Category: SOBRIETY

  • When we cannot be delivered from ourselves, we delight in devouring ourselves.

    —Emil Cioran

  • …noonday devil and described with great precision this state in which the monk, after having known the spiritual consolations of starting out, begins to doubt his spiritual journey. It is the great doubt: Had he not after all been abused? What good has it served spending all this time in the desert? He no longer finds any pleasure in the liturgy or religious observances. God seems nothing more than a projection, a fantasy or a childish notion. Would it not be better, therefore, simply to abandon solitude altogether, to be of some use in the world, to do something? At times this noonday devil will incite this chaste and sober person to catch up on lost time especially in regard to sensuality and strong drink.

    In his theory of individuation, C.G. Jung describes very accurately this moment of crisis, when a person in mid-life finds his or her whole life put into question. It is a time when repressed material can suddenly manifest itself with violence. But it can also mark a crucial moment of passage towards a deeper integration. The values of having are substituted for those of Being. From now on the person’s life is no longer oriented towards the affirmation of the ego, but towards this ego taking second place and being integrated into that archetype of wholeness, which Jung called the Self.

    It is a particularly difficult time. All the former supports and certainties fall by the wayside, and nothing seems to be taking the place of this collapsing edifice. If the person seeks help or consolation, it only heightens the despair, the feeling of complete unknowing to which one seems condemned.

    For this affliction, the desert fathers counsel much prayer. One is capable of little else. Their suggestion of manual labour won’t be of great relief. Nevertheless, it is necessary to occupy the mind with simple tasks and to live in the present moment without looking either to the past or to the future. The pain of each day suffices. It becomes a question of holding firm at the heart of the anguish. It is a time for fidelity.

    Being Still: Reflections on an Ancient Mystical Tradition
    Jean-Yves Leloup

  • “You can’t rescue a brother who needs to save himself.”

    —Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

  • “It is alarming to consider how many major life decisions we take primarily in order to minimize present-moment emotional discomfort.”

    ―Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking

  • I always felt two whiskeys in while everybody I talked to was as polished as a news anchor.

    —Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy

  • There is no aspect of any suffering whatever that is foreign to Me, that is outside Me. I am afflicted in all the afflictions of men, espousing them to the maximum, without their being able to erode My nature either by corrupting it or by diminishing it. Each human affliction releases in Me a new impulse of Love which wants to sweep into its vortex everything negative. Thou, mother who hast lost thy child,
    woman who hast lost thy husband, young girl who hast lost thy sweetheart, thou who art tortured by cancer, thou who art prisoner in a concentration camp, another the prisoner of alcohol, or of drugs, or of an egoistic sexuality, I am bowed over your misery, ah! If you but knew that I did not will such things, that they result from the work of the enemy, and that, invisibly, I am fighting for you! The outcome I prepare for you is one of light. Now is the hour and the power of darkness; and the time of their undoing must still remain hidden. But My Love will overcome their resistance and will wipe away all the tears. The veil will be lifted. Then you will see, you will understand. You will make your choice.

    —Lev Gillet, In Thy Presence

  • The one who has undergone gymnastic training will not be disheartened in the arena when he gets hit, but will immediately attack the opponent, despising momentary affliction in order to be named the champion. So also, when those who love virtue encounter something unpleasant, it will not hinder their joy. For suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us. [Rom 5.3—5] Therefore the Apostle exhorts us, in another place, to rejoice in hope and hope in distress. [Rom 12.12]

    —St. Basil the Great, On Fasting and Feasts, Homily Against Drunkards

  • Just as one with weak eyes turns them away from anything that is very bright, refreshing the vision with flowers and herbs, so also must your soul not stare at sorrow, fixating on present afflictions, but rather focus your eye on the true Good.

    —St. Basil the Great, On Fasting and Feasts, Homily Against Drunkards

  • The same is true of sins that occur through ignorance: they arise from sins consciously committed. For unless a man is drunk with either wine or desire, he is not unaware of what he is doing; but such drunkenness obscures the intellect and so it falls, and dies as a result. Yet that death has not come about inexplicably: it has been unwittingly induced by the drunkenness to which we consciously assented. We will find many instances, especially in our thoughts, where we fall from what is within our control to what is outside it, and from what we are consciously aware of to what is unwitting. But because the first appears unimportant and attractive, we slip unintentionally and unawares into the second. Yet if from the start we had wanted to keep the commandments and to remain as we were when baptized, we would not have fallen into so many sins or have needed the trials and tribulations of repentance.

    —St Peter of Damaskos

  • One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons—marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.

    —C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity