Our Secret Longing to Be Good Our time on earth may be far less enjoyable than it should be because of an unfortunate and peculiar idea that has taken hold of our collective thinking: that the ultimate purpose of life is to make ourselves as happy as possible. Encouraged by this now-dominant concept, we’re goaded to try…

La véritable nature de l’esprit est comparable au ciel, qui n’est pas affecté par la poussière qu’on lui jette.Matthieu Ricard

Father Richard further clarifies what he means by the false self:  Our false self is not our bad self, our inherently deceitful self, the self that God does not like, or we should not like. Actually, our false self is good and necessary as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go far enough, and it often…

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own…

Monastic people are celibate for a very practical reason: the kind of community life to which they aspire cannot be sustained if people are pairing off. But it is not easy. Monastic novices may be carried along for a time on the swells of communal spirit, but when that blissful period inevitably comes to an…

From Things of the Hidden God

From The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald:“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”