Quotes About Community

If you look at every flower individually, they look quite miserable. Put them together in a vase and they become a bouquet and that's quite attractive. I think about our community often in that way

If prayer, understood as an intimate relationship with God, is indeed the basis of all relationships—to ourselves as well as to others.

Here is a home for you; maybe you need us." All my desires to be useful, successful, and productive revolted.

In a time so filled with methods and techniques designed to change people, to influence their behavior, and to make them do new things and think new thoughts, we have lost the simple but difficult gift of being present to each other. We have lost this gift because we have been led to believe that presence must be useful.

Often I have the impression that priests and ministers are the least confessing people in the Christian community

Whether in solitude or community, whether alone or with others, we are called to live obedient lives, that is, lives of unceasing prayer — "unceasing" not because of the many prayers we say but because of our alertness to the unceasing prayer of God's Spirit within and among us.

I've yet to meet anyone who has come closer to Jesus by forsaking the church.

But real openness to each other also means a real closedness, because only he who can hold a secret can safely share his knowledge. When we do not protect with great care our own inner mystery, we will never be able to form community. It is this inner mystery that attracts us to each other and allows us to establish friendship and develop lasting relationships of love.

It is folly for a man who has a dead person in his house to leave him there and go to weep over his neighbor's dead."6

It is important to think about the Church not as over there but as a community of struggling, weak people of whom we are part and in whom we meet our Lord and Redeemer.

a much deeper human darkness: the darkness of not feeling truly welcome in human existence.

September 4, 2019 0 Minutes Children, adolescents, adults and old people are in growing degree exposed to the contagious disease of loneliness in a world in which a competitive individualism tries to reconcile itself with a culture that speaks about togetherness, unity and community as the ideals to strive for.

Following Jesus means to let go of the "I" and move toward the "other." Following Jesus means to dare to move out of ourselves and to slowly let go of building our "self" up.

Only when we recognize the rich network of connections between the Eucharist and our life in the world can the Eucharist be "worldly" and our life "Eucharistic.

Being friendly to everybody, he very often has no friends for himself. Always consulting and giving advice, he often has nobody to go to with his own pains and problems. [...] Looking for acceptance, he tends to cling to his counselees [...] In this way he […] never feels safe, is always on the alert, and finally finds himself terribly misunderstood and lonesome.

We also need guides: spiritual friends, a spiritual director, or a spiritual accountability group that can function for us as a safe place to bear our souls.

To live and serve and worship with others thereby brings us to a place where we come together and remind each other by our mutual interdependence that we are not God, that we cannot meet our own needs, and that we cannot completely fulfill each other's needs.

La formación espiritual exige emprender un viaje al interior del corazón. Aunque este viaje se realiza dentro de la comunidad y conduce al servicio, la primera tarea es mirar dentro de uno mismo, reflexionar sobre nuestra vida cotidiana y buscar a Dios y su actuar justamente ahí.

we find a place where people give one another grace.

When we become persons who transcend the limitations of our individual characters, the God who is love can reveal himself in our midst and bind us into a community.

The paradox indeed is that those who want to be for "everyone" find themselves often unable to be close to anyone.

If we do not know we are the beloved sons and daughters of God, we are going to expect someone in the community to make us feel that we are. We will expect someone to give us that perfect, unconditional love. They cannot.

Never in my life did I dream that men and women with a mental handicap would be the ones who would put their hands on me in a gesture of blessing and offer me a home. For a long time, I had sought safety and security among the wise and clever, hardly aware that the things of the Kingdom were revealed to "little children"; that God has chosen "those who by human standards are fools to shame the wise.

It is easier to live in the world without being of the world than to live in the church without being of the church