One Writer's Thoughts

"You rarely have time for everything you want in life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are."

"There are years that ask questions and years that answer."

"The act of forgiveness is the act of returning to present time. And that’s why when one has become a forgiving person, and has managed to let go of the past, what they’ve really done is they’ve shifted their relationship with time."

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As I was picking up the peaches on Saturday, I thought of the stories that Jesus told about the mustard seed. It occurred to me how well he understood nature. The key to nature is waste. You’ve got to waste in order to harvest. Waste ninety-nine seeds for the sake of one that may come up, and when it does come up, the tiny little thing you dropped in the ground is multiplied a hundred times. Of course, what I need is not peaches, but time­—minutes, hours, and days. Time is what I’m short of, and I sometimes imagine being given an occasional week with eight days so that I can catch up on everything. But I know perfectly well that a week later I’d he just as far behind as before.

Dorothy Day’s friend Peter Maurin, the French social­ist, told her when she was complaining about not having enough time, ‘To make time, you must sow time.’ Dorothy Day wrote in her journal, ‘In other words, throw it away. It must seem madness to throw that first wheat away, but more wheat grew up a hundred fold.

What are you short of? Time? Money? Power? What­ever you need, throw it away. Drop it, toss it, chuck it, lose it. And get ready for a harvest. No, its not a sure thing. Nothing’s sure-neither the stock market nor the Red Sox nor life. The harvest that comes may not he the one you expect. But it might be the one you need.

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"We are lovers, we say Yes to each other.  Yes to life—to more and more of life—to its brevity, its grief, its disappointments.  To its possibilities, its magnificence, its glory.  We quarrel—because we glimpse further possibilities, the non-sense—and wish to lay claim to it.  We remember death, and that life is brief, and that the time for love is now and more is possible.  One more step toward the holy.  It is to know the peace that passes understanding and that there is no peace.  It is to love others as they are, warts and all, and to believe that more is possible, and to bespeak that wanting.  It is to pray ‘Give us this day our daily bread….’ and to know that we do not live by bread alone.  It is to remember death, and to love life and to accept them both as holy. More and more, then, the embracing of ministry is work for an artist—one who is alert to ‘apprehending the points of intersection of the timeless with time.’"