winter, star

On Thee the Angels look and are at peace; that is why they have perfect bliss. They never can lose their blessedness, for they never can lose Thee. They have no anxiety, no misgivings -- because they love the Creator.

We all have angels watching us . . .
What will bring their help?
Asking . . Giving thanks.

To evoke angels . . . we need only to live in quiet expectation of their presence and attune ourselves to their heedings. . . . From time to time, angels conceive and bring about serendipitous experiences and events in our lives to remind us that we are continually in God's care and that we are part of a divinely ordered universe.

The way I treat my inner child is the way I am going to treat my outer child.

It takes a universe
to make a child both
in outer form and inner spirit.
It takes a universe
to educate a child;
a universe to fulfill a child.
For, the child awakens to a universe.

A young Indian boy was auditioning along with some of us for a school play. His mother knew he’d set his heart on being in the play — just like the rest of us hoped, too — and she feared how he would react if he was not chosen.

On the day the parts were awarded the little boy’s mother went to the school on her horse to collect her son. The little boy rushed up to her and her horse, eyes shining with pride and excitement.

"Guess what, Mom," he shouted, and then said the words that provide a lesson to us all, "I’ve been chosen to clap and cheer."

When I was a baby my heart
was a tiny fish swimming
in a gargantuan sea of things to come.

When I was a toddler my heart
was a trout in a large lake of
thoughts and feelings.

Now my heart is becoming
a salmon ready to go to the sea
of troubles I will have to face.

When I am old my heart
will be a whale swimming
in a sea of memories.

When I die God will become
a whaler.

How great is the difference between the hidden child and the secret friend! For the friend makes only loving, living but measured ascents toward God. But the child presses on to lose its own life upon the summits, in that simplicity which knoweth not itself.

Perhaps there was in Beethoven the man, a child inside that never grew up and to the end of his life remained a creature of grace and innocence and trust even in his moments of greatest despair. And that innocent spirit speaks to us of hope and future and immortality.

A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed or even lost before we reach adulthood. I wish I could give a sense of wonder to each child in the world, so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote to the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with artificial things, the alienation from the sources of our strength.