Quotes About Spirituality

God respects you when you work, but he loves you when you dance.

Let's all say a little prayer that gives God permission to guide us in the right direction, in doing good, mending hurts, healing hearts, asking for forgiveness. And then we'll sing.

Thinking about it like that made it more bearable, that we go back to God when we've had our turn, that some of us roll the dice less than we'd like, but that we're the ones who are rolling them.

Biblically, Faulkner. We know each other biblically.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us. Hebrews 12:1

The gooey, amorphous "spirituality" of paganism allowed people to do their own thing in matters of religion. Sing, shout, prophesy, pray, go into a trance . . . nobody gave a fig, so long as you did not attempt to impose any of your high-falutin' opinions on anyone else.

If we are going to be for the world as Christ meant for us to be, we are going to have to spend more time away from the world, in deep prayer and substantial spiritual training—just as Jesus retreated to the desert to pray before ministering to the people. We cannot give the world what we do not have.

If you are going to put down spiritual roots, taught Benedict, you need to stay in one place long enough for them to go deep. The Rule requires monks to take a vow of "stability"—meaning that barring unusual circumstances, including being sent out as a missionary, the monk will remain for the rest of his life in the monastery where he took his vows.

Love is the only way we will make it through what is to come. Love is not romantic ectasy. It has to be a kind of love that has been honed and intensified through regular prayer, fasting, and repentance and, for many Christians, through receiving the holy sacraments. And it must be a love that has been refined through suffering. There is no other way.

We cannot hope to resist the coming soft totalitarianism if we do not have our spiritual lives in order. This is the message of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great anti-communist dissident, Nobel laureate, and Orthodox Christian. He believed the core of the crisis that created and sustained communism was not political but spiritual.

People long for God, and more of them than we might think are willing to accept the idea that getting close to him might be painful. The church needs to worry less about coddling our superficial tastes and impulses and more about giving us the whole truth.

Jesus Christ promised that the gates of Hell would not prevail against His church, but He did not promise that Hell would not prevail against His church in the West. That depends on us, and the choices we make right here, right now.

The kind of Christians we will be in the time of testing depends on the kind of Christians we are today.

If everyone, including himself, loved as they should love, they would love God more than they loved themselves and their passions.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.

Father Martin put it, "Stability give us the time and the structure to go deep into who we are as sons of God.

Still, as I have said, accepting that God loved me was something I did only on the level of theory.

I saw—no, I think the word is beheld—the most wondrous thing in the world. This church was indescribably complex and harmonious; it was like stepping into the mind of God. I was overcome by the desire to worship—a feeling I would not see as adequately articulated until many years later, when I would read Dante Alighieri's description, in his first book, Vita nuova, of the first time he, as a child, saw Beatrice:

They think they love, but they merely desire. They think they follow Jesus, but in fact, they merely admire him.

Developing the cognitive control that leads to a more contemplative Christian life is the key to living as free men and women in post-Christian America. The

The monk holds that meaning exists objectively, within the natural world created by God, and is there to be discovered by the person who has detached themselves from their own passions and who seeks to see as God sees.

Submitting to rules one doesn't understand is difficult, but it's a good way to counteract the carnal desire for personal independence. There may not be spiritual merit in choosing to eat two dishes instead of three at a meal, but the humility that comes with agreeing to submit to another's decision that one do so is transformative.

In the end, either Christ is at the center of our lives, or the Self and all its idolatries are.

A Christian who practices asceticism trains himself to say no to his desires and yes to God.