EAT SLOWLY

in

Eat at a local restaurant tonight.
Get the cream sauce.
Have a cold pint at 4 o’clock in a mostly empty bar.
Go somewhere you’ve never been.
Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you.
Order the steak rare.
Eat an oyster.
Have a negroni.
Have two.
Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways.
Eat slowly.
Tip your server.
Check in on your friends.
Check in on yourself.
Enjoy the ride.


Anthony Bourdain

A TESTAMENT

in , ,

I imagine that today I am to die. I ask for time to be alone and write down for my friends a sort of testament for which the points that follow could serve as chapter titles.

1. These things I have loved in life: things I have tasted, looked at, smelled, heard, touched.
2. These experiences I have cherished:
3. These ideas have brought me liberation:
4. These beliefs I have outgrown:
5. These convictions I have lived by:
6. These are the things I have lived for:
7. These insights I have gained in the school of life: insights into God, the world, human nature, Jesus Christ, love, religion, prayer.
8. These risks I took, these dangers I have courted:
9. These sufferings have seasoned me:
10. These lessons life has taught me:
11. These influences have shaped my life: persons, occupations, books, events.
12. These Scripture texts have lit my path:
13. These things I regret about my life:
14. These are my life’s achievements:
15. These persons are enshrined within my heart:
16. These are my unfulfilled desires:

I choose an ending for this document: A poem—my own or someone else’s; or a prayer; a sketch or a picture from a magazine; a Scripture text; or anything that I judge would be an apt conclusion to my testament.

Anthony De Mello, S.J.
Hearts on Fire, Praying with Jesuits

LOVE AFTER LOVE

in

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

NO MAN IS AN ISLAND - JOHN DONNE

in

No man is an island entire of itself; every man 
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 
own were; any man's death diminishes me, 
because I am involved in mankind. 
And therefore never send to know for whom 
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. 

John Donne
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

NO MAN IS AN ISLAND - MERTON

in

Every other man is a piece of myself, for I am a part and a member of mankind. Every Christian is a part of my own body, because we are members of Christ. What I do is also done for them and with them and by them. What they do is done in me and by me and for me.

Nothing at all makes sense, unless we admit, with John Donne, that: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

Thomas Merton
No Man Is An Island

KILLING TIME

in

How do I kill time?
Let me count the ways.

By worrying about things
over which I have no control
Like the past.
Like the future.

By harboring resentment
and anger
over hurts
real or imagined.

By disdaining the ordinary
or, rather, what I
so mindlessly
call ordinary.

By concern over what’s in it for me,
rather than what’s in me
for it.

By failing to appreciate what is
because of might-have-beens,
should-have-beens,
could-have-beens.

These are some of the ways
I kill time.

Jesus didn’t kill time.
He gave life to it.
His own.

Leo Rock, SJ
Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits