Thoughts

God

God is the only thing.

Another Prayer

'My kingdom is within you
And omnipresent
Lift a stone and you will find me
Split a piece of wood and I am there.'
Whose words are those?
Are they the teachings of the Creator?
Or the boasts of the Tempter?
For truly there are hideous evils
Hidden in every glorious beauty
And every towering peak
Hides an abysmal valley
How can I judge anything
When Good and Evil walk hand in hand?
When every extreme contains, within itself,
The essence of its opposite extreme?
Therefore teach me God
(Who is also Satan)
To not judge at all
But rather to accept
And through acceptance
To learn harmony
With your hideously glorious universe.

A Prayer

Lord teach me to ignore the grumblings of my hungry stomach
Teach me to quiet the gasps of my parched throat
Teach me to disregard the cries of my agonized flesh
Teach me to cool the cauldron of my boiling blood
Teach me to dry the tears of my homesick eyes
Teach me to calm the yearnings of my lonely heart
Teach me to disprove the logic of my rational mind
Teach me to quell the storm of my oceanic soul
Teach me to destroy the greed of my subjective being
Lord unteach mine self the very concept of mine
And help me to be not me at all

My Point Exactly

"My route when I set out to find God...was...laziness. Yes, laziness. If I wasn't lazy I would have gone the way of respectable, upstanding people. Like everyone else I would have studied a trade-cabinetmaker, weaver, mason-and opened a shop; I would have worked all day long, and where then would I have found time to search for God? I might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack: that's what I would've said to myself. All my mind and thoughts would have been occupied with how to earn my living, feed my children, how to keep the upper hand over my wife. With such worries, curse them, how could I have had the time, or inclination, or the pure heart needed to think about the Almighty?
"But by the grace of God I was born lazy. To work, get married, have children, and make problems for myself were all too much trouble. I simply sat in the sun during winter, and in the shade during summer, while at night, stretched out on my back on the roof of my house, I watched the moon and the stars. And when you watch the moon and the stars how can you expect your mind not to dwell on God? I couldn't sleep any more. Who made all that? I asked myself. And why? Who made me, and why? Where can I find God so that I may ask Him? Piety requires laziness, you know. It requires leisure-and don't listen to what others say. The laborer who lives from hand to mouth returns home each night exhausted and famished. He assaults his dinner, bolts his food, then quarrels with his wife, beats his children without rhyme or reason simply because he's tired and irritated, and afterwards he clenches his fists and sleeps. Waking up for a moment he finds his wife at his side, couples with her, clenches his fists once more, and plunges back into sleep.... Where can he find time for God? But the man who is without work, children, and wife thinks about God, at first just out of curiosity, but later with anguish."

-Spoken by the character Brother Leo in Nikos Kazantzakis's Saint Francis