Quotes About Transformation

You do not have to wait until you become a saint. [Prayer] is the way to become a saint.

The more you treat someone you hate as if you loved them, the more you will find yourself loving them.

His purpose was not just to make us safe but to make us saints.

Many saints were made out of passionate sinners—the angry, the hating, the lustful, the cynical; but none were ever made out of the slothful.

The transformation of Christ's bodily scars into badges of glory shows us what happens, even in this life, to our souls when we lovingly and trustingly offer our sufferings to Christ and unite them to His. He turns "deformity" into "dignity".

A fundamental principle of Catholic theology is that grace perfects nature rather than setting it aside; and that means that the Christian life is not a two-layer cake, the supernatural simply added on to the natural. It transforms the natural but by perfecting it, not by demeaning it.

nothing else can ever cure our sick world except saints, and saints are never made except by prayer.

The ultimate reason we must become holy is that that is the only way to become real.

First, you must read it, not as you read other books, but slowly and thoughtfully (that is why I made it very short) and above all prayerfully, that is, under the eye of God, in the presence of Truth and therefore in absolute honesty. Second, you must actually do it, not just read about doing it, think about doing it, understand how to do it, plan to do it, or imagine yourself doing it. It is a cookbook, not a dinner.

Christ changed every human being he ever met. In fact, He changed history, splitting it open like a coconut and inserting eternity into the split between B.C. and A.D. If anyone claims to have met Him without being changed, he has not met Him at all. When you touch Him, you touch lightning. Socrates is puzzled because he is looking for the burn marks.

The purpose of Purgatory is to completely internalize, in your own individual soul, what Christ has completely accomplished in objective reality in His Passion. Nothing

we catch the good infection of Godliness by contact.

When God changed someone's name in Scripture, He changed their destiny: Abram to Abraham, Jacob to Israel, Simon to Peter.

The changing thing begins with only the potential to change, but it needs to be acted on by other things outside if that potential is to be made actual. Otherwise it cannot change.

As for the thing that changes, although it can be what it will become, it is not yet what it will become. It actually exists right now in this state (an acorn); it will actually exist in that state (large oak tree). But it is not actually in that state now. It only has the potentiality for that state.

Heaven will do to earth what the New Law did to the Old: not replacement but consummation (Mt 5:17).

We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto

But this time I see a new person. Silent. Still. Someone I believe I know. WHO ARE YOU? I move closer but the face is shrouded, the features blurred as if seen through a dirty lens. I'm tempted to run away, but I don't. I know where running leads. To the hole. To death. I know I can no longer fear.

To break the chain of mistrust, someone has to go first. I am happy to make the move.

Like water, it slowed my descent. Like water, it gave me a feeling of buoyancy.

The committed person doesn't play by the rules of the game. He is responsible for the game. If the rules of the game stand in the way of achieving the vision, he will find ways to change the rules.

It took a scenario that he was going to die for Fred to wake up. It took that kind of shock for his life to be transformed. Maybe that's what needs to happen for all of us, for everyone who lives on Earth. That could be what a requiem scenario offers us.

it is no surprise that extraordinary leaders, like Mieko Nishimizu and Roger Saillant, often have deep personal stories of moments of awakening, when some old part of them died and a new part emerged.

Transfixed by the bright gaze of a lizard, I become calm. This stone on which the lizard lies was under the sea when lizards first came into being, and now the flood is wearing it away, to return it once again into the oceans.