"What is essential is to keep the heart always open to beauty."
What could be harder in an age like ours? And yet, it is just because our age is so harsh and brutal that it is more than ever essential to create around us, in our homes and offices and meeting places, a sacred environment. To do so is to awaken the poet in each of us, the poet and the lover of life and beauty. Creating a sacred environment is not complicated; it just requires concentration and the constant reminder that the one important thing in your life is to keep your heart open to Divine Love.
~ from MARY'S VINEYARD by Andrew Harvey and Eryk Hanut
God's grace and attraction touch the human person at the most vulnerable points of existence. Response to this movement in our hearts leads us to compassion, joy, celebration and forgiveness. The heart is that which can be attracted, touched, moved, acted upon. It is called affective, able to be affected, inasmuch as it is drawn and does not move under its own power. Those who act from the heart, moved by God to compassion, become signs of God's love and tenderness. This is the significance of the affirmation that the person is the heart. Created in the image of God, a God who is all love and compassion, we act in harmony with our nature when we manifest the qualities of the heart that are revealed to us in weakness, not in our strength. The seeds of the divine life within and the capacities of the human heart are found in weakness. A blessed weakness this human heart!
~ from A BLESSED WEAKNESS: THE SPIRIT OF JEAN VANIER AND L'ARCHE by Michael Downey
