Joan D. Chittister
Try saying this silently to everyone and everything you see for thirty days and see what happens to your own soul: I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future.Collection: Soul
Blind obedience is itself an abuse of human morality. It is a misuse of the human soul in the name of religious commitment. It is a sin against individual conscience. It makes moral children of the adults from whom moral agency is required. It makes a vow, which is meant to require religious figures to listen always to the law of God, beholden first to the laws of very human organizations in the person of very human authorities. It is a law that isn't even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality.Collection: Religious
Awareness of the sacred in life is what holds our world together, and the lack of awareness of the sacred is what is tearing it apart.Collection: Our World
Beware of your definition of success: If it has more to do with what other people think of you than it does with what you know of your own abilities, you may be confusing applause with achievement.Collection: Success
A seeker searched for years to know the secret of achievement and success in human life. One night in a dream a sage appeared bearing the answer to the secret. The sage said simply: "Stretch out your hand and reach what you can." "No, it can't be that simple," the seeker said. And the sage said softly, "You are right, it is something harder. It is this: Stretch out your hand and reach what you cannot." Now that's vision.Collection: Dream
The kind of "blind obedience" once theologized as the ultimate step to holiness, is itself blind. It blinds a person to the insights and foresight and moral perspective of anyone other than an authority figure.Collection: Perspective
Fear is not the opposite of courage. Fear is the catalyst of courage.Collection: Inspirational
We have learned that the things we amassed to prove to ourselves how valuable, how important, how successful we were, didn't prove it at all. In fact, they have very little to do with it. It's what's inside of us, not what's outside of us that counts.Collection: Successful
Learning to celebrate joy is one of the great practices of the spiritual life.Collection: Spiritual
Acceptance is the universal currency of real friendship. . . .It does not warp or shape or wrench a person to be anything other than what they are.Collection: Real
Don't worry about wearing the sign; be the sign. You don't have to wear a sandwich board saying, "I am religious and spiritual and know what you should do." You do have to be the best of the mystical presence that your tradition brings. Certainly in Christianity, that means that you begin to go through life putting on the mind of Jesus, trying to see the world as Jesus saw the world.Collection: Spiritual
Beauty scatters the seeds of hope in us.Collection: Seeds
If the people speak and the king doesn't listen, there is something wrong with the king. If the kings acts precipitously and the people say nothing, something is wrong with the people.Collection: Kings
Work is not slavery, then. Work is creativity. It is the expression of ourselves that no one else can duplicate.Collection: Work
In community we work out our connectedness to God, to one another and to ourselves...In human relationships I learn that theory is no substitute for love. It is easy to talk about the love of GOD; it is another thing to practice itCollection: Practice
faith isn't faith until it's all we have to hold on to and knowledge fails us. When we pray for faith, we automatically pray for darkness. Think about it.Collection: Faith
To insist on living until we die may be one of life's greatest virtues.Collection: May
A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility - and the morality - of the church itself.Collection: Loyalty
Life is an exercise in the development of feeling. When we repress feelings, we become sour and judgmental. When we live awash in great feeling over small things, we become jaded long before we have even begun to enjoy. When feelings are in balance they sweeten long days and great distances with gratitude and hope.Collection: Gratitude
When I know and accept myself-all my strengths and all my limitations- I am immediately respectful of everyone else because I know they have something beautiful within them that I do not have.Collection: Beautiful
To be a presence of perpetual thanksgiving may be the ultimate goal of life. The thankful person is the one for whom life is simply one long exercise in the sacred.Collection: Exercise
Happiness does not come quickly. It is not conferred by any single event, however exciting or comforting or satisfying the event may be. It cannot be purchased, whatever the allure of the next, the newest, the brightest, the best. Happiness, like Carl Sandburg's fog, "comes on little cat feet," often silently, often without our knowing it, too often without our noticing.Collection: Happiness
I celebrate myself," the poet Walt Whitman wrote. The thought is so delicious it is almost obscene. Imagine the joy that would come with celebrating the self — our achievements, our experiences, our existence. Imagine what it would be like to look into the mirror and say, as God taught us, "That's good.Collection: Mirrors
