Tag Archives: love

Why Love What You Will Lose?

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Tricycle’s online magazine offers a provocative article which discusses two key questions: Why love what you will lose? and What else is there to love?

Below is a highlight from this worthy article. To read the entire article see the link at the bottom of this post.

  • Suffering is, strangely, both sickness and medicine, impossible to tease apart in the end. … That we suffer and share this great fact of impermanence together is profound medicine in itself, a medicine that releases compassion, love, connectedness, and forgiveness as the healing source. 

From A Fire Runs through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis by Susan Murphy © 2023 by Susan Murphy. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO

Why Love What You Will Lose?

Flaws and All – The Beginning of Authentic Love Highlights

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Sometimes romantic love hurts so bad we may start to feel that it is beyond our ability. But maybe, we’re trying too hard.

Below are highlights from a provocative Lion’s Roar article. For the full article, see this link: https://www.lionsroar.com/authentic-love/

Authentic Love

Sumi Loundon Kim, a Yale University chaplain, weighs in on seeing and communicating clearly in love and marriage.

Just as with the spiritual path, when we let go of control, we learn to love the person for who he or she is, flaws and all. That’s the beginning of true love.

We imagine a kind of perfection

But after a few years or a few decades or maybe a few lifetimes of dedicated striving, we start to get the sense that our progress is terribly slow, given all the effort we’ve made. There are even times when we completely lose it, when anger or fear overtakes us even after all that practice. It’s disappointing.

When we let go of needing that person to be a certain way, when we let go of control, we find that as we do so we learn to love the person for who he or she is, flaws and all. That’s the beginning of true love, authentic love with another.

the key is in accepting ourselves and our partners for who we are.

as we learn to ease up on our demands and needs from others, we learn that love is not about fulfilling a need—a need to change what we don’t like about ourselves, for example—but about letting go of needs altogether.“

Sumi Loundon Kim is the Buddhist chaplain at Yale University and founder of the Mindful Families of Durham. She is editor of the anthologies Blue Jean Buddha and The Buddha’s Apprentices, from Wisdom Publications, and the author of Sitting Together: A Family-Centered Curriculum on Mindfulness, Meditation, and Buddhist Teachings.

Restorative Justice: Remembering 9/11

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Today is 9/11. I remember how close I was to the World Trade Center twenty-three years ago. I remember how the call for revenge disturbed our already violence-soaked culture.

Today is 9/11. I am grateful for the wisdom highlights shared by Shane Claiborne, Karl Barth and Melissa Florer-Bixler below.

May we act in peace today for the benefit of all sentient beings.

Restorative Justice

Violence is contagious. Violence begets violence.… Pick up the sword and die by the sword. You kill us and we’ll kill you. There is a contagion of violence in the world; it’s spreading like a disease.  

But grace is also contagious. An act of kindness inspires another act of kindness…. A single act of forgiveness can feel like it heals the world.

Grace makes room … for justice that is restorative and dedicated to healing the wounds of injustice. But the grace thing is hard work. It takes faith—because it dares us to believe that not only can victims be healed, but so can the victimizers.

We are told that we choose whose world we want to live in. We’ll choose wealth or God. We’ll choose violence or God. We’ll choose nationalism or God. We’ll choose racial hierarchy or God. Each case is an example of a different and incompatible operational system. One of those systems, if we live by it, binds us in endless struggle and violence that leads to our own destruction, as well as the destruction of others…. 

Karl Barth, reflecting on forgiveness, writes, “Living by forgiveness is never by any means passivity, but Christian living in full activity.” Barth writes that, when we finally come before God, we will not be asked to give an account of our piety or morality. Instead, we will be asked, “Did you live by grace, or did you set up gods for yourself and perhaps want to become one yourself?” [2]  

References:  
[1] Shane Claiborne, Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It’s Killing Us (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2016), 5, 7. 

[2] Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thomson (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 152. 

[3] Melissa Florer-Bixler, How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace (Harrisonburg, VA: Herald Press, 2021), 73, 75–76. 

We Would Change

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Oh, to spoon in June and point to the moon and read our future in a newly discovered rune. You know that tune, right?

Below is beautifully written reminder from Joan Chittister that everything changes in June.

We would change

Clearly, June is the time for being in the world in new ways, for throwing off the cold and dark spots of life.

flowers confront us with our responsibility for beauty.
 
June is the month that calls us out of our houses, out of ourselves,

Be a tribute to creation. Be a part of the chorus of life.
 
“I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future.”

Beauty and human warmth would take root in us like a clear, hot June day. We would change.

                   —selections from A Monastery Almanac by Joan Chittister

For more great writing check out this website: joanchittister.org/

Finding Home in Ourselves

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“Don’t forget … to call yourself Home.” Kaitlin Curtice

This is a beautiful excerpt from the Center for Action and Contemplation about Kaitlin Curtice’s writing on the sacred legacy of home.

Check out both links identified below. You will be comforted and edified.

http://www.kaitlincurtice.com

Finding Home in Ourselves
 
Author Kaitlin Curtice writes about the sacred legacy of home:  

May we always return to the places where the stories begin, to challenge them, to accept and honor them, and to whisper to ourselves and one another that we are always, always arriving. 

Don’t forget, 
my love, 
to live. 

Don’t forget 
to love yourself, 
all of you, 
from every season 
and every place, 
because you never know 
when they will 
come knocking for 
a cup of coffee 
and an overdue hug. 

call yourself Home. 

Love Is Home

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“Felicia Murrell acknowledges that our first homes are not always safe …

How are you preparing a home of unconditional acceptance for yourself?“

Today’s Center for Action And Contemplation message offers a provocative post on where we can find our true home. Check out this beautifully written message by Felicia Murrell and her quotes from The Wizard of Oz written by L. Frank Baum.

“Home,” says Glinda the Good, “is a place we all must find, child. It’s not just a place where you eat or sleep. Home is knowing. Knowing your mind, knowing your heart, knowing your courage. If we know ourselves, we’re always home, anywhere.”

https://feliciamurrell.com/

Love is Home
 
Felicia Murrell acknowledges that our first homes are not always safe:  

For some, home is terror, a place to flee with no desire to return or revisit.

Often, when we think of home, we think only of an external place,

Love is home.  

Home is both an external dwelling and an internal abode. Home is the place where we belong, our place of acceptance and welcome. There, in this shame and judgment-free embryonic cocoon of love, we practice unconditional acceptance; we learn to relate to ourselves and the world around us.  

How are you preparing a home of unconditional acceptance for yourself?

“Home,” says Glinda the Good, “is a place we all must find, child. It’s not just a place where you eat or sleep. Home is knowing. Knowing your mind, knowing your heart, knowing your courage. If we know ourselves, we’re always home, anywhere.” [3] 

 [3] Joel Schumacher, The Wiz: Screenplay, adapted from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum (New York: Studio Duplicating Service, 1977).