https://youtu.be/2D5DmfUUXaU    "Speak O Lord'

 The Amish have maintained what I like to think is a proper scale, largely by staying with the horse. The horse has restricted unlimited expansion. Not only does working with horses limit farm size, but horses are ideally suited to family life. With horses you unhitch at noon to water and feed the teams and then the family eats what we still call dinner. While the teams rest there is usually time for a short nap. And because God didn’t create the horse with headlights, we don’t work nights.

-Amish farmer David Kline, 'Great Possessions' 

 “I understood that every flower created by Him is beautiful, that the brilliance of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not lessen the perfume of the violet or the sweet simplicity of the daisy. I understood that if all the lowly flowers wished to be roses, nature would no longer be enamelled with lovely hues. And so it is in the world of souls, Our Lord's living garden.”

-St. Thérèse de Lisieux

 Prayer, both ecclesial and personal prayer...ranks higher than all action, not in the first place as a source of psychological energy (“refueling,” as they say today), but as the act of worship and glorification that befits love, the act in which one makes the most fundamental attempt to answer with selflessness and thereby shows that one has understood the divine proclamation. It is as tragic as it is ridiculous to see Christians today giving up this fundamental priority.

-Hans Urs von Balthasar, 'Love Alone is Credible'

 

For two years, between 1971 and 1973, I lived with a community of Franciscans in Bayou La Batre, Alabama. Three were priests, two were lay brothers. I was thirty-five years old at the time, the adventure of my faith in full sail. The shore was a port city, the second and largest in the United States, after the one in New York. A few of us worked on the shrimp boats there whenever they needed help. It was short-term work, ten days at sea, trawling for shrimp, flounder, snapper. We were always careful when we went to sea. Always. One day we were on our way home from Beaumont when we caught the end of a Texas tailstorm. The water was calm at first. And our forty-five-foot-long boat bobbed lazily in the water like the boat on the cover of this book. But suddenly the clouds gathered and the temperature dropped. The sea began to churn, sweeping spray across the bow. Waves pummeled the sides of the boat. Our seasoned captain told us to get below. Below deck, we reached for metal handles and dear life. I was convinced we were going to die. Then the storm, the real storm, hit. Winds of 120 miles per hour. Sudden swells ten feet high. It was a fury unleashed. Someone once said, If a man would learn to pray, let him go to sea. My life has been a life lived in God's furious longing. And I have learned to pray.

Brennan Manning. 'The Furious Longing of God' 

https://open.substack.com/pub/cslewisofficial/p/learning-to-hear-ourselves-think?r=rd0zg&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

To Find What We Have Lost

WHAT IT MEANS IS that if we come to a church right, we come to it more fully and nakedly ourselves, come with more of our humanness showing, than we are apt to come to most places. We come like Moses with muck on our shoes—foot-sore and travel-stained with the dust of our lives upon us, our failures, our deceits, our hypocrisies, because if, unlike Moses, we have never taken anybody's life, we have again and again withheld from other people, including often even those who are nearest to us, the love that might have made their lives worth living, not to mention our own. Like Moses we come here as we are, and like him we come as strangers and exiles in our way because wherever it is that we truly belong, whatever it is that is truly home for us, we know in our hearts that we have somehow lost it and gotten lost. Something is missing from our lives that we cannot even name—something we know best from the empty place inside us all where it belongs. We come here to find what we have lost. We come here to acknowledge that in terms of the best we could be we are lost and that we are helpless to save ourselves. We come here to confess our sins. 

-Frederick Buechner