Mama Monday #30

I loved reading Gregory Boyle's new book on the plane this past week and typed out my favorite quotes for you here.

May we be given the grace to “cultivate a new way of seeing.” - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

Tenderness is the highest form of spiritual maturity.  - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

No us and Them- just Us, This is, indeed, God’s dream come true. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

The Tender One says so clearly: I will carry you and sustain you in love, no matter what. You are irreplaceable, unrepeatable, and of unlimited worth. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

The God of love is peeking behind the curtain of every holy moment, and we just hope to be alert to it. This is our practice. The Divine fully alive in my kid, in that sunset, in the unexpected kindness. The God we experience is uncaged and freed of the personified Deity. We stand hopeful for a language large enough to carry us into a new territory of mystical seeing.  - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

We seek to be steady and aspire to an evenness. We clear the deck and find the generosity of God in those touchstones, the moments when we are quickened to become the generosity of God in the world. We ponder carefully those moments where there is a quickening. It’s not our rest stop, but our departure point, Like the mystic Brother Lawrence who sees a tree, but really sees it. For him, it becomes a singular moment of God. This quickening never left him. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

The goal of all mystical teachers is to awaken. We are being asked to see everything anew all the time. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

How can we choose to be curious about wounds that life underneath this delusion? Our narratives need revising. Healing is in order and compassion is required. If we could see the secret history of each person, it would surely disarm our hearts.  - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

All cruelty points to the wound in need of healing. We make progress when we walk each other home to this wholeness. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

But we all engage in behavior and responses that are less than whole, balanced, and healthy. God’s tender invitation is that we be well. It’s not about morality but staying true to our deepest longing to let love live through us. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

Hope in darkness, an ability to be with anguish, coming to terms with what was done to you and what you did in your brokenness. Progress looks like bowing to life’s sorrows and betrayals. Freed of shame, these is a robust, acceptance of what is. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

The imprints of trauma can keep you from inhabiting the present moment. The meaning of the word “trauma” in its Greek origin, is “wound.”  - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

We train the mind to tenderness and cherishing. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

You start to realize that God just wants us to be whole, and so we try to restore wholeness in each other. Christ consciousness. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

To become wholesome, we need living connection with the whole… We welcome our wound, and it keeps us from despising the other. Connective tissue. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

Mary Oliver encourages us to “be where you are in the universe” and to “start the day in happiness, in kindness.” I have tried to calibrate my daily intentionality to greet people… and to choose to brighten.  It’s about greeting, truly seeing people, and finding yourself anchored in the sure and certain knowledge that “The only non-delusional response to everything is kindness,” as George Saunders reminds us. Which is to say that every other response is delusional. Our rage, resentment, relentless annoyance, impatience…. all delusional. Kindness lets us brighten and greet folks. It changes everything. When you greet people in this way, watch folks revive. The heart gets jump-started. Yours and theirs.  - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

The traumatized are encased in the defended self. Every dose that everyone here dispenses seems to say, “Rely on my faith in you, until you have your own.” As is said around here often: “Try kindness. And if that doesn’t work, increase the dose.” Until the armor welded around your heart comes undone. This requires attention- which is a good definition of prayer. We are invited to practice heaven in this attention to what’s right in front of us. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

The most pronounced Scripture passage from 1 Corinthians 13 ends with “Love never fails.” I also like another translation that renders it: “Love never stops loving.” Still, the First Nations translation puts it this way: “The road to love has no end.” The addition of the road as a notion is helpful here. Or, as Sergio underscores: “Love is never a false doctrine” and “Love won’t let us go.” - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

There is a famous story about a Zen master who was asked about the highest teaching of Zen. He wrote the word “Attention” on the blackboard. The student persisted and asked, “But isn’t there anything else?” The master said, “Yes, there is” and once again, he wrote the word “Attention” on the blackboard. The student insisted, “There must be something more.”  And his teacher turned to the board and wrote yet another time, “Attention.” Now the board announced, “Attention, Attention, Attention.” It is all that is required, since attention will always bring us back to the present. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

The constant attention of prayer is an invitation to practice heaven always, attentive to the person who’s right in front of us.  - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

Rumi writes: “If the house of the world is dark, then love will find a way to make windows.” - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

And this is all I want. To be freshly grounded in endless, oceanic love. Restored to a more grounded sense of myself in God’s presence. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

We need to cherish with every breath… Hence, we connect cherishing with every breath we take, otherwise we forget. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

He knows you can’t be curious and judgmental at the same time, so he chooses curiosity. Curiosity may well kill the cat, but it also neutralizes judgment. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

We see wholeness, and it helps us all to rewire- not just the traumatized, but every one of us. Since we are all walking wounded, only tenderness is mutually transformational. That is what leads to awakened hearts.  - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

We arrive at the clear intention to be tender, and it catapults us out of our default mode—self-absorption—and it lands us in the lap of belonging. Along the way, sturdiness and an emotional strength replace a hypersensitivity to anxiety. We give each of us the power and permission to contain everything with kindness, to find a balance and recalibrate and hold even our “panicked story lines” as my friend Pema Chodron puts it. Intending only to be anchored in gentle cherishing. Kindness becoming atmospheric. Kinship as a frequency.  - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

 Let us be “loving, caring folks who pay attention and choose to be the very notice and heartbeat of God.” -- Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

There are a couple translations from a variety of Bibles of the word “repentance.” Some render it as “change your mind.” This seems to suggest that repentance is about shifting your opinion. I like the interpretation: “Move beyond the mind you have.” It connotes an escape from a narrow mindset of views and opinions to a whole new way of seeing. From mere human thought to a mystical seeing. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging

We belong to each other, and we need to cling to an insistence that no one is outside of that inclusion. - Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging