Overcoming isolation within the self
Awareness of yourself and your relationship with God are intricately related. In fact, the challenge to shed our “old false” self in order to live authentically in our “new true” self strikes at the very core of authentic spirituality.
Peter Scazzero • Emotionally Healthy Spirituality: It's Impossible to Be Spiritually Mature, While Remaining Emotionally Immature
The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social
... See moreC. S. Lewis • Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)
I’ve often said that great love and great suffering (both healing and woundedness) are the universal, always available paths of transformation because they are the only things strong enough to take away the ego’s protections and pretensions.
Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM • Saved by the Cross
thoughts and ways were never anything like mine? But each year I know love and belonging—a love that doesn’t require sacrifice at the altar of acceptance—I become more of who I already am. I am liberated into what Merton calls my “true self.” I believe this is my deepest calling.
Cole Arthur Riley • This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
meghna added
Jesus (a good person) still had to die for the Christ (the universal presence) to arise. It is the pattern of transformation . . . What has to die is not usually bad; in fact, it will often feel good and necessary.2
Can you see the necessity of healthy and mature religion? Why else would you take the jump from a safe, comfortable sense of self into
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I think the primary work of Jesus Christ was to show us a path of self-giving love that is bigger than our fears, bigger than our jealousies and resentments, and bigger than our worst thoughts and deeds. By love I mean neither neither a milquetoast “kindness” that elides the hard bits nor a graceless “tough-love” program for perfection.
In my exper... See more
In my exper... See more
Rebekah Berndt • We are all cells in God's body
Stuart Evans added
The only way to be delivered from our “body of death” is a love that is greater, a deeper connection that absorbs all the negativity and irritation with life and with ourselves.