Paradox

Paradoxically, what we fear most is love. When someone loves us completely, abandons oneself totally to us, then we are no longer our own. Often, we try to insulate ourselves against such love because it asks the same of us. Partial love we can handle, but total love begets a running fear in us: instinctively, we hide.


Rev Edward J Farrell

life's problems

The serious problems in life are never fully solved. The meaning and the purpose of a problem seem not to lie in its solution but in our working at it incessantly. This alone preserves us from stultification and petrifaction.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.


Carl Jung

Robert Frost: Escapist - Never

He is no fugitive -- escaped, escaping,
No one has seen him stumble looking back,
His fear is not behind him but beside him
On either hand to make his course perhaps
A crooked straightness yet no less a straightness.
He runs face forward. He is a pursuer,
He seeks a seeker who in his turn seeks
Another still, lost far into the distance.
Any who seek him seek in him the seeker.
His life is a pursuit of a pursuit forever.
It is the future that creates his present.
He is an interminable chain of longing.

Robert Frost

Images in St Teresa of Avila

Images found in The Interior Castle: castle, water, journey, serpent and devil, butterfly, marriage and Christ.

The castle image calls us to center our lives. Water speaks to the hidden depths which contain a great deal of our life. Journey as an image alerts us to passages or transitions which will inevitably be part of our development. Serpents and devils express the darkness we experience in life, and butterflies remind us of the newness that comes to be in the darkness. Marriage expresses the healing and wholeness we ache for, within our persons, our communities, and with God. And finally, the symbol of Christ points to the fullness of life we attain when we are in union with the divine presence in our lives.


Spiritual Pilgrims - Carl Jung & Teresa of Avila
John Welch