Truly live

"Everyone dies. Not everyone really lives." -William Wallace

Follow your bliss

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.


~Joseph Campbell

Henry Nouwen: "You are not what the world makes you"

During our short lives the question that guides much of our behavior is: ‘Who are we?’ Although we may seldom pose that question in a formal way, we live it very concretely in our day-to-day decisions.

The three answers that we generally live—not necessarily give—are: ‘We are what we do, we are what others say about us and we are what we have,’ or in other words: ‘We are our success, we are our popularity, we are our power.’

Jesus came to announce to us that an identity based on success, popularity and power is a false identity—an illusion. Loudly and clearly he says: ‘You are not what the world makes you; but you are children of God.’

Henri Nouwen, from Here and Now: Living in the Spirit

"Our calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood," Parker Palmer

"Our calling is to grow into our own authentic selfhood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks - we will also find our path of authentic service in the world. True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need."

Buechner's definition starts with the self and moves toward the needs of the world: it begins, wisely, where vocation begins - not in what the world needs (which is everything), but in the nature of the human self, in what brings the self joy, the deep joy of nowing that we are here on earth to be the gifts that God created."

~ Parker Palmer in "Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation," page 17

Serenity Prayer

God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.

Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Amen.

-Reinhold Niebuhr, Theologian, 1892-1971

I have no idea where I am going...prayer by Thomas Merton

My Lord God,
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think that I am following your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore will I trust you always
though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

- Thomas Merton, "Thoughts in Solitude”

The place God calls you...

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet

-Frederick Buechner