Quotes About Spirituality

Today we celebrate both outer freedom and inner freedom.

Divine Beloved, thank you for the flowering of the Godseed within me that acknowledges and encourages other people and myself. Guide me in maintaining the basic disciplines of a healthy mind and body without falling prey to the rigidity and fanaticism of the ego and its constant efforts to prove itself worthy by being "right.

When the heart is open, good humor flows and the ego's rigidity melts like snow in the sun.

Don Juan says that we fail to see the world as it is because our energy field gets locked in by our sense of self-importance, what some philosophies refer to as our ego.

Prayer in Benedictine spirituality is not an interruption of our busy lives nor is it a higher act. Prayer is the filter through which we learn, if we listen hard enough, to see our world aright and anew and without which we live life with souls that are deaf and dumb and blind.

To pray in the midst of the mundane is simply and strongly to assert that this dull and tiring day is holy and its simple labors are the stuff of God's saving presence for me now.

I have come to understand that the voice of God is all around me. God is not a silent God. God is speaking to me all the time. In everything. Through everyone. I am only now beginning to listen, let alone to hear.

Benedictine spirituality, after all, is life lived to the hilt. It is a life of concentration on life's ordinary dimensions. It is an attempt to do the ordinary things of life extraordinarily well.

Prayer that is regular confounds both self-importance and the wiles of the world. It is so easy for good people to confuse their own work with the work of creation. It is so easy to come to believe that what we do is so much more important than what we are. It is so easy to simply get too busy to grow.

The spiritual life... is not achieved by denying one part of life for the sake of another. The spiritual life is achieved only by listening to all of life and learning to respond to each of its dimensions wholly and with integrity.

Benedictine conversion, then, is not an assertion of our strength or character. Benedictine spirituality is based on the simple acknowledgment that God will come to life before us and be reborn in us in unexpected ways day after day throughout our entire lives. We must be ready to respond to this God of woods and highways, of gentle breeze and cataclysm, of privacy and crowds - however this Spirit comes. Response is the essence of Benedictine spirituality.

The message to the stranger is clear: come right in and disturb our perfect lives. You are the Christ for us today.

In the monastic mind, work is not for profit. In the monastic mentality work is for giving, not just for gaining. In monastic spirituality, other people have a claim on what we do. Work is not a private enterprise. Work is not to enable me to get ahead; the purpose of work is to enable me to get more human and to make my world more just.

Uniqueness and independence are clearly not synonyms in the mind of Benedict of Nursia. Uniqueness and responsibility go hand in hand in Benedictine spirituality. By all means I should be who I am and have what I need, but you have a claim on those gifts. Those gifts were given to me so much for your sake as for my own. The community does not exist to make me possible. Together we exist to make the gospel possible.

nothing is more insidious than spiritual pride; nothing is more impervious to identification. No, the monastic mind0set says, spiritual development is not an event. Spiritual development is a process of continuing conversion. "What do you do in the monastery?" an ancient tale asks. "Oh, we fall and we get up. We fall and we get up," the old monastic answers. In monastic spirituality, we never arrive; we are always arriving.

Spirituality without a prayer life is no spirituality at all, and it will not last beyond the first defeats. Prayer is an opening of the self so that the Word of God can break in and make us new. Prayer unmasks. Prayer converts. Prayer impels. Prayer sustains us on the way. Pray for the grace it will take to continue what you would like to quit.

Everywhere I looked, hope existed - but only as some kind of green shoot in the midst of struggle. It was a theological concept, not a spiritual practice. Hope, I began to realize, was not a state of life. It was at best a gift of life.

The liturgical year is the year that sets out to attune the life of the Christian to the life of Jesus, the Christ. It proposes, year after year, to immerse us over and over again into the sense and substance of the Christian life until, eventually, we become what we say we are -- followers of Jesus all the way to the heart of God. The liturgical year is an adventure in human growth, an exercise in spiritual ripening.

holiness is made of dailiness, of living life as it comes to me, not as I insist it be.

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?

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.

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?