Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“I learned without her saying a word that there are truly many ways to pray, and lighting a candle is one of them.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Be led by your joy.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Putting words onto paper—when it is done as an honest act of search or connection, rather than as an act of manipulation, performance, self-aggrandizement or self-protection—is a holy act.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Writing and prayer are both a form of love, and love takes courage.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“I go fishing in my mind. I put out bait, the bait of my own longing, my desire, and my hunger for connection, for a tug of something alive at the end of a line. Something that I may have to struggle with to pull in, but that will be wild and important to me, whether I keep it or let it go.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Both writing and praying are acts of deep vulnerability.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“The more we open ourselves to love, the larger our capacity for love becomes.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“If we can't forget, how can we forgive? I believe that forgiving can't be done by willpower alone. I can will myself to write out my own memories and feelings. I can will myself to imagine onto the page how someone else may have felt. I can will myself to research someone else's life in order to better understand what happened. But I don't think I can forgive by simply willing to forgive. Forgiving happens to us when our hearts are ready. Sometimes it takes the form of working on our own story until quietly, often surprisingly, we simply let go of the hurt. Sometimes forgiving makes it possible to pick up the pieces of a broken relationship and begin again. Sometimes it means letting a relationship go. We can't forgive through willpower. What we can do is work toward readiness of heart. Writing as a spiritual practice can be that kind of work.

When our heart is ready, we often don't even know it until forgiveness happens within us. It is a gift.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“She begins, “What is the question we spend our entire lives asking?â€� and answers, “Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another.â€� She closes her sermon to the snakes with these words: “I am like you, curious and small. Like you, I pause alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun’s slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“It occurred to me that when I begin to write, I open myself and wait. And when I turn toward an inner spiritual awareness, I open myself and wait.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Jesus said, “But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Surprise is a major factor in distinguishing an answer to prayer from a projection of my own mental processes. When I can’t believe I made up the answer myself, I have to look around to see where it came from.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“God’s love is God’s attention.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“I am like you, curious and small. Like you, I pause alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun’s slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.â€�5”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Follow, poet, follow right to the bottom of the night. I have no choice but to pursue the deepest truth my life has given me.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“To pray is to open oneself completely, intimately, into the Presence that is beyond our ability to name.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Maybe the bottom of my own night is a darkness I cannot descend into without “the light that is within meâ€� becoming dark.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“In writing, we see, sometimes with fear and trembling, who we have been, who we really are, and we glimpse now and then who we might become.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Darkness and light are inextricably bound together.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“The panther that has stalked you
since you were a child
is old now. No longer wild,
and tired of guarding the treasure
you yourself left behind -
blind and deaf, she will give it all to you
if you just let her go.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our lives eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“It is what we love the most / can make us most afraid”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“human suffering is the price we pay for freedom—our own, and the freedom of others. We are free to make mistakes, free to be cruel or kind, free to hurt or help one another. We are free in a dangerous world;”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“The issue for me, both as a writer and as a spiritual seeker, is courage—the courage to be there myself, and the courage to allow the reader to be there—to see, to touch, to taste, to smell,”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Writing is often a struggle between the personal and the universal, and the way writers deal with that struggle varies.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“Maybe she is right. Maybe the old self has to die for the new self to be born. Or maybe, for me, the old self doesn’t have to die. Maybe who I have been is not erasable on the tablet of who I am, or in the book of who I will become. Maybe writing, like painting, can be pentimento—one layer over another, the early layers now and then showing through.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“That first voice, the voice of home, is the one the writer must protect from the contempt or disdain or disregard of any critic, no matter how famous or capable that critic may be. It is not all that a mature writer needs; surely every writer needs the tools of literary criticism and as much knowledge of various traditions as possible—but a profound acceptance of and trust in one’s own voice is the first and most important thing the writer needs.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“American men are allotted just as many tears as American women. But because we are forbidden to shed them, we die long before women do with our hearts exploding or our blood pressure rising or our lives eaten away by alcohol because that lake of grief inside us has no outlet. We, men, die because our faces were not watered enough.8”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice

“PERHAPS Perhaps the world ends here. —JOY HARJO You have undone the weave of the garment the old ghost habitually wore, the ghost who forever meets you inside the tenement door. She is naked now, and so thin you can’t see her anymore. But ghosts don’t have to be visible for you to know they are there. She never stands at the table or sits down in a chair. She is naked, and cold as a shiver under her long, grey hair. In dreams you’ve unwoven her garments and set fire to the tenement wall. Nothing is left of the building â€� a tumble of ashes is all. You can’t see her in that absence. In the silence, you can’t hear her call. The world begins at a table, says the poet. The world ends there, too. And the ghost you try to dismantle clothes herself in you. Then her silence speaks only to silence, and there’s nothing more you can do. You have railed at the fetters that bind you; you have asked the inevitable “Why?â€� You have stripped her of clothing and lodgingâ€� what else can you possibly try? If you kill the ghost of your childhood, It is you who will certainly die.”
― Pat Schneider, How the Light Gets In: Writing as a Spiritual Practice