Quotes from Joan D. Chittister

These questions do not call for the discovery of data; they call for the contemplation of possibility.

Better to walk through life simply and without masks, than to lose ourselves in the pursuit of identities that are purely cosmetic and commercial. Then, at least, we will be known for what we are rather than for what we are not.

I learned that the Italians are right. It isn't what happens to us that counts. It's what we do with what happens to us that makes all the difference

Life is not about age, about the length of years we manage to eke out of it. It is about aging, about living into the values offered in every stage of life. As E. M. Forster wrote, "We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

The poet Mary Oliver may have written the best definition of what it means to be a prophet in contemporary spirituality. She writes, "Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

When God has become a business, though, it is very hard for people to get the confidence to realize that God is really a personal God, a God who touches us as individuals, a God who is as close to us as we choose to see. We have learned well the remoteness of a God who lived for so long behind communion rails and altar steps and seminary doors and chancery desks that the experience of God, however strong, has always been more private secret than public expectation.

Where will Christian feminists go for spiritual nourishment if the church itself fails to reflect the feminism of Jesus? If tradition becomes a reason for churches, for synagogues, for mosques to refuse to change in the light of new insights and understandings, on what grounds can we expect change from other institutions?

We don't change as we get older - we just get to be ore of what we've always been.

life is the vessel we have been given in order to find out what life is really meant to be about.

Bloom where you are planted,' the poster reads. But the poster does not tell the whole story. ' plant yourself where you know you can bloom' may well be the poster we all need to see. Or better yet, "Work the arid soil however long it takes until something that fulfills the rest of you finally makes the desert in you bloom.

It is what we do routinely, not what we do rarely, that delineates the character of a person.

As Albert Camus put it: "In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

Indeed, the big decisions in life are hardly ever clear—except for one. And that one is piercingly clear: life is a series of dilemmas, of options, of conundrums, of possibilities taken and not taken. Negotiating these moments well is of the essence of the life well lived.

Friendship is the call out of isolation and selfishness in order to teach me how to love and how to serve. But without stability, friendship - real soul-searing friendship, the kind that makes us choose between domination and infatuation and possessiveness and dependence for growth and freedom and depth and responsibility and self-knowledge - is impossible. Stability is what enables us, in other words, to live totally in God and totally for others.

God's will for us is what's left over when we have done everything we can possibly do to get out of doing what we're doing rigth now.

Spirituality is not meant to be a panacea for human pain. Nor is it a substitute for critical conscience. Spirituality energizes the soul to provide what the world lacks.

The historian Arnold Toynbee says of it, "The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves.

was greed that broke Wall Street, not the lack of financial algorithms.

If God worked through one woman to bring redemption, how is it that anyone can argue that God does not go on working through other women as well?

But one thing I do know: life and time are ghosted creatures for us all. They belong to us - and are not ours at the same time.

Stability of heart— commitment to the life of the soul, faithfulness to the community, perseverance in the search for God— is the mooring that holds us fast when the night of the soul is at its deepest dark, and the noontime sun sears the spirit. When

Prayer restores the soul that is dry and dulled by years of trying to create a world that never completely comes.

God is indeed everywhere in everything at all times—in the abstruse as well as the luminous, whether we ourselves can see the hand of God in this moment or not.

Humility does not necessarily require me to agree and comply with everyone else's position, but it does demand that I be willing to understand and respect the many sides of every issue.