Cron Quotes

A boy needs a father to show him how to be in the world. He needs to be given swagger, taught how to read a map so that he can recognize the roads that lead to life and the paths that lead to death, how to know what love requires, and where to find steel in the heart when life makes demands on us that are greater than we think we can endure.

If I ask you to think about something, you can decide not to. But if I make you feel something? Now I have your attention.

Each thing you add to your story is a drop of paint falling into clear water; it spreads through and colors everything.

The Enneagram is a tool that awakens our compassion for people just as they are, not the people we wish they would become so our lives would become easier.

Before there were books, we read each other.

We don't turn to story to escape reality. We turn to story to navigate reality.

The Enneagram doesn’t put you in a box. It shows you the box you’re already in and how to get out of it.

Once you know the dark side of your personality, simply give God consent to do for you what you’ve never been able to do for yourself, namely, bring meaningful and lasting change to your life.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution—more so than opposable thumbs. Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to.

Risking vulnerability and love is what takes courage.

Stories are about people who are uncomfortable.

...what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way.

your number is not determined by what you do so much as by why you do it.

Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.

Art is fire plus algebra.

How, as John Calvin put it, “without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God.” “For

We think in story. It’s hardwired in our brain. It’s how we make strategic sense of the otherwise overwhelming world around us.

Elmore Leonard famously said that a story is real life with the boring parts left out.

Either way, always maintain a compassionate stance toward yourself as God does. Self-contempt will never produce lasting, healing change in our lives, only love.

Ironically, the term personality is derived from the Greek word for mask ( persona), reflecting our tendency to confuse the masks we wear with our true selves, even long after the threats of early childhood have passed.

each scene in your story, ask yourself, If I cut it out, would anything that happens afterward change?

..."love always stoops.

Outlining the plot before you develop your protagonist traps you on the surface of your novel—that is, in the external events that happen.

They had mistaken the story for what happens in it. But as we’ve learned, the real story is how what happens affects the protagonist, and what she does as a result.

Francis taught me that if we spent less time worrying about how to share our faith with someone on an airplane and more time thinking about how to live radically generous lives, more people would start taking our message seriously.

Why do men pray to God, Kendall? I’ve never understood it. God loves us. We are his cron, like my spider; we are his beloved.… Yet when faced with mortal danger, we pray to him to spare us! Shouldn’t we pray instead to the one who would destroy us, who has sought our destruction from the very beginning?

Beauty can break a heart and make it think about something more spiritual than the mindless routine we go through day after day to get by. Francis was a singer, a poet, an actor. He knew that the imagination was a stealth way into people's souls, a way to get all of us to think about God. For him, beauty was its own apologetic. That's why a church should care about the arts. They inspire all of us to think about the eternal.

Anyone who says they’re “trying” to be a good Christian right away reveals they have no idea what a Christian is. Christianity is not something you do as much as something that gets done to you. Once you know the dark side of your personality, simply give God consent to do for you what you’ve never been able to do for yourself, namely, bring meaningful and lasting change to your life.

You cherry-pick events that are relevant to the story question and construct a gauntlet of challenge (read: the plot) that will force the protagonist to put his money where his mouth is. Think baptism by ever-escalating fire.

Sooner or later we must distinguish between what we are not and what we are. We must accept the fact that we are not what we would like to be. We must cast off our false, exterior self like the cheap and showy garment that it is

Life always comes down to who's driving

Atticus tells her, “Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

the source of most of your problems is you.

His will to live was waning, and it made him almost transparent, as though rather than dying, he might just disappear one day, leaving behind only a vague scent of regret.

Beauty can break a heart and make it think about something more spiritual than the mindless routine we go through day after day to get by.

If you don't know what the objective is, everything appears random.

I love a lot of people, understand none of them.” Flannery O’Connor

First, if Francis were around today, he'd say our church community relies too much on words to tell others about our faith. For Francis, the gathered community was as potent a form of witness as words. He was convinced that how we live together is what attracts people to faith.

What if, now and then, we put the drums and guitars away, turned off the projectors, shut down the sound system, and waited quietly for God to emerge from the woods? Do we have enough faith to believe he’d appear to us as a community?

Sadly, the unlived lives of parents sometimes push their children toward destinies not of their own choosing.

Because the story, as I’m very fond of saying, is in the specifics.

Don't try to change people. Love them. Only in acceptance can people embrace healthy transformation.

