Try to be more attentive to yourself instead of judging the actions, behavior, and attitude of others towards you; if you do not see love in them, it is because you yourself have no love within you.”
—Elder Leo of Optina
Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE
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And in your heart you will now be free at last and utterly alone. It is only in this aloneness, this utter solitude, that dependence and desire will die, and the capacity to love is born. For one no longer sees others as means to satisfy one’s addiction.
―Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love -
We all enter the Infinite Scroll shouting, hoping to find love.
Bimbo Ubermensch
The Ocean -
If I have the feeling that I am applying boundaries in an improper way, I ought to open the doors once again, because boundaries preserve relationships, and not destroy them.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Build Boundaries
Seldom set foot in your neighbor’s house,
Lest he become weary of you and hate you.
Proverbs 25:17 (NKJV)
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The person who lives in isolation from others and refrains from helping others, has a problem with boundaries, because he shuts his doors to good things.
Nevertheless, we pray in the Divine Liturgy, “He made us unto Himself an assembled people, and sanctified us.”…
The avoiders do not allow [both] the good and the bad from entering, even though there may be a risk that God may be left outside the heart, and he does not allow Him to come in: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.” (Rev 3:20)
“Do not consent in your thoughts, nor characterize in your words, any person as evil. The Lord has loosened us from the bondage of the devil, so that we should not bind ourselves again nor give our souls up to slavery by our ill opinion.”
St. Macarius
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Build Boundaries
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“If he’d learned one thing while he’d been away, it was that loneliness is the most taboo subject in the world. Forget sex or politics or religion. Or even failure. Loneliness is what clears out a room.”
— Douglas Coupland, Miss Wyoming
Pain, for instance. Everyone has it, most people want to talk about it, yet no one really wants to hear about it. Talking about one’s pain makes one boring and embarrassing. It imposes on the sympathy and energy of others.
—Noreen Masud, There is nothing so deep as the gleaming surface of the aphorism -
And sometimes we isolate ourselves from others, whom we have characterized as evil, or we isolate (ourselves] from church. Or perhaps a person may isolate himself from his job, when he is doing a work he does not like, and so he submits his resignation and looks for another job, and so he moves from work to work, and everywhere he goes he finds flaws only. Therefore, he keeps on saying that he has not found people who love him, and there is no fairness in this work, etc. And this person continues to search for perfection, and will not find it, for there is no absolute perfection on earth.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Develop Your Personality
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The person who has not learned how to bond with others, will find it very difficult to say to someone that he is in need of others’ help. In contrast to that is the person who has bonded with another. It is very easy for him to say that he needs your support, because he is going through a tough time.
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Develop Your Personality
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What happens when a person, because of upbringing, fails in bonding with others, and is not able to form successful relationships? The person feels lonely, isolated, and estranged.
This isolation and estrangement passes through three stages:
The first stage [consists of] grumbling and distress, in which the person feels pain because he is alone, and feels that he is a stranger and has nobody to ask about him, and that nobody loves him. But he may [even] grumble against God, and say that the Lord does not love him, and may grumble against society wherein he lives. This person complains, because he has failed in making sound relationships. For this person to overcome this matter, he has to deal with this pain in a positive way, and from it, as an impetus, set out to form relationships and friendships with others, and then he can heal himself and grow in a sound way. If he does not do this, he will enter into the next stage.
The second stage is what we call, the building up of the feelings of grumbling against everything around him, because the feeling of the pain of loneliness persists for a long time. So you find him grumbling against God and others, and against home, church, and school.
As for the third stage, it is the most dangerous, in which the person feels that he does not deserve to live, and then he ends his life and reaches the point of [committing] suicide.
From the aforementioned, the importance of forming relationships is made clear, and [also] bonding with God and entering into a relationship with God, so he will bask in the warmth of His love, and will attain success in his life, as Joseph bonded with God, and therefore, Scripture says, “The LORD was with Joseph, and he was a successful man.”
—H.E. Metropolitan Youssef, How to Develop Your Personality
SO GOOD QUOTES 