Archive for wisdom

The fellowship of the weak

June 6, 2015 / / Comments Off on The fellowship of the weak

Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.

― Henri J.M. Nouwen

 

A quotidian task, the family’s work, this cleaning up the mess of living.
Washing what is soiled, repairing what is broken,
putting away what someone else has taken out and carelessly forgotten.
A thousand injuries healed not counted, in a world where, the hard truth is that all people love poorly, and we
the weak, are called to the great work of Love.

 

Category: community, forgiveness, healing, love, wisdom /

Proverbs: sayings of the wise

November 16, 2013 / / One comment

When I was a son with my father,
tender, the only one in the sight of my mother,
he taught me, and said to me,
“Let your heart hold fast my words;
keep my commandments, and live;
do not forget, and do not turn away from the words of my mouth.
Get wisdom; get insight.
Do not forsake her, and she will keep you;
love her, and she will guard you.
The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom,
and whatever you get, get insight.
Prize her highly, and she will exalt you;
she will honor you if you embrace her.
She will place on your head a fair garland;
she will bestow on you a beautiful crown.

Proverbs 4:3-9

 
The glory of young men is their strength, but the beauty of old men is their grey hair.

Proverbs 20:29

Category: Bible, Proverbs, wisdom /

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November 12, 2012 / / 2 comments

 

Flickr Photo courtesy Harleyannie

 

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil. As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

–John Milton

An excerpt from John Milton’s Areopagitica, the first full-length treatise on freedom of the press, published 1644.

 

Category: virtue, wisdom / Tags: , , ,
 
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