INTERIOR FREEDOM

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Nobody can prevent us from believing in God, hoping in Him, and loving Him. Faith, hope, and love make human being fully human.

That others are sinners cannot prevent us from becoming saints. Nobody really deprives us of anything.

The harm people do to me never comes from them, it comes from me. Harm is only self-inflicted.

If the wrongs people commit do penetrate our hearts, that is because they find room there. If suffering makes us bitter and ill humored, it is because our hearts are devoid of faith, hope, and love.

God is the eternal present.

Living in the present termites our hearts to expand.

It’s a mistake to add the burden of the past to the weight of the present, it’s still a worse mistake to burden the present with the future.

Jacques Phillippe
Interior Freedom

LOVE AFTER LOVE

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The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

THE FIRST DUTY OF LOVE IS TO LISTEN

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The first task is to listen. No human relation, especially no intimate one, is possible without mutual listening. Reproaches, reactions, defenses may be justified in terms of proportional justice. But perhaps they would prove to be unjust if there were more mutual listening.

All things and all men, so to speak, call on us with small or loud voices. They want us to listen, they want us to understand their intrinsic claims, their justice of being. They want justice from us. But we can give it to them only through the love which listens.

Paul Tillich
Love, Power, and Justice

II

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When my father was an old man,
past eighty years, we sat together
on the porch in silence
in the dark. Finally he said,
“Well, I have had a wonderful life, “
adding after a long pause,
“and I have had nothing
to do with it!” We were silent
for a while again. And then I asked,
“Well, do you believe in the
informed decision?” He thought
some more, and at last said
out of the darkness: “Naw!”
He was right, for when we choose
the way by which our only life
is lived, we choose and do not know
what we have chosen, for this
is the heart’s choice, not the mind’s;
to be true to the heart’s one choice
is the long labor of the mind.
He chose, imperfectly as we must,
the rule of love, and learned
through years of light what darkly
he had chosen: His life, his place,
our place, our lives. And now comes
one he chose, but will not see:
Emily Rose, born May 2, 1993

Wendell Berry
This Day