Randomness at its finest @jlee5108 - Tumblr Blog

In life, he was known as a 'quiet man'; where his experience of God was concerned, he was 'slow to speak about such things'.

Iain Matthew, The Impact of God: Soundings from St. John of the Cross

sevdolo

hopepunk-humanity

“I’m almost 50, and here is the best thing I have learned so far: every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.” @louisethebaker on Twitter

cell113

"No love, however brief, is wasted."

guerrillatech

aspiringwarriorlibrarian

I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.

The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.

Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”

She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire will fall. And I will help it along.”

beguines

Desire and union take on a wide variety of forms among the medieval female mystics. For Gertrude [of Helfta], as mentioned above, eucharistic union is a life-giving force by which Christ feeds the believer with "the virtue of the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ"—that is, with his Christness. The soul is a tree which reaches its roots, by the Eucharist, into Christ's wounds and finds there all the nutrients it needs. For Hadewijch, mutual interpenetration takes on a much more erotic tone. Her longing is to be wrapped up in Christ, her lover. The eucharistic union is a sexual union of sorts, with almost orgasmic language: "[M]y heart and my veins and all my limbs trembled and shuddered with desire... I desired to consummate my Lover completely and to confess and to savor the fullest extent—to fulfill his humanity blissfully with mine and to experience mine therein." Spiritual penetration thus takes on sexual connotations. In Julian, both Christ and believer thirst to be quenched by each other's love. Similarly, in Hadewijch, Christ and believer long to be consummated in each other's embrace.

Zechariah Mickel, "Julian of Norwich and the Eucharist"

progressivepower

Truth

primordialsoundmeditation

"Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees" ~ Rumi.

Sould Alchemy

letlovemeetlove

“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

— bell hooks (via onlinecounsellingcollege)

northernlib

letlovemeetlove

“True sacred reading is slowed-down reading with no regrets for the time thus wasted.”

— Charles Cummings, OCSO, Monastic Practices (via benedictinesuggestion)

girlofdogs

sometimes i think about how constellations are an entirely man-made construct and don’t actually exhist inherently in nature. i mean, the universe just gave us stars, and we saw art and myths and stories in them. the capacity that humans have for seeing purpose in the incidental makes me realize just how lonely we are on this planet, desperately searching for meaning elsewhere in the universe.

letlovemeetlove

‘Vocation’

We remember Mary today because, in so doing, we remember our true vocation: to bear and carry and give birth to the One who is Bread, Word and Redeemer. It was Mary’s vocation to bear God for the world. And every time you say "yes" to God, this becomes your vocation as well: to bear, carry and give birth to Bread, Word and Redeemer. -Br. James Koester, SSJE