“”Do you wish to have love? If you wish to have love, then you must leave love.” Mechtild of Magdeburg
Letting go is a lesson all the mystics teach us. Mechtild reminds us of a deep paradox: we sometimes must leave love to have love. We need to let go of everything eventually, at some time, and so we need to develop the art of letting go. We will even, Mechtild is saying, at times need to let go of love. Ask yourself: What are my experiences of letting go? What follows after that? Have I had to let go of love? Why? Under what circumstances? How did it change me, deepen me, transform me? To let go can be to grow.”
“The way to spiritual maturity is through personal and interactive experience. We travel to wisdom along the roads that our soul is drawn to explore, eventually evolving a map that we begin to understand. Even within formal religions this journey must take place; otherwise, spiritual stasis sets in.
In the old language of craftspeople, there are three aspects to the spiritual path: first we are the apprentice, painstakingly learning the basics of our craft; then we become journeymen, trained apprentices who are able to travel from place to place practising our craft; finally we become masters of our craft and are honoured as repositories of skill. Our journey to wisdom, to a mature spirit, must go through all three phases. And even when we have arrived spiritually, we face the devastating revelation that the spiritual path is just that – a path, not a destination.
This is a lonely realisation for many, yet we are not unaccompanied on our path. Upon it we encounter others who are travelling our way, some of whom will become close personal friends because they are spiritual kindred. These encounters and spiritual friendships mould our understandings as soul calls to soul, bringing new insights and concepts. By working with such friends, we realise that the validity of our journey, we absorb new concepts that modify our own, we become more practical and less theoretical, and we change and grow in spirit.”
From The Celtic Spirit: Daily Meditations for the Turning Year by Caitlin Matthews
“To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ‘Tis much better to do a little with certainty, and leave the rest for others that come after you, than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.”
“What if one day you come to the realization that you never again have to explain yourself away to anyone any more, or that you no longer must carry the burden of another’s false perception of you or your own perceived inadequacies and you could relax, finally, in knowing you’re incredible in the light you are standing in at this moment. And what if you go on to not care about the judgments someone else might have; that your life is not full or amazing enough or that you no longer feel the need to endlessly apologize for being human? That day has been graciously waiting for you to begin swimming in its warm waters of love and acceptance.”
“It has been one of the greatest and most difficult years of my life. I learned everything is temporary. Moments. Feelings. People. Flowers. I learned love is about giving- everything- and letting it hurt. I learned vulnerability is always the right choice because it is easy to be cold in a world that makes it so very difficult to remain soft. I learned all things come in twos: life and death, pain and joy, sugar and salt, me and you. It is the balance of the universe. It has been the year of hurting so bad but living so good, making friends out of strangers, making strangers out of friends. We must learn to focus on warm energy, always. Soak our limbs in it and become better lovers to the world, for if we can’t learn to be kinder to each other how will we ever learn to be kinder to the most desperate parts of ourselves.”
“Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”
King Edward Street Chapel 