Gerald G. May Quotes

We may need to consider a little abstinence from our automatic, reflexive responses of being helpful to others. For some of us, doing this may feel very threatening; to identify our addictions of helpfulness is to challenge the ways we habitually express love – it comes close to challenging our love itself.

. . . Let us go back for a moment and look at that tiny, perhaps almost nonexistent space between feeling a person's pain and doing something in response to it. It is not easy to just be with the pain of another, to feel it as your own. No wonder we are likely to jump into our habitual responses so quickly. As soon as we start doing something for or to the suffering person, we can minimize the bare agony of feeling that person's pain. It is like that everywhere; our addicted doings act as minor anaesthesia.

. . . Sometimes, perhaps often, taking the space will feel like an absence of response. We may fear the person will think we don't care because we are not immediately hopping like popcorn to do something helpful. And sometimes the response that is authentically invited will never appear overtly helpful. Perhaps we are just invited to pray, silently in the background, or just to be present without saying a word or offering even a touch. Sometimes love even invites us to leave a person alone. Such responses are not too good for our egos; the suffering person is unlikely to come and thank us for our lack of involvement. But love does not ask for credi

When we are really given to the why of life, the hows begin to flow.

Excessive preoccupation with psyche and evil - either from supportive or antagonistic standpoints - fosters a degree of self-consciousness and self-importance that is very likely to eclipse the ever-present mystery of God's truth. Discernments are essential, but it is not at all necessary or helpful to become attached to making them. If possible, it is best to see psychological phenomena such as dreams, fantasies, images, and thoughts as manifestations of God's potential in the same way that nature, art, relationships, and all other phenomena are. Gazing into an empty, blue sky, kneeling in prayer in a cathedral, and recalling memories associated with a dream can all be worthwhile spiritual explorations. The can also all be distractions from spiritual exploration. The beauty of the sky or the cathedral can create an absorption with sensate experience, just as dream analysis can create ego-absorption.

Compulsions are not good for the soul.

It is a good rule of thumb for spiritual directors to ask themselves, What truly constitutes our spiritual concern here? Am I really being attentive to the Lord in this? What things are getting in the way of our simple, humble intention towards the working of the Holy Spirit in this person's life? All human experience can be said to be spiritual in the largest sense, but spiritual direction should deal primarily with those qualities that seem most clearly and specifically spiritual, those that reveal the presence or leadings of God, or evidence of grace, working most directly in a person's life. This becomes increasingly important as spiritual direction progresses over time with any given individual. In the course of spiritual maturation, concern with superficial psychological experience must give way to a much more basic concern for the discernment of good and evil.

In spiritual direction, however, there has to be an ongoing awareness that anything can happen; that the Holy Spirit is already affecting the person; and that one must participate in this work through careful discernment and support. here again, it is necessary to walk the fierce path of free will and dependence. We must always claim the freedom we have been given; to do otherwise would devalue our humanity. But at the same time, we will increasingly recognize the extreme inadequacy of personal will and knowledge in figuring out what life is or how we should live it. As we grow in wisdom, we also grow in the realization of our utter dependence upon the Lord in all things. it seems to me, then, that in its purest human form spiritual direction is a journey towards more freely and deeply choosing to surrender to God.

Constance FitzGerald, a contemporary Carmelite authority on John's theology, points out John's assertion that this divine inflow is the "loving Wisdom of God." Specifically, she says, it is the active presence of Jesus Christ as Wisdom, as divine Sophia. Thus, "Dark night is not primarily some thing, an impersonal darkness like a difficult situation or distressful psychological condition, but someone, a presence leaving an indelible imprint on the human spirit and consequently on one's entire life."21

Homeostasis is necessary for life. It provides a stable home base, a resting place from which the body can respond to the surrounding world. . .

In the service of homeostasis, addiction acts upon the human spirit like gravity upon a planetary body, seeking to hold it within a stable orbit against the planet's own centrifugal striving for the stars. In this way, our most natural addictions safeguard the essentials of life. They are part of love, but they are pure function, unadulterated efficiency, nothing but inhibition. For the spirit seeking freedom of love, as for the planet seeking the stars, the gravity of addiction is a painful price to pay for safety.

If homeostasis were the end of things, that end would surely be Sheol: stagnation and death. With no stretching, reaching, opening, or yearning to counteract our gravity, we would collapse in upon ourselves like stars becoming black holes. Often we do try to choose that option. We choose safety over freedom; we entrench ourselves in inertia. We dull and occupy ourselves so completely that we stifle our desire, anesthetize our yearning, restrict the energy of our passion. This does not remove us from the ongoing birth of creation, but it deadens us to it. . . We all opt for safety on occasion . . . Most of us choose it more than we would like to admit. Some of us choose it continually.

