Quotes about Awareness

When the younger son was no longer considered a human being by the people around him, he felt the profundity of his isolation, the deepest loneliness one can experience. He was truly lost, and it was this complete lostness that brought him to his senses.

Our individual as well as communal lives are so deeply molded by our worries about tomorrow that today hardly can be experienced.

Spiritual reading, therefore, is slow, deliberate, meditative reading in which we allow the words to penetrate our heart and question our spirit.

we are usually surrounded by so much inner and outer noise that it is hard to truly hear our God when he is speaking to us.

it became increasingly clear to me that I know quite well the difference between darkness and light but do not always have the courage to name them by their true names.

When we are spiritually deaf, we are not aware that anything important is happening in our lives. We keep running away from the present moment, and we try to create experiences that make our lives worthwhile. So we fill up our time to avoid the emptiness we otherwise would feel.

It is by being awake to God in us that we can increasingly see God in the world around us.

It was hard for me to see God at work in my life when I was running from class to class and traveling from place to place.

Holding the cup of life means looking critically at what we are living. This requires great courage, because when we start looking, we might be terrified by what we see. Questions may arise that we don't know how to answer. Doubts may come up about things we thought we were sure about. Fear may emerge from unexpected places.

Learning how to die has something to do with living each day in full awareness that we are children of God, whose love is stronger than death.

The awareness that children are guests can be a liberating awareness because many parents suffer from deep guilt feelings toward their children, thinking that they are responsible for everything their sons or daughters do. When they see their child living in ways they disapprove of, the parents may castigate themselves with the questions: "What did we do wrong? What should we have done to prevent this behavior?" and they may wonder where they failed.

Our lives can indeed be seen as a process of becoming familiar with death, as a school in the art of dying. I do not mean this in a morbid way. On the contrary, when we see life constantly relativized by death, we can enjoy it for what it is: a free gift.