I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
*Galatians 2:20*The self must be unmade that it might be remade. And the remaking is not into a copy of what others are, but into a likeness of what God always intended you to be. The crucifixion of the old self is not destruction -- it is liberation from a prison you had mistaken for home.
-- *Søren Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity*
We are all something, but we are not everything. We all have some talent, but not all talents. It is only by the discovery of our nothingness before God that we arrive at the knowledge of our true selves. The soul that knows its own poverty is already rich.
-- *Blaise Pascal, Pensées*
The soul that cleaves to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. It advances from virtue to virtue, not by change of place but by progress in character. Moses did not ascend the mountain by moving his feet -- he ascended by the purification of his mind. So too the one who seeks God does not travel a road external to himself, but enters the inner chamber of his own heart, where the true ascent begins.
-- *Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses*
The disciplines of the spiritual life are not meritorious works. They are not painful requirements imposed by a hard master. They are simply the most obvious and natural things anyone must do to receive and keep in mind the things that are most real and valuable in human existence. The disciplines are for freedom, not for bondage.
-- *Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines*
What would you attempt today if the old self -- the one that flinches, calculates, and protects its image -- were already dead?
Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness -- all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother; therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading.
-- *Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II.1*
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