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Uncommon Prayer

Toward A New Liturgy

There is something that loves you in the world. The voice that speaks to you within, in the worst despair, is not different from the voice that called the world into being.

Encounter Above Tintern Abbey

Then he let go of me, and the meaning of the poem was clear. This man had finally brought me inside of it. Both of us had somehow been given what we came for. On the trail down to the bridge I broke out in goose flesh.

Sunbeams

Monkeys are superior to men in this: when a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.

Malcolm de Chazal

Betrayals Of My One Love

Notebooks 1974 – 1980

We are seduced by the beauty of the veils never to look further. This is God’s camouflage. We must not let Him get away with it.

Auntie Barba

In early times, divine guidance came through prophets, but for today’s fast-paced and multidenominational world, the most direct and democratic means of communion is the unpretentious fortune cookie. Remember that our Universal Source has a sense of humor. It was Voltaire who remarked that God is a comedian playing to an audience that’s afraid to laugh.

Step By Step

To live without suffering means to live always in the present. The highest happiness is here and now. There is no time at all unless we cling to it. Brothers and sisters, please eat time!

The Ward

The first noise was hardly audible, like the whimper of a child so hurt that the wounds had to speak, a primal crying that went far deeper than language. The hurt had lost all anger and selfishness; it spoke only of its existence, incapable of any control, gurgling its rawness.

Sunbeams

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

The Prophet Explains Religion

OK so he don’t look like a prophet but he’s / A real smart old guy. Got a place / Over a Chinese restaurant on Broadway / & you got something you want to ask / Just take him some chateau la hooch & go up the back way. / Says PROPHET IS IN on the door.

Sunbeams

No matter what success I experience, my contentment is never final. I carry with me always a secret desire to die to the old man and rise to the new . . . for hidden in my life is the certainty that no mode of existence can ever fulfill me completely.

Adrian Van Kaam