo of God's life in us.