Quotes About Spirituality

Finally, in the last step of the examen you ask for the grace of God's help during the next day, and you can close with any prayer you like. Ignatius suggests the Our Father.

do not analyze or argue it, describe or define it—I am one with it.

True prayer wants others to flourish. If any still have a hard time praying for church leaders, they might use a prayer that I find helpful when I am struggling with another person. My prayer is to see that person as God sees him or her.

Ignatius realized that if you act in accord with God's desires for you, you will naturally feel a sense of peace.

Looking at our personal relationships can help us get our prayer life in order.

mine what we know about human relationships for ways to understand our relationship with God.

Occasionally during prayer, when I catch myself daydreaming, I say to myself, "You're speaking with God! Pay attention!

examen." Essentially a review of the day, it helps you see where God is active in your daily life.

Then, when you sit in the chair, you're reminded, often in a surprising way, that God is gazing upon you and is with you in your prayer.

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.

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.

After "finding God in all things," the second answer you would probably get from those five hypothetical Jesuits is that Ignatian spirituality is about being a contemplative in action.

The third way of understanding the way of Ignatius is as an incarnational spirituality.

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.

Detachment, freedom, and a sense of humor are signposts on the road to holiness.

Fun—a word you don't hear much in church—is also a foretaste of heaven and, for Christians, an important spiritual goal.

I got the idea that Merton was bright, funny, holy, and altogether unique. But there was something else about the show that drew me.

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