. . . Love does not permit homeostasis to be the end of things. If we so choose, whatever stability we ha

We are addicted to fulfilment, to the eradication of all emptiness. . . . swallowed the cultural myth that says, "if you are well-adjusted, and if you are living your life properly, you will feel fulfilled, satisfied, content, and serene." If you are not satisfied and fulfilled, there is something wrong with you. . .

. . . The myth of fulfilment makes us miss the most beautiful aspect of our human souls: our emptiness, our incompleteness, our radical yearning for love. We were never meant to be completely fulfilled; we were meant to taste it, to long for it, and to grow toward it. In this way we participate in love becoming life, life becoming love. To miss our emptiness is, finally, to miss our hope.

Emptiness, yearning, incompleteness: these unpleasant words hold a hope for incomprehensible beauty. It is precisely in these seemingly abhorrent qualities of ourselves – qualities that we spend most of our time trying to fix or deny – that the very thing we most long for can be found: hope for the human spirit, freedom for love.

This is a secret known by those who have had the courage to face their own emptiness. The secret of being in love, of falling in love with life as it is meant to be, is to befriend our yearning instead of avoiding it, to live into our longing rather than trying to resolve it, to enter the spaciousness of our emptiness instead of trying to fill it up.

It has taken me a long time to learn this secret, and I co

Resolutions mean willpower, willpower means achievement, achievement means success and failure, and the whole sequence means losing an appreciation of the gift. I have learned two sure things in the struggle between my desire for love and the oppression of my attachments. The first is that God is absolutely trustworthy. The second is that resolutions are absolutely not.

imagination in looking to the future. Memory is the ground of dreaming.

The importance of experiences lies not so much in their precise nature as in one's response to them. In part this represents a harkening back to an old principle of discernment...of evaluating an experience in relation to its fruits. More deeply, however, we are speaking of remaining attentive to the mystery and reality of God behind> all phenomena, refusing to allow superficial appearances to distract us from this central concern. We do a disservice to ourselves and others when we allow our interest in the nature of a phenomenon to obscure the mysterious wonder of the very existence of that phenomenon.

There is a desire within each of us,
in the deep center of ourselves
that we call our heart.
We were born with it,
it is never completely satisfied,
and it never dies.
We are often unaware of it,
but it is always awake.

It is the Human desire for Love.
Every person in this Earth yearns to love,
to be loved, to know love.
Our true identity, our reason for being
is to be found in this desire.

Love is the "why" of life,
why we are functioning at all.
I am convinced
it is the fundamental energy
of the human spirit.
the fuel on which we run,
the wellspring of our vitality.

And grace,
which is the flowing,
creative activity, of love itself,
is what makes all goodness possible.

Love should come first,
it should be the beginning of,
and the reason for everything.

God darkens our awareness in order to keep us safe. When we cannot chart our own course, we become vulnerable to God's protection, and the darkness becomes a "guiding night," a "night more kindly than the dawn."5

The word comes from Latin roots com and templum, "with" and "temple.

The greatest commandments are not obligations at all, but affirmations of grace. They are promises that with our willing assent, grace will make possible the triumph of full, unfettered love within us.

Our assent, our yes, finally comes from nothing other than our own yearning, from passion itself. It may surface temporarily as desire for self-improvement, functional efficiency, moral virtue, or social justice, but ultimately it will take us beyond and beneath all such ends. Love will bring us to our ever-present beginning, where our only reason for saying yes is simply that we want to.

Here it is only our plain desire that makes true assent possible: the desire to respond to a larger love already given, the desire to love and to be loved and to be fully, consciously present in love as an end in itself. It is a matter of simple caring, our hearts aching for the fullness of love for no other reason than its own essential goodness. In this simple, exquisite longing, awakening in each precious moment, we know who we really are. It is a likeness of God.

The spiritual life for Teresa and John has nothing to do with actually getting closer to God. It is instead a journey of consciousness. Union with God is neither acquired nor received; it is realized, and in that sense it is something that can be yearned for, sought after, and - with God's grace - found.

The night is the means by which we find our heart's desire, our freedom for love. This is not to say that all darkness

I think the greater danger is that those who think they understand the process [of overcoming our attachments] are likely to try to make it happen on their own by engaging in false austerities and love-denying self-deprivations. They will not wait for God's timing; they will rush ahead of grace. I have seen it happen when ascetic practices have become overinstitutionalized, and I have engaged in it myself when I thought I could engineer my own salvation. It does not work.