Quotes About Faith

God says that Moses will see his back as he passed by him. "Thus," Father Kolvenbach wrote, "looking back over the length and breadth of his life the abbot could see for himself the passage of God." The examen helps you see God in retrospect.

Jesus often says, "Follow me," but never "Worship me."5 It's a needed reminder to those who would focus only on his divinity.)

Knowing God is more important than knowing about God.

But this is about more than just work, a job, or even a career. Vocation may have little to do with one's actual work. For the deepest vocation is to become who you are, to become your "true self," the person whom God created and calls you to be.

Joy is not simply a fleeting feeling or an evanescent emotion; it is a deep-seated result of of one's connection of God.

God can change)

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

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

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

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

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.

Finally, Ignatian spirituality is about freedom and detachment

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.

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.

Jesus must make decisions on his own, choices that probably seem confusing, and, in this case, offensive to those around him. This is often true of all of us when we make truly free decisions.

So, when I entered the Jesuits, at age twenty-seven, I did so with only an eleven-year-old's knowledge about the faith.

though I was by that point rather fond of Saint Jude, I was afraid of what my friends might say if they saw a strange plastic statue standing on my dresser. So Saint Jude was stuffed inside my sock drawer, and was brought out of the drawer only on special occasions.

For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the LORD, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope."27

One day she accidentally ran over my rosary beads with the vacuum cleaner. When she pulled it out, it had lost three beads. When I came home from school I spied it on my bedpost and said, "Hey look what happened to my rosary beads!" Hoping to make me feel better, she said, "Well, look on the bright side. Now it won't take you so long to pray it!

specifically The Seven Storey Mountain and No Man Is An Island that led me to where I am today and helped me become the person I was meant to be.

As the African American theologian James Cone notes, "Far from being songs of passive resignation, the spirituals are black freedom songs which emphasize black liberation as consistent with divine revelation.

His whole life was a quest for freedom—the freedom to be open to the wonderful reality that God has made, to God himself, to what is!