Quotes from Joan D. Chittister

preoccupation with fantasies of success; exhibitionism and insatiable attention-getting maneuvers;

We should employ our passions in the service of life," Sir Richard Steele wrote, "not spend life in the service of our passions.

To simply withdraw from the arena of ideas, from public discourse on public issues, from the value formation of the young—to shrug our shoulders and say, "I don't know" or, worse, "I don't care about those things anymore"—is to abandon the young to the mercy of their own ideas without the benefit of experience to guide them.

For the Jew, Passover is a sign of salvation, of "God with us" at a particular historical moment in the past. For the Christian, Easter is a sign of "God with us" in the past, but with us now also and at a time to come, as well.

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

LIKE A GREAT WATERWHEEL, THE LITURGICAL YEAR goes on relentlessly irrigating our souls, softening the ground of our hearts, nourishing the soil of our lives until the seed of the Word of God itself begins to grow in us, comes to fruit in us, ripens in us the spiritual journey of a lifetime.

for beginners. After that, you can set out for

We must take our whole selves there—mind and heart—as well as our bodies. And we must be there five minutes before prayer starts.

Most important of all, perhaps, all the childhood images of God—God the Magician, God the Santa Claus, God the wrathful Judge, God the Puppeteer—disappear. We know now that the God of Creation has shared power with us and remains with us to help us see life through. Our role is to do our part, to do our best, to trust the path.

we try so hard to avoid the rest of the year: how do we deal with the God of darkness as well as the Giver of light?

The essence of life is not to find the one thing that satisfies us but to realize that nothing can ever completely satisfy us. And that's all right.

Regret claims to be insight. But how can it be spiritual insight to deny the good of what has been for the sake of what was not? No, regret is not insight. It is, in fact, the sand trap of the soul. It fails to understand that there are many ways to fullness of life, all of them different, all of them unique.

Never saying no to the self becomes the holy grail in a world more intent on the material than on the spiritual.

Most significant of all, perhaps, is that, of the 613 laws in the Torah, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out, not one uses the word obey. God, the rabbi says, does not impose the intractable on Israel. God uses the word shema. Attend to.

Statio—stopping to collect our hearts and minds before we begin something new—is the sign that we know we are about to do the will of God for the world. We know that we must not go at it when we are scattered of heart.

old ways of doing things. It is the ability to make ancient truth the living memory of today. Only the elderly have lived through both the good and the bad decisions of the past. It is they, then, who have the wisdom to alert us to alternatives, to evaluate present choices from the perspective of history. The role of

Benedict understood clearly that the function of leadership is to call us beyond ourselves, to stretch us to our limits, to turn the clay into breathless beauty. But first, of course, we have to allow it to happen.

It's when freedom isn't freedom at all that the confusion of time soon becomes a confusion of soul. It doesn't take long to figure out that to have no fixed time for the major parts of life is to have bartered our freedom away.

Risk, the willingness to accept an unknown future with open hands and happy heart, is the key to adventures of the soul. Risk stretches us to discover the rest of ourselves - our creativity, our self-sufficiency, our courage. Without risk we live in a small world of small dreams and lost possibilities.

Those who insist on preserving yesterday when today has already swept it away like sand on a beach lose the opportunity to guide the present. Rather they insist on resisting the present to the point that it simply fails to notice them anymore. It is a choice whether to run the risk of becoming part of a comfortable but insignificant cult in a society that is passing or participate in the efforts of a society that is rushing to regain its balance in a headwind of major proportions.

Are you Jesus? people ask us silently every day. And the answer liturgical spirituality forms in us if we live it with constancy, with regularity, with fidelity, is surely, yes.

Everything new is not the end of the world. Instead, it is the beginning of a new way of being alive that is based on the past but has already grown beyond it.

Rogue waves are the dangerous ones; they are the ones that no one takes note of or prepares to manage. These are the movements we should have seen but did not. Or, worse, they are what we saw coming but refused to acknowledge in the hope that ignoring them would make them go away.

Benedict sets up a community, a family. And families, the honest among us will admit, are risky places to be if perfection is what y ou are expecting in life.