The older I get, the more I meet people, the more convinced I am that we must only work on ourselves, to grow in grace. The only thing we can do about people is to love them.” from All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day
When we love a person, we accept him or her exactly as is: the lovely with the unlovely, the strong with the fearful, the true mixed in with the façade, and of course, the only way we can do it is by accepting ourselves that way.
You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose...
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or...
Who, being loved, is poor?
The greatest deterrent to genuine happiness - believing that if our circumstances were different, then we would be happy. Paradoxically, deep contentment finds us when we lay aside the pursuit of happiness for something more...loving God and others. May we be caught...
There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves; it is not my nature.
Blessed are the agnostics. Blessed are they who doubt. Those who aren’t sure, who can still be surprised. Blessed are they who are spiritually impoverished and therefore not so certain about everything that they no longer take in new information. Blessed are those who...
I have decided that the only way to live is to embrace grief. For grief only exists where love lived first.
God, Keep my anger from becoming meanness. Keep my sorrow from collapsing into self-pity. Keep my heart soft enough to keep breaking. Keep my anger turned towards justice, not cruelty. Remind me that all of this, every bit of it, is for love. Keep me fiercely kind....