I struggled to find words to explain why I’d lost my composure, but as I was about to speak, Thomas squeezed my hand. “Not to worry; sometimes prayers are wet,” he said.

More often than not, Jesus comes to us incognito.

There is a big difference in life between a jump and a fall. A jump is about courage and faith, something the world is in short supply of these days. A fall is, well, a fall.

Remember, when we're lost in a story, we're not passively reading about something that's happening to someone else.

Information is not transformation.

In a nutshell: A story is about how the things that happen affect someone in pursuit of a difficult goal, and how that person changes internally as a result.

Father Alexander Schmemann is an Orthodox scholar who wrote a book called For the Life of the World. He says the liturgy is a journey that proceeds from the kingdom of this world into a brief encounter with the kingdom of God, and then back out again to bear witness to it.

That’s why in every scene you write, the protagonist must react in a way the reader can see and understand in the moment. This reaction must be specific, personal, and have an effect on whether the protagonist achieves her goal. What it can’t be is dispassionate objective commentary.

There is a law in physics that applies to the soul. No two objects can occupy the same space at the same time; one thing must displace another. If your heart’s crammed tight with material things and a thirst for wealth, there’s no space left for God. Francis wanted a void in his life that could only be filled with Jesus. Poverty wasn’t a burden for him — it was a pathway to spiritual freedom.

...she taught me how to ride the Dragon Coaster and what to do when you're flung into the mouth of whatever it is you think will kill you. Throw up your arms and laugh until you come out the other side.

A peace lover is someone who enjoys the absence of conflict, but a peacemaker is someone who is proactively engaged in works of reconciliation in every sphere of life, from the personal to the global. That

It’s like what Gandhi said: “The world is so hungry for God that God could only come as a piece of bread. We so long for joy that God even risked coming into the world in the form of intoxication, that risky thing called wine.

All of us are meaning-seekers. We approach every painting, novel, film, symphony, or ballet unconsciously hoping it will move us one step further on the journey toward answering the question ‘Why am I here?’ People living in the postmodern world, however, are faced with an excruciating dilemma. Their hearts long to find ultimate meaning, while at the same time their critical minds do not believe it exists. We are homesick, but have no home. So we turn to the arts and aesthetics to satisfy our thirst for the Absolute. But if we want to find our true meaning in life, our search cannot end there. Art or beauty is not the destination; it is a signpost pointing toward our desired destination.

I'm beginning to see that there's a difference between art that trusts beauty's simple power to point people to God and Christian art that's consciously propagandistic. My Uncle Kenny, with whom I spent most of my time in Italy, said something profound--that you can make art about the Light, or you can make art that shows what the Light reveals about the world.

In fact, often the opposite is true, because we’re much better at teaching something that we’ve learned through experience than we are at teaching things we innately know. When we innately know how to do something, we assume it’s part of the standard operating package we’re all born with.

In short, when we read a story, we really do slip into the protagonist’s skin, feeling what she feels, experiencing what she experiences. And what we feel is based, 100 percent, on one thing: her goal, which then defines how she evaluates everything the other characters do. If we don’t know what she wants, we have no idea how, or why, what she does helps her achieve it. As Pinker is quick to point out, without a goal, everything is meaningless.6 It

To sum up, when writing in the first person, it helps to keep these things in mind:    • Every word the narrator says must in some way reflect his point of view.    • The narrator never mentions anything that doesn’t affect him in some way.    • The narrator draws a conclusion about everything he mentions.    • The narrator is never neutral; he always has an agenda.    • The narrator can never tell us what anyone else is thinking or feeling. Conveying

1. Eating fewer calories while maintaining optimal levels of all essential nutrients—CRON. 2. Eating and supplementing with generous amounts of broad- spectrum antioxidants. 3. Eating low glycemic impact foods and minimizing sugar. 4. Eating high quality foundational and fuel fats and supplementing with antioxidant essential fatty acids.

Human beings are wired for survival. As little kids we instinctually place a mask called personality over parts of our authentic self to protect us from harm and make our way in the world. Made up of innate qualities, coping strategies, conditioned reflexes and defense mechanisms, among lots of other things, our personality helps us know and do what we sense is required to please our parents, to fit in and relate well to our friends, to satisfy the expectations of our culture and to get our basic needs met.

AN EXTERNAL LAYER: The thing that happens, the external event, the unavoidable problem the protagonist must tackle (the plot). 2. AN INTERNAL LAYER: What that external problem causes the protagonist to struggle with, internally—the misbelief versus the truth—in order to solve it (what the story is really about). Combined, those two layers rivet us.

