“It is worth considering the ‘particular’ in life. If I want to dance with another person I  need to learn particular steps. If I need to be healed, I go to a particular doctor, look at particular symptoms and have a particular treatment… If I am lost, I use a particular map to find my way home. When I grieve it is because I have lost someone I particularly love… ‘Particular’ is the way I live at depth, the way I search with focus, the way I heal, the way I find, the way I enjoy, the way I choose and the way I act in union with Christ and others.”

—from a meditation published by Campion Centre for Ignatian Spirituality on The Particular Examen, an exercise from the Ignatian tradition

“You cannot devote your life to an abstraction. Indeed, life shatters all abstractions in one way or another, including words such as ‘faith’ or ‘belief’… The meanings that God calls us to in our lives are never abstract. Though the call may ask us to redefine, or refine what we know as life, it does not demand a renunciation of life in favour of something beyond it. Moreover, the call itself is always composed of life. That is, it is not some hitherto unknown voice to which we respond;  it is life calling to life… If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time-ravaged self.” 

Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss

“You can’t love roses. You can only love a rose.”

Adam Gopnik, “The Strange Triumph of ‘The Little Prince’“, The New Yorker