The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air: Three Godly Discourses

What is joy, or what is it to be joyful? It is truly to be present to oneself; but truly to be present to oneself is this “today,” this to be today, truly to be today. And the truer it is that you are today, the more you are entirely present to yourself in being today, the less does tomorrow, the day of misfortune, exist for you. Joy is the present

If the place assigned to the lily is really as unfortunate as possible, so that it can be easily foreseen that it will be totally superfluous all its life, not be noticed by a single person who might find joy in it; if the place and the surroundings are—yes, I had forgotten it was the lily of which we are speaking—are so “desperately” unfortunate,

In nature, everything is unconditional obedience. The sighing of the wind, the echo of the forest, the murmuring of the brook, the hum of summer, the whispering of the leaves, the hiss of the grass, every sound, every sound you hear, it is all compliance, unconditional obedience, so that in it you can hear God as you can hear him in the music of th

A human being needs to know that even if all human beings gave up on him, indeed, even if he were on the verge of giving up on himself, God is still the God of patience. This is incalculable wealth.

For there is one thing that the lily and bird unconditionally do not understand, that, alas, most people understand best: half-measures.

For to cast sorrow away, but not upon God, is “distraction.” But distraction is a dubious and ambivalent remedy for sorrow.

Even less may you become self-important—in view of the fact that the lily and the bird, after all, are simple—so that you (perhaps in order to feel that you are a human being) become clever, and speaking with reference to some particular tomorrow, say: “The lily and the bird, of course they can—they who do not even have a tomorrow by which to be pl

So learn, then, from the lily and the bird, learn this, the dexterity of the unconditioned.

As noted, the certainty of downfall would disturb a human being, so that although only the briefest of existences had been allotted him, he did not fulfill the possibility he had in fact been granted. “To what purpose?” he would say, or “Why?” he would say, or “What good will it do?” he would say: and then he would not develop the whole of his pote