Whenever possible, perform acts of anonymous service.

what we’re hoping for in that opening sentence is the sense that something is about to change (and not necessarily for the better). Simply

We don’t know ourselves by what we get right; we know ourselves by what we get wrong.

The story you’re telling doesn’t start on page one. It started long before you got there.

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke up to find myself alone in a dark wood.4

good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment. The

To be the altar boy at the first Mass of the day was a sacred initiation rite. It was like being hazed at a fraternity, only more Catholic.

I was drunk with belonging.

You don’t need to know exactly how the story is going to end, but you do need to know what the protagonist will have to learn along the way—that

narrators are often unreliable, and part of the reader’s pleasure is figuring out what’s really true. The

Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible. SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI

But there is an old Rwandan proverb: ‘He who seeks vengeance is like a man who drinks poison, hoping that it will kill his enemy,’ ” Emmanuel said, a fleeting smile appearing

As the great Southern writer Flannery O’Connor once noted, “Most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

Sixes make terrific friends or partners when they’re spiritually healthy and growing in self-knowledge. Loyal to a fault, Sixes mean it when they say, “Until death do us part.

All human creativity plays with patterns to create an emotional experience in its audience. We look for patterns and ascribe meaning because that is what we are wired to do. The inestimable Lisa Cron has written an entire book called Wired for Story that examines the direct link between brains and books, synapse and story—I cannot recommend it strenuously enough.

And the best preparation for writing any story is to know with clarity what your protagonists’ worldview is, and more to the point, where and why it’s off base. Thus you have a clear view of the world as your protagonist sees it and insight into how she therefore interprets, and reacts to, everything that happens to her. It’s what allows you to construct a plot that forces her to reevaluate what she was so damn sure was true when the story began. That is what your story is really about, and what readers stay up long past their bedtime to find out.

Buried in the deepest precincts of being I sense there’s a truer, more luminous expression of myself, and that as long as I remain estranged from it I will never feel fully alive or whole.

Miss Annie, is it wrong for me to believe it was Jesus who asked my forgiveness?" I asked her. She frowned and shook her head, "Lord, what do they teach you at that school?" she said. Then she faced me head-on. "Did God humble himself by becoming a man?" she asked, every word spoken more loudly than the one before. "Yes, ma'am," I said. I'd never used the word ma'am before, but it seemed an excellent time to start. "Did he humble himself by dying on the cross to show us how much he loved us? she asked, waving her spatula at me. My eyes widened and I nodded, yes. Miss Annie's body relaxed, and she put her hand on her hip. "So why wouldn't Jesus humble himself and tell a boy he was sorry for letting him down if he knew it would heal his heart?" she asked. "But if Jesus is perfect--" Miss Annie ambled the five or six feet that separated us and took my hand. "Son," she said, rubbing my knuckles with her thumb, "love always stoops.

Thomas Merton wrote, “For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self.

Unlike animals, we’re endowed with reason. That gift comes with a God-given responsibility to care for creation. It’s pretty obvious that Christians have dropped this ball in a really big way.

May you recognize in your life the presence, power, and light of your soul. May you realize that you are never alone, that your soul in its brightness and belonging connects you intimately with the rhythm of the universe. May you have respect for your individuality and difference. May you realize that the shape of your soul is unique, that you have a special destiny here, that behind the façade of your life there is something beautiful and eternal happening. May you learn to see your self with the same delight, pride, and expectation with which God sees you in every moment.

the object of all great art is beauty, and it makes us nostalgic for God. Whether we consider ourselves people of faith or not, art arouses in us what the pope calls a ‘universal desire for redemption.

The good news is we have a God who would know our scrawny butt anywhere. He remembers who we are, the person he knit together in our mother’s womb, and he wants to help restore us to our authentic selves.

The artist’s job is to reveal the real nature of things through picture or story or song, to show the rest of us what is really there when we are content with the misleading surface of things. As Pope John Paul II has written, “Artists are constantly in search of the hidden meaning of things, and their torment is to succeed in expressing the world of the ineffable.” Through their work, in the words of the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, “the knowledge of God can be better revealed and the preaching of the Gospel can become clearer to the human mind.” DAVID MILLS, “Imaginative Orthodoxy: The Art of Telling the Christian Story,” Touchstone

When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something larger than the sum.… The concept of emergent properties means that something new can be introduced that is not inherent in any of the parts.

