It was fantastic to hear your great ideas last week about fun ways to review a passage. Feel free to keep these ideas coming, or keep on trying them out if you think of any more!
This week, we’d like to continue our passage study together by looking at qualities a passage embodies. As Easwaran says, “we become what we meditate on.” For example, from the Prayer of St. Francis, “It is in giving that we receive” might help us cultivate the quality of generosity. Please read the passage below. Can you pull out words, phrases, or lines that speak to qualities you’d like to develop if you meditated on this passage?
Let’s reflect on the qualities this passage has the potential to bring out in us, and share our ideas below!
They have completed their voyage; they have gone beyond sorrow. The fetters of life have fallen from them, and they live in full freedom.
The thoughtful strive always. They have no fixed abode, but leave home like swans from their lake.
Like the flight of birds in the sky, the path of the selfless is hard to follow. They have no possessions, but live on alms in a world of freedom. Like the flight of birds in the sky, their path is hard to follow. With their senses under control, temperate in eating, they know the meaning of freedom.
Even the gods envy the saints, whose senses obey them like well-trained horses and who are free from pride. Patient like the earth, they stand like a threshold. They are pure like a lake without mud, and free from the cycle of birth and death.
Wisdom has stilled their minds, and their thoughts, words, and deeds are filled with peace. Freed from illusion and from personal ties, they have renounced the world of appearance to find reality. Thus have they reached the highest.
They make holy wherever they dwell, in village or forest, on land or at sea. With their senses at peace and minds full of joy, they make the forests holy.