- Moore explains his biases, his Catholic upbringing, his Jungian predisposition, fondness for Renaissance theology
- It's my conviction that slight shifts in imagination have more impact on living than major efforts at change.
- The Renaissance theologians, my primary teachers, advocated "natural religion" -- not in the eighteenth century sense of a rational religion, but as a sensitivity to the sacred in everyday life.
The Soul in Love
- Moore goes into the main contradictions in love: attachment and freedom; the desire to cleave to another, and the desire to flee
- Samuel Beckett was notorious for his love of his sparse apartment and for his resistance to the world. "All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante."
(This reminded me of the much less coarse John Maeda quote, "All I want to be is someone who makes new things and thinks about them.") - Marcilio Ficino, Renaissance philosopher, Neo-Platonist, (declared heretical by the Catholic Church) who insisted upon the immortality of the soul.
- A soul mate is someone to whom we feel profoundly connected, as though the communicating and communing that take place between us were not the product of intentional efforts, but rather a divine grace.
- Instructions: Think about all of your relationships, past and present. Think about family ties and alienations. Think about old loves and present affections. Think about hopes and dreams and don't overlook the disasters and tragedies. Think about all of these in relation to your soul. Try to avoid familiar judgments about them. Above all, try to wash away some of the narcissism that makes you think more about your own success and failure rather than the large mysteries held in these tales and memories.
- You are accepted, a sermon by Paul Tillich
Intermingled Souls
Reading this was particularly poignant because just as I read it T. called to tell me that N. had decided to leave him for good, and that T. had moved on and had a new girlfriend from work, who was also going through a divorce (which was secret, because N. had not yet moved out.) It had been a year since she first started cheating on him, and six months since he knew; he had done his best to keep her, and change to suit her, but to no avail, so he was finally done.
- p. 26. The wife was going through a remarkable period of renewal. She was waking up to possibilities for herself that she had never considered before. Her husband, however, was still asleep, going through the rote motions of a career and marriage. It was his habit to blame the external world for everything negative that was happening to him. His wife, her mother, his boss, the town in which they lived--all these things were at fault. He never said anything of substance about his own thoughts, feelings, or experiences. It appeared that he had no relationship to his soul. In this case the wife decided after a while to go her own way. She felt that her husband would never be a true partner, that he would never be able to appreciate the intense experiences she was having or to be there himself as a person, alive with fresh thoughts and reflections.
- p. 26. Many people imagine relationship fundamentally as a simple structure of being together.
- p. 37 Some individuals live as if there were no interior life. The problem in such relationships is not simply a lack of communication, but a sense that experience is meaningless. There seems to be a widespread tendency in modern life to observe events as they happen passively, like Camus' stranger, whose detached passivity stems from a complete equalization of values. Nothing is shocking, there are no problems, things happen, there is nothing to be done, said, or thought.
- p. 52 Oddly, the attempts of many married people to create an affluent environment might even be the cause of marital failure, because the point in marriage is not to create a material, human world, but rather to evoke a spirit of love that is not of this world.
Work
- p. 87 Some businesses seem almost monastic in expecting employees on the work site to be individuals cut off from their families; but corporations and businesses could find more soul by sincerely taking the family life of their employees into account when making corporate decisions, and by re-imagining the very nature of work in ways that include the family.
- In some countries, trains, and even an occasional plane, will be filled with families seeing that their relatives are comfortably seated and given full farewells--not a common American practice.
Endings
- p. 192. A man once complained to me bitterly that his former wife was utterly selfish when she divorced him in order to be with someone else. He lived in his bitterness for years as though waiting for his wife one day to admit her fault. It's especially easy to dodge fate when the partner has done something that has the slightest shadow in it. Yet after some conversation, it became clear that he, too, had felt the marriage to be an impossible burden. I asked him why he hadn't made any moves to leave a relationship that was obviously soulless and lifeless. "I kept hoping, " he said, "that one day it would change."
- p. 193 It isn't unusual for only one of the partners to see that a relationship is over. She may then go through terrifying struggle and aching decision-making to force a change that she would never have willed. The other may find it extremely difficult to acknowledge the same signs, or perhaps to bear the fatefulness, and a way out seems to be to blame the person who is causing the ending for being heartless and unfeeling.
- p. 197 I realize that friends and professionals sometimes urge those who suffer an ending in a relationship to hold the other responsible, or tell them that they should move on in life, happy to be rid of such an irresponsible partner, but that hero's way of conquering the death of the relationship defends against the initiation that is offered.
