Have you ever been seized by a quote from somewhere that simply won’t leave you alone? Maybe it’s from a bood you’ve been reading, and the first time through you underline it. Maybe you go back and read that quote enough times, until you finally write it down and start carrying it around.

This experience has happened to be a number of times. The quotes that get this treatment are always ones that speak to me in a special way. They seem to say, “This is for you. Pay attention to it.” The meaning of such statements is seldom entirely clear to me. It speaks to me, and yet I don’t for sure know what it means. I’m meant to spend time with the statement, do my best to figure out what it means and then, make it mine, by following it, in some sense.  

Of all the statements that have spoken to me in a special way, the one that has hung around the longest is this one:

“Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.”

Now before you read further, take a moment and give some thought to what that statement actually means.

“Angels fly because they take themselves lightly” speaks to me partly because I am not naturally very good at taking myself lightly. In fact, I can, at times, be quite heavy and dark — rather than light — with fuss, or fear, or discouragement, or loneliness — or any other of the characteristically heavy conditions that weigh us down and make it hard to take ourselves lightly.

I would like to take myself more lightly than I do, and the “Angels fly…” statement is beginning to help.

An invitation: Please join in. We’ve got the makings of a good conversation here — better than a monologue.

Tags: angels, burdens, heavy, Light

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 16th, 2010 at 4:26 PM and is filed under Light, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.