Stop fantasizing about the ideal relationship, career or community and getting stuck in longing for it. Instead, work hard for what’s possible and see it through to completion. Don’t look for beauty and meaning only in the extraordinary or unusual but in the ordinary and simple as well. When the past calls, let it go to voicemail. It has nothing new to say to you. Don’t embellish and get swept up in your feelings. In the words of Jack Kornfield, “No emotion is final.

Most people don’t ever anticipate that a sudden change in cabin pressure might occur in their home, triggering the hope that an oxygen mask would fall from somewhere overhead to replace the air that shock has just sucked out of their lungs.

Think of each detail as an egg. The writer keeps tossing them at us, one after another, seemingly unaware of the growing number of precariously balanced eggs we’re being asked to hold. So somewhere around the middle of the description—say, the huge brass lamp—it’s one egg too many. The trouble is, we don’t just drop that particular egg; all the eggs go crashing to the ground. The more details the writer gives us, the fewer we’ll remember, proving, once again, that as with most things in life, less is more.

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them. Thomas Merton

When the church first began, it was a pacifistic movement known for its outspoken criticism of any form of bloodshed or violence. After Constantine legalized Christianity, ‘just war’ theory emerged, which meant that Christians could participate in wars if certain criteria were satisfied. By the year 1100, Christians were launching Crusades and telling the faithful that killing Muslims would secure them a spot in heaven! What happened? Somewhere along the way we forgot that Jesus intended the Sermon on the Mount to be an actual, concrete program for living. He wanted us to actually live it, not just admire it as a nice but unrealistic ideal. I mean, what would happen if Christians dedicated themselves to peacemaking with the same discipline and focus that armies do for war? What difference could it make? We have to revisit the early church’s teachings about reconciliation, peacemaking, and the Sermon on the Mount and ask ourselves if we’re living them out or tiptoeing around them.

As counterintuitive as it may sound, a story is not about the plot or even what happens in it. Stories are about how we, rather than the world around us, change. They grab us only when they allow us to experience how it would feel to navigate the plot. Thus story, as we’ll see throughout, is an internal journey, not an external one.

Simply put, we are looking for a reason to care. So for a story to grab us, not only must something be happening, but also there must be a consequence we can anticipate. As neuroscience reveals, what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on its way. This means that whether it’s an actual event unfolding or we meet the protagonist in the midst of an internal quandary or there’s merely a hint that something’s slightly “off” on the first page, there has to be a ball already in play. Not the preamble to the ball. Not all the stuff you have to know to really understand the ball. The ball itself.

Neuroscientists have determined the brain’s dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is associated with decision making and cost-benefit assessments. If MRI brain scans had been performed on my friends and me one summer’s night when we were fifteen, they would have revealed a dark spot indicating a complete absence of activity in this region of our brains.

I carry an invisible box of jerseys with me that say "Team Ian" on the front. My goal is to convince everyone I meet to become my fan and prove it by putting on my "Team Ian" jersey. If they do, then for at least ten minutes I feel like I've won their approval and love. If I have a run of people who don't put it on, I can fall into a rut I have visited so often I should have it decorated and furnished. For me, life is like one long job interview in which I'm trying to impress everyone I meet enough to hire me. The routine is exhausting, mostly for everyone else. I confessed this nutty practice to my spiritual director. He smiled, put his arm around my shoulder, and said, "I never trust a man without a limp.

Think of it this way,” he continued. “A pilgrimage is a way of praying with your feet. You go on a pilgrimage because you know there’s something missing inside your soul, and the only way you can find it is to go to sacred places, places where God made himself known to others. In sacred places, something gets done to you that you’ve been unable to do for yourself.

When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change,” he says. “But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.

Unlike most preachers in the medieval era, Francis was conflicted and sometimes even hostile toward academics and theologians. He believed that book knowledge was like material possessions — too much of it occasioned pride and got in the way of simple devotion to Jesus. (In The Last Christian, Adolf Holl imagined Francis meeting Augustine, Barth, Aquinas, and Bultmann in heaven for the first time and asking them what they would be without their books. When they can’t come up with an answer, Francis says, “Without your books perhaps you might have become Christians” [p. 63].) When Francis preached, he avoided theological arguments and polemics like the plague. Rather, his preaching was more autobiographical than intellectual, more performative than argumentative, more spontaneous than scripted, more genuine than contrived, more about transformation than about information. The endgame was to help his listeners find peace, reconciliation, and shalom with God, themselves, others, and creation. As Francis said, “We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.