“Listening is a very deep practice. You have to empty yourself. You have to leave space in order to listen. Especially to people we think are our enemies – the ones we believe are making our situation worse. When we have shown our capacity for listening and understanding, the other person will begin to listen to you, and you have a chance to tell him or her of your pain, and it’s your turn to be healed. This is the practice of peace.”

Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926 – 2022), Vietnamese Buddhist teacher

International Migrants Day

“I know that those who hate have good reason to do so. But why should we always have to choose the cheapest and easiest way? It has been brought home forcibly to me here how every atom of hatred added to the world make it an even more inhospitable place. And I also believe, childishly perhaps but stubbornly, that the earth will become more habitable again only through love.”

Etty Hillesum (1914 – 1943), Dutch Jewish writer, murdered in Auschwitz

“The Judaeo-Christian vision of the cosmos defends the unique and central value of the human being amid the marvellous concert of all God’s creatures, but today we see ourselves forced to realize that it is only possible to sustain a “situated anthropocentrism”. To recognize, in other words, that human life is incomprehensible and unsustainable without other creatures…

Let us stop thinking, then, of human beings as autonomous, omnipotent and limitless, and begin to think of ourselves differently, in a humbler but more fruitful way.

I ask everyone to accompany this pilgrimage of reconciliation with the world that is our home and to help make it more beautiful, because that commitment has to do with our personal dignity and highest values. At the same time, I cannot deny that it is necessary to be honest and recognize that the most effective solutions will not come from individual efforts alone, but above all from major political decisions on the national and international level.”

From Laudato Deum by Pope Francis, born Jorge Mario Bergoglio, on this day in 1936

“There is a reason why walking amongst nature is most people’s best advice when depression strikes.
Because walking in nature is a return to ‘home’.
You are not a lover of nature, or a fan of nature, you ‘are’ nature.
You are as much nature as the trees in your garden and the bees on your picnic.
You were designed to live your days out in the wild with your fellow creatures and plants but progress, humanity, had different plans for us all.
And so we exist day-to-day, in our homes, but never ‘home’.
The quickest route back to self, to inner peace, is bare feet on grass, arms around trees, head in the clouds and heart in a forest.
Put your bones in water, whenever you can, smell each flower you see and crumble dirt between your tired-of-typing fingers.
You are nature, go home once in a while.
It will bring you much you didn’t even know you were missing.”

Donna Ashworth

“Finding your Self, discovering who you really are, means to find God, for there is nothing really outside of Him.. God is fully and equally present everywhere.. Everything is He.”

Ma Anandamayi (1896 – 1982), Indian spiritual teacher

“The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks don’t see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.
That’s the story.
That’s the message.”

Jack Kerouac (1922 – 1969), novelist and poet, quoted in Fragments of Holiness for Daily Reflection

“If we could set up a stop-frame film of the solar year and point it up toward the northern heavens, we would see revealed the dance of the circumpolar stars about the polestar in a fantastic circle dance. Among the peoples of the north, the polestar is called “the nail of heaven” because of its unchanging position in the sky: an unfailing and welcome guide to travellers and sailors in the darkest night.

Discovering our own true north as the compass point of our soul’s direction is a worthwhile enterprise on our spiritual path. Our true north may not be an actual belief system or ideology, not a religious figure or archetype, if we are still searching. It may be something that is nearer to an instinct or feeling of travelling in the right direction, something that we sniff in the wintry air or intuit from the glancing rays of the sun through the leafless trees.”

From The Celtic Spirit: Daily Meditations for the Turning Year by Caitlin Matthews

International Day of Neutrality

“You see, when the world becomes too solid for nuance, when it hardens up and crystallizes into a binary that forces you to pick a side, compelling you to become intelligible to the hardness that creeps on its once loamy surfaces, cracks become the first responders. We need a politics of tenderness more than ever. Not tenderness as capitulation to particular conclusions that have already been made. Not tenderness as “if you don’t see the world as I do, there’s something wrong with you.” But tenderness as the nurturing of grace that allows something different, something even beautiful, to be born in the midst of the fires.”

Báyò Akómoláfé, philosopher, writer and activist

“It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good…

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained.”

Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn (1918 – 2008), Soviet dissident writer, born on this day

“Prayer is as natural to man as speaking, sighing and seeing, as natural as the palpitation of a loving heart; and actually that is what prayer is: a murmur, a sigh, a glance, a heartbeat of love…

All our bodily acts are the nature of prayer. Our body performs a perfect physiological act of thanksgiving when, thirsting, it receives into itself a glass of water. Or, when on a hot day we bathe in a cool river, our skin sings a hymn of thanksgiving in praise of the Creator, even though this kind of prayer may be non-rational, unconscious and at times involuntary. However we are able to transform everything we do into prayer. Work and labour are forms of existential prayer.”

Ernesto Cardenal, Nicaraguan Catholic priest and liberation theologian (1925 – 2020)