Roland Merullo Quotes

You keep telling yourself it will be different. Year after year, time after time, you keep telling yourself things might change. It's what makes people go back to people they shouldn't ever go back to.

I am not one of these people who wants everyone to live the way I live. What causes more trouble on our troubled earth than people like that?

I studied him the way I studied all the people in my life, noticing the changes of his mood, the times when the edge of his patience came into view, even small physical details like the sickle-shaped scar on the top of his right forearm and the small flourish he made with his hand whenever he set down a tool, as if he was brushing bad air away from it.

I thought I heard a cow mooing in Seese's back yard. Later on, later down the road, as they say, I would learn that this was the sound of the Rinpoche chanting some ancient prayer. But, at that moment, it sounded to me very much like a mooing cow.

To me, enlightenment is a big shift inside your eyes, a different way to use your mind so you can understand some of God, some of Jesus. But it is maybe not one shift, but many small shifts. You change your spiritual condition - by prayer, by meditation, by the way you live, the way you decide to think, by the lessons you learn in living this life with a good intention - and then, when this happens, after a long times or a short times, the way you see the world changes.

Now, at a point when the entire world seems mired in violence and cynicism, when the Church is shrinking, the environment being poisoned, when good souls are giving up hope, when greed and bitterness seem to be gaining at the expense of kindness and compassion - now, I believe, we have been given a divine help.

The past shouts at you, the ugly words or actions echo down across the years.

Inside the big world that you cannot control, you have the small world of you that you can control. In that small world, if you look, you can see whether to go this way toward good, or the other way toward bad.

It's like the difference between a kid who goes to school and learns and a kid who goes to school and learns and comes home to parents who are reading to her and talking to her about the world, showing her things, teaching by their actions.

How, I wondered, could a fifteen-year-old boy act like this without getting his ass kicked every time he opened his mouth?

There was a small glass vase between us, three gladioli in a few ounces of water. One of the gladioli had dropped a petal- brushstroke of purple on fine white cloth. Rinpoche drank the last sip of his tea, then set the cup aside, took the petal with his thumb and second finger, placed it on the middle of the saucer in front of him, and turned the cup upside down to cover it.
"I feel a lesson coming on," I said ...
"The flower is the good inside every person," he said. "The cup is like a wall, to protect. Many people have that wall."
"Armor" I said. He nodded.
"Why?"
"Because to live without the cup means you must feel the world as the world really is.

Families are like countries. They have their own language and jokes and secrets and assumptions about the right and wrong ways of doing things, and some of that always shows in the children, the way something of
Germany or Australia always shows in a German or an Australian, no matter where they go. Outsiders like it or they don't, they feel at home there or they don't. It's like the taste of cilantro.

I have a tremendous fascination with the United States of America, the grand, swirling variousness of it, the way it siphons off the ambitious, the poor, and the abused from so many other nations, the ability we seem to have to be noble and heroic at the same time as we are being arrogant and stupid.

With two teenagers in the house, we sometimes experience a degree of domestic turbulence that sounds, to my ear, like a boiling teakettle filled with hormones shrieking on a stove.

A fair portion of my anger had returned, but alongside it ran the memory of those few seconds on the yoga mat in the death pose. I felt as if I had been shown a kind of essential secret, something so subtle and quiet and small(and yet so important)that I could gone my entire adult life and never even imagined such a thing existed.

You ask a certain question again and again, in a sincere fashion, and the answer appears. But, in my experience, at least, that answer arrives according to it's own mysterious celestial timing, and often in disguise. And it comes in a way you're not prepared for, or don't want, or can't at first, accept.

Some people use their own hurt as an excuse for hurting others

My father he always say that the oil is already inside the student, already there from all time. The teacher only has a match and makes it light, and then the student isn't a student anymore, just a friend, going the same way down the dark road but seeing now by himself.

it occurred to me that the modern spiritual leaders of my tradition were always somber, self-important men, thickly coated in others' idea of who they were supposed to be.

Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world. - James Baldwin

Isn't mockery the province of the insecure?

The number of poor, and poorly prepared, students who succeed in college and beyond undercuts the simplistic notion that economic or educational disadvantage is an excuse for failure, violent behavior, or indulgence in drugs.

We have a tradition in Tibet. Sacred craziness. Men and women who act in a strange way. People think they are fools, but their wisdom, in fact, is more than those we call normal.

It was becoming clear to me that what Jesus wanted from us was not pious obedience to a narrow set of rules, but a smart, limitless openmindedness that allowed us--in real life, in actual day-to-day , modern American life--to treat the other person the way we would want to be treated--Gay people, Jewish people, dumb people, rich people, poor people, women, men, right-wingers, liberals, soldiers, and antiwar protesters, maybe even animals--we were supposed to see through the disguise they were wearing, all the down to the I AM in them. That was it. That was the the big commandment, I was almost sure. p. 153

If Christ's message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness.

There is...a golden alpine field within each of you, a place where you are bathed in approval, not because of anything particular you have done, but simply because of your own sacred nature. If you had a president who could show you the route to that place, what a difference it would make in your lives, and in the culture of the world!

We see our troubles through the filter of our own imperfection ...

Womb? ... I mean ... does your lineage

When you have known someone your whole life you don't need a lot of warm-up time to get into a big argument. All the fore-play has been done years ago, and so the battle sits in your memory like stove gas awaiting the match. A wrong word, a careless allusion, and the old fire is suddenly raging.

God couldn't possibly love my father and hate my mother, or vice versa; that God was bigger than our ideas about him and greater than any name we might call him. p. 6

Some point you had to risk the ridicule of the mob, of your own internalized voices, and try to see clearly what had been set in front of you in this life, and try to act on that as bravely and honestly as you could, no matter what kind of rules you'd previously been living by.

Isn't the spiritual search, at its essence, a movement toward objectivity?

We hadn't yet traded freedom for comfort.

I came to be emulated. That's what people didn't get. Followed, as in being an example, as in making your interior world resemble mine. p. 22

When we were first together, when you first brought me here to this beautiful place, you used to say you were glad you found a napoletana, remember? You said the northerners were sane and orderly and hardworking and maybe more honest, but that without the south, Italy would have too many brains and not enough heart. It would be like Europe having only Germany and Austria - no Spain, no France, no Italy. It would be a world of scientists without singers. I thought it was romantic. What happened to the man who said those things?

I felt I was drawing close to that age, that place in life, where you realize one day what you'd told yourself was a Zen detachment turns out to be naked fear. You'd had one serious love relationship in your life and it had ended in tragedy, and the tragedy had broken something inside you. But instead of trying to repair the broken place, or at least really stop and look at it, you skated and joked. You had friends, you were a decent citizen. You hurt no one. And your life was somehow just about half of what it could be.

When you are a crank, you put yourself on the top of the list of people you make miserable.

I mused about the human phenomenon that went by the title "organized religion." What, I wondered, was disorganized religion?

Simply by being your absolute, most genuine self in every interaction of every hour, you provide a great and rare service on this earth.

There are teachers who say that one of the main obstacles, spiritual obstacles, for westerners is a sense of unworthiness, a self-limiting sense of what's possible for them in a human life.

...if we somehow find the courage to go directly into the discomfort - even the discomfort of illness, pain, old age, and death - we might discover something unexpected there.

try if you can to not stay in the small box of old thinking.

I'm not great at talking to people. I have all these thoughts bunching up inside my head and then they come out like a dam bursting or something. I'm sorry.