Quotes from James Martin

Savoring slows us down. In the examen we don't recall an important experience simply to add it to a list of things that we've seen or done; rather, we savor it as if it were a satisfying meal. We pause to enjoy what has happened. It's a deepening of our gratitude to God, revealing the hidden joys of our days. As Anthony de Mello said, "You sanctify whatever you are grateful for." The

Not only do I have good friends, but I also have friends who are good.

present moment holds infinite riches beyond your wildest dreams but you will only enjoy them to the extent of your faith and love. The more a soul loves, the more it longs, the more it hopes, the more it finds. —Jean-Pierre de Caussade, S.J. (1675–1751), The Sacrament of the Present Moment The

Our sexuality, in a sense, touches everything we do, including the way we love, even when the sexual expression of that love is neither involved nor even contemplated. So to call a person's sexuality "objectively disordered" is to tell a person that all of his or her love, even the most chaste, is disordered. That seems unnecessarily cruel.

If asked to define Ignatian spirituality, the first thing out of their mouths would most likely be finding God in all things.

Because people understand that the diocese is trying to help the members of that group feel more connected to their church, the church they belong to by virtue of their baptism.

Be grateful for your sins. They are carriers of grace.

Beware of condemning any man's action. Consider your neighbor's intention, which is often honest and innocent, even though his act seems bad in outward appearance. —St. Ignatius Loyola

After "finding God in all things," the second answer you would probably get from those five hypothetical Jesuits is that Ignatian spirituality is about being a contemplative in action.

Can you surrender to the future that God has in store for you?

Is it right for people to critique others for their supposed un-Christian attitudes by themselves being un-Christian?

On the way out of the theater, I brushed away the tears, worried that my friend would notice. Suddenly he turned to me. "What a waste of a life!" he snapped. "All that suffering for nothing!" His comments shocked me. It was the first time I realized that my feelings toward religion might be the opposite of what others experienced.

The third way of understanding the way of Ignatius is as an incarnational spirituality.

All Christians have access to the spiritual riches found in the Scriptures, which, after all, were written amid the spiritual turmoil and social conflicts of the writers' times. We can learn from those who went before us.

Twice a day, or at least once, make your particular examens. Be careful never to omit them. So live as to make more account of your own good conscience than you do of those of others; for he who is not good in regard to himself, how can he be good in regard to others?

And she can be found in the hearts of those who feel that, above almost all the saints, she is the one who most understands what it means to be a human being who suffers and rejoices in everyday life. Her life—at once simple and complex, clear and opaque, childlike and mature, humble and bold, joyful and sorrowful—has spoken to millions of people. It spoke to my friend David. And it spoke to me, from the first moment I met her, in that little movie theater in Connecticut.

Finally, Ignatian spirituality is about freedom and detachment

But shining through the nineteenth-century piety, like a pale green shoot bursting through dark soil, is a stunningly original personality, a person who, despite the difficulties of life, holds out to us her Little Way and says to us one thing: Love.

avoid dying a moment before we have to. Given that we expend so much effort staying alive, it might seem strange to think that anyone

My friend's experience reminded me that the search for a perfect religious community is a futile one. As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote in The Seven Storey Mountain, "The first and most elementary test of one's call to the religious life—whether as a Jesuit, Franciscan, Cistercian or Carthusian—is the willingness to accept life in a community in which everybody is more or less imperfect." That holds for any religious organization.

Detachment, freedom, and a sense of humor are signposts on the road to holiness.

I will recommend focusing on gratitude. This is not to dismiss or cover up the sadness. Rather, when we are sad, we tend to assume that there is no good at all in life. Focusing on gratitude helps to restore our whole vision.

Fun—a word you don't hear much in church—is also a foretaste of heaven and, for Christians, an important spiritual goal.

Religious experiences are often dismissed—not out of doubt that they aren't real, but out of fear that they are real after all.