Your job is not to lock the doors and chisel at yourself like a marble statue in the darkness until you feel quantifiably worthy of the world outside. Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other.

If you have found human beings like this, I hope you protect them. I hope you risk your heart for what you feel. I hope you believe that you are worthy of something full, and pointed and real. I hope you never settle for less, because certain people are truly just rare, beautiful drops of borrowed light that find their way to you.

In my mind, pity isn’t even analogous to compassion. Pity is just the paternalistic cousin of contempt. It allows us to see others as “those less fortunate than ourselves” (a term I loathe). Pity keeps the other person at a distance and me in a rarified state of satisfaction.... Compassion, on the other hand, draws us close.

One way to notice that you are being taught the same lesson over and over is by writing. When you reflect often, you become aware of your patterns (if you are willing to notice them). You see that life keeps trying to teach you the same lesson and you are simply not absorbing it. It tries to teach you by showing you that the choice you’re repeatedl... See more

And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life.

“My belief is that the two universal paths are great love and great suffering,” he told me. For much of his life, Rohr has used suffering as a spiritual tool to help him learn to be humble. “I pray for one humiliation a day,” he told me. “It doesn’t have to be major.”

To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love. To know how to love someone, we have to understand them. To understand, we need to listen. That person may be our partner, our friend, our sibling, or our child. You can ask, “Dear one, do you think that I understand you enough? Please tell me your difficulties, your suffering, and your

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