However, in making the assertion that a certain service—in this case, raising children—can in fact be prayer, I am bolstered by the testimony of contemplatives themselves. Carlo Carretto, one of the twentieth century’s best spiritual writers, spent many years in the Sahara Desert by himself praying. Yet he once confessed that he felt that his mother, who spent nearly thirty years raising children, was much more contemplative than he was, and less selfish. If that is true, and Carretto suggests that it is, the conclusion we should draw is not that there was anything wrong with his long hours of solitude in the desert, but that there was something very right about the years his mother lived an interrupted life amid the noise and demands of small children.
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For years, while she is raising small children, her time is not her own, her own needs have to be put into second place, and every time she turns around some hand is reaching out demanding something. Years of this will mature most anyone. It is because of this that she does not need, during this time, to pray for an hour a day. And it is precisely because of this that the rest of us, who do not have constant contact with small children, need to pray privately daily.
Domestic Monastery
Ronald Rolheiser
Category: PARENTS
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The only really valuable religious and moral training I ever got as a child came to me from my father, not systematically, but here and there and more or less spontaneously, in the course of ordinary conversations. Father never applied himself, of set purpose, to teach me religion. But if something spiritual was on his mind, it came out more or less naturally. And this is the kind of religious teaching, or any other kind of teaching, that has the most effect. “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart, bringeth forth good fruit; and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth that which is evil. For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.”
—Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain -
There are those who are called the slothful in the book of Wisdom, who strew their path with thorns, who consider harmful to the soul a zeal for deeds in keeping with the commandments of God, the demurrers against the apostolic injunctions, who do not eat their own bread with dignity, but, fawning on others, make idleness the art of life. Then, there are the dreamers who consider the deceits of dreams more trustworthy than the teachings of the Gospels, calling fantasies revelations. Apart from these, there are those who stay in their own houses, and still others who consider being unsociable and brutish a virtue without recognizing the command to love and without knowing the fruit of long-suffering and humility.
James Stuart Bell, ed., Ancient Faith Study Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bibles, 2019), 752.
They stay in their homes and “isolate from others” and their community. One of the most dangerous things people do is isolate themselves from the church community. All of this is a big thorn that you are putting in your life that makes you lazy, that makes you not put effort, and makes you isolated, and makes the devil easy to control you and change you.
—Fr. Mina Dimitri, inspired by Gregory of Nyssa’s On Virginity, Chap. 23
They take from people (by flattery, by anger, by complaining, by manipulation). Sometimes they’re lazy, dependent fully on their family, yet they’re still yelling and disrespecting their own family.
—Fr. Mina Dimitri -
I have never treated my mother worse than I did during that period; and thus, to the boredom that oppressed me, there was added on top of everything else, a feeling of pity for her, incapable as she was of finding any explanation for my rudeness. Worse than anything, I suffered from a kind of paralysis of all my faculties, which made me mute and apathetic and dull, so that I felt as if I were buried alive inside myself, in a hermetically sealed and stifling prison.
Boredom
Alberto Moravia -
To any impartial observer it appears that the human individual cannot be happy, and is in no way conceived for happiness, and his only possible destiny is to spread unhappiness around him by making other people’s existence as intolerable as his own—his first victims generally being his parents.
The Possibility of an Island
Michel Houellebecq -
“It seems we don’t know how to love the ones we love until they disappear from our lives.”
—Joshua Fields Millburn, Everything That Remains: A Memoir by The Minimalists -
I fell silent, with a sense of satiety, of futility. I might, I reflected, go on questioning my mother for hours and still not come to a conclusion about anything: her life, and she herself, had by now attained a degree of utter meaninglessness which amounted, in the long run, to a sort of mystery at the same time both dull and impenetrable.
Boredom
Alberto Moravia -
Consider watching through a window as a family enjoys a home-cooked meal. You might imagine how it feels to be part of this group—their warmth and happiness, their sense of belonging as they pass dishes back and forth. Now imagine being part of this family. Maybe you do feel warmth and happiness, but those feelings are much more complex, less tidy. What came before the dinner? What comes after? Are you actually present, or thinking about something else? Your family is not a snapshot or a concept; it’s messy, in flux, evolving. It has depth and continuity. No matter how lovely the dinner is in reality, it can never really live up to what the observer imagines. Because what they imagine is actually just a symbol—an idea they’ve adapted from TV, movies, and marketing their entire lives about what it means to be part of a happy family.
#187: Drowning in envy
Haley Nahman -
Excessive sorrow for our loved ones who have left this world is not a Christian act, but an act of godlessness. We prepare ourselves in this life for eternal life. We must be thankful for everything and thank God for taking the souls of our departed loved ones to Himself.
—Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica
SO GOOD QUOTES 