Quotes About Spirituality

Above all things have charity, which is the bond of perfection and may the peace of Christ exult in your hearts in which you are called unto one Body. And be grateful.? It seems to me that all mystical theology is contained in those two lines.

look for Him unless we have already found Him, and we cannot find Him unless he has first found us. We cannot begin to seek Him without a special gift of His grace, yet if we wait for grace to move us, before beginning to seek Him will probably never begin.

I should be able to return to solitude each time as to the place I have never described to anybody, as the place which I have never brought anyone to see, as the place whose silence has mothered an interior life known to no one but God alone.

There is "no such thing" as God because God is neither a "what" nor a "thing" but a pure "Who."* He is the "Thou" before whom our inmost "I" springs into awareness. He is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo "I am.

Therefore beware of the contemplative who says that theology is all straw before he has ever bothered to read any.

It is a law of man's nature, written into his very essence, and just as much a part of him as the desire to build houses and cultivate the land and marry and have children and read books and sing songs, that he should want to stand together with other men in order to acknowledge their common dependence on God, their Father and Creator. In fact, this desire is much more fundamental than any purely physical necessity.

Thomas Merton

PRAYER and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone.

Less and less conscious of themselves, they finally cease to be aware of themselves doing things, and gradually God begins to do all that they do, in them and for them, at least in the sense that the habit of His love has become second nature to them and informs all that they do with His likeness.

How could this fatuous, emotional thing be without beginning and without end, the creator of all? I had taken the dead letter of Scripture at its very deadest, and it had killed me, according to the saying of St. Paul: The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life

There is a monastic outlook which is common to all those who have elected to question the value of a life submitted entirely to arbitrary secular presuppositions, dictated by social convention, and dedicated to the pursuit of temporal satisfactions which are perhaps only a mirage. Whatever may be the value of life in the world there have been, in all cultures, men who have claimed to find something they vastly prefer in solitude. (p. 10)

Man is the image of God, and his inner self is a kind of mirror in which God not only sees Himself, but reveals Himself to the "mirror" in which He is reflected.

St. Eucherius on that sunrise! "Think how much more the splendor of the light will be for us in the future, if it shines upon us so brilliantly now. In what magnificent form will the light shine on eternal things, when it shines so beautifully now on what is passing away!

But in the actual experience of contemplation all other experiences are momentarily lost. They "die" to be born again on a higher level of life.

Thus, just about the time when I most needed it, I did acquire a little natural faith, and found many occasions of praying and lifting up my mind to God.

But there is nothing to prevent a layman from taking just one Psalm a day, for instance in his night prayers, and reciting it thoughtfully, pausing to meditate on the lines which have the deepest meaning for him.

They knew a good building would praise God better than a bad one, even if the bad one were covered all over with official symbols of praise.

For a Christian is one whom the world does not know.

Thomas Merton

Go into the desert not to escape other men but in order to find them in God.

You and I and all men were made to find our identity in the One Mystical Christ, in Whom we all complete one another "unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ.

Had I ever read the Life of St. Bernard by Dom Ailbe Luddy?—

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate.

My life is a listening, His is a speaking. My salvation is to hear and respond. For this, my life must be silent. Hence, my silence is my salvation.