Superficial people are those who simply go along without a question in the world-asking nothing, troubled by nothing, examining nothing. Whatever people around them do, they do, too. That's a sad and plastic life-routine and comfortable, maybe, but still sad.Collection: People
Freedom, in childhood, may be the right to be totally self-centered. But freedom in old age is the ability to be the best of the self I have developed during all those years.Collection: Freedom
Mystery is what happens to us when we allow life to evolve rather than having to make it happen all the time. It is the strange knock at the door, the sudden sight of an unceremoniously blooming flower, an afternoon in the yard, a day of riding the midtown bus. Just to see. Just to notice. Just to be there.Collection: Flower
But we are here to depart from this world as finished as we can possibly become.Collection: World
Assuming that tomorrow will be the same as today is poor preparation for living. It equips us only for disappointment or, more likely, for shock. To live well, to be mentally healthy, we must learn to realize that life is a work in process.Collection: Disappointment
Prophets are those who take life as it is and expand it. They refuse to shrink a vision of tomorrow to the boundaries of yesterday.Collection: Yesterday
Getting to know ourselves and learning to control ourselves are the two great tasks of life. Don't make up strange and exotic 'penances.' Simply say no to yourself once a day, and you will be on the road to sanctity for the rest of your life.Collection: Two
No one finds time for prayer. You either take time for it or you don't get it.Collection: Time
Every dimension of life, its gains and its losses, are reason for celebration because each of them brings us closer to wisdom and fullness of understanding.Collection: Wisdom
prayer can be an easy substitute for real spirituality. It would be impossible to have spirituality without prayer, of course, but it is certainly possible to pray without having a spirituality at all. How do you know? 'Am I becoming kinder?' is a good place to start.Collection: Prayer
Longing is a compass that guides us through life. We may never get what we really want, that's true, but every step along the way will be determined by it.Collection: Life
The question is not, do we go to church; the question is, have we been converted. The crux of Christianity is not whether or not we give donations to popular charities but whether or not we are really committed to the poor.Collection: Peace
Hospitality is simply love on the loose.Collection: Simply Love
Temptations are part of life, part of growing up. We grapple with them often - in some instances for our lifetime - before we come to realize that it is not so much the victory as it is the struggle that is holy.Collection: Growing Up
Judaism calls for us to honor the rhythm of human life, the demands of the human community around us, the call of the divine order as the filter and scale for the decisions that drive our own small lives. We do not rule the universe, Judaism reminds us. God does. We are not its standard or its norms. We are only its keepers, its agents, its stewards. To do right by the universe at large is the measure of a happiness framed with the entire cosmos in mind but lived in microcosms across time.Collection: Divine Order
Indifference is the acid of life. It erodes all the spirit that's in us and makes us useless to anyone else. We all have to stand for something, or our souls cease to breathe.Collection: Soul
Life is the ability to start over again.Collection: Life
Anger is not bad. Anger can be a very positive thing, the thing that moves us beyond the acceptance of evil.Collection: Moving
Solitude is not a way of running away from life ... from our feelings. On the contrary. This is the time we sort them out, air them, get over them, and go on without the burden of yesterday.Collection: Running
It is not our job to work miracles, but it is our task to try.Collection: Jobs
To be enlightened is to know that heaven is not "coming." Heaven is here.Collection: Heaven
Benedictine spirituality is a consistent one: live life normally, live life thouhtfully, live life profouncly, live life well. Never neglect and never exaggerate. It is a lesson that a world full of cults and fads and workaholics and short courses in difficult subjects needs dearly to learn.Collection: Live Life
We each should have 2 pockets: in 1 the message, 'I am dust & ashes;' in the other, 'For me the universe was made.'Collection: Dust
Never confuse desire with vision. Desire has to do with what we want. Vision has to do with what we need.Collection: Vision
Hospitality is the key to new ideas, new friends, new possibilities. What we take into our lives changes us. Without new people and new ideas, we are imprisoned inside ourselves.Collection: Life Changing
Why do people think the spiritual life demands withdrawal from the ordinary? Because they've been taught, at least by implication, that the physical is a block to the spiritual. When we assume that the spiritual, unlike the physical, is impervious to corrosion, then we assume that all things material are not to be honored. But the fact of the matter is, the material is the vehicle of the spiritual.Collection: Spiritual