"Passionate love is only a momentary eruption if it’s not expressed in fidelity."
Jean Sulivan
"What are we to do in the midst of our tangled lives? Nothing, except to let love act. To become its accomplice, in happiness or sorrow. To put oneself second. To love without hope of return. Every pain can become a lasting joy, starting today."
"Personalities united can contain more of God and sustain the force of his greater presence much better than scattered individuals. The fire of God kindles higher as the brands are heaped together and each is warmed by the other’s flame."
Dallas Willard
"From need to desire, from desire to love, from love to self-forgetfulness."
Jean Sulivan
"Naturally, God doesn’t need prayers. Let’s stop turning him into a potentate anxious for homage. It’s you and I who need prayer so that we will no longer be alone, in order to get out of our shells and rejoin the movement of love. We can’t link up with others without passing through what is furthest away; to get there it’s necessary to lose one’s identity. It’s in that loss that I can find you, that you can find yourself. To pray is therefore to introduce love, humor, and death into every action and ideology. Hence prayer is the revolutionary act par excellence, the very opposite of alienation."
Jean Sulivan
"… The Bible is perfectly clear on this. After Ezekiel, the loving tenderness of Amos and Hosea serve to dissolve formalism. The Gospels contrast ritual to the love of God and neighbor, which sums up the law (John 5:6; Mark 2:27, Matthew 12:8; Luke 6:9). It’s quite clear; mystics and saints of every century, as well as countless ordinary people, have lived in that light.
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It’s nearly impossible to quibble about this. The object of faith, we repeat, is not a bare catalogue of truths; it is to love God in knowing His love for us, even if this love has little in common with what we imagine love to be. As a result, Christian love consists in loving others, not in words and ideas, but in acts (John 3:19). It calls for the creation here and now of a new relationship with others."
Jean Sulivan
"When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination. What can any artist set on fire but his world? What can any people bring to the altar but all it has ever owned in the thin towns or over the desolate plains? What can an artist use but materials, such as they are? What can he light but the short string of his gut, and when that’s burnt out, any muck ready at hand?"
Annie Dillard
"The Archimedian point outside the world is an oratory where a man really prays in all sincerity—and he shall move the earth. And it is unbelievable what a man of prayer can achieve if he will close the doors behind him."
Soren Kierkegaard
"Most people believe that the Christian commandments (e.g. to love one’s neighbor as oneself) are intentionally a little too severe—like putting the clock on half an hour to make sure of not being late in the morning."
Soren Kierkegaard
"The immediate person thinks and imagines that when he prays, the important thing, the thing he must concentrate upon, is that God should hear what HE is praying for. And yet in the true, eternal sense it is just the reverse: the true relation in prayer is not when God hears what is prayed for, but when the person praying continues to pray until he is the one who hears, who hears what God wills. The immediate person, therefore, uses many words and, therefore, makes demands in his prayer; the true man of prayer only attends."
Soren Kierkegaard
