The Royal Mountain

"The passage of hours is either an invitation to despair or a ladder to eternity. This little time in our hands melts away ere it can be formed. Before our eyes, man and maid, spring and splendor, slide into oblivion. However, there are hours that perish and hours that join the everlasting. Prayer is a crucible in which time is cast in the likeness of the eternal. Man hands over his time to God in the secrecy of single words. When anointed by prayer, his thoughts and deeds do not sink into nothingness, but merge into the endless knowledge of an all-embracing God. We yield our thoughts to Him who endowed us with a chain of days for the duration of life." -Abraham Joshua Heschel

"When you are compassionate with yourself, you trust in your soul, which you let guide your life. Your soul knows the geography of your destiny better than you do." -John O'Donahue

Vocation at its deepest level is "This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain...and don't fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling." -Parker Palmer

"From that hour, I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal. Led by Ariadne's thread of my answer through the labyrinth of Life, I came to a time and place where I realized that the Way leads to a triumph which is a catastrophe, and to a catastrophe which is a triumph, that the price for committing one's life would be reproach, and that the only elevation possible to man lies in the depths of humiliation. After that, the word 'courage' lost its meaning, since nothing could be taken from me."    -Dag Hammarskjold

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is--is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement. To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your bearing, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise and blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance. Towards this, so help me, God--    -Dag Hammarskjold

"The intense blaze of your anxiety reveals to what a great extent you are still fettered, still alienated from the One. However, don't worry about this or anything else, but follow the Way of which you are aware, even when you have departed from it. 'Nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou will.'" -Dag Hammarskjold

"Would the crucifixion have had any sublimity or meaning if Jesus had seen Himself crowned with the halo of martyrdom? What we have later added was not there for him. And we must forget all about it if we are to hear his commands."  -Dag Hammarskjold

You dare your yes--and experience a meaning. You repeat your yes--and all things acquire a meaning. When everything has a meaning, how can you live anything but a yes. -Dag Hammarkjold

"This is a freedom in the midst of action, a stillness, in the midst of other human beings. The mystery is a constant reality to him who, in this world, is free from self-concern, a reality that grows peaceful and mature before the receptive attention of assent. In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action." -Dag Hammarkjold

"Destined...a reward--or a price--to be committed to a task in comparison with which nothing I could seek for myself is of any value." -Dag Hammarskjold

"Maturity: among other things, a new lack of self-consciousness--the kind you can only attain when you have become entirely indifferent to yourself through an absolute assent to your fate. He who has placed himself in God's hand stands free vis-a-vis men: he is entirely at his ease with them, because he has granted them to the right to judge." -Dag Hammarskjold

"Dare he, for whom circumstances make it possible to realize his true destiny, refuse it simply because he is not prepared to give up everything else?" -Dag Hammarskjold

I Came to Believe - Johnny Cash