Ian 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.

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.

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.

Risking vulnerability and love is what takes courage.

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

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

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.

..."love always stoops.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Information is not transformation.

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.

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.

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.

Whenever possible, perform acts of anonymous service.

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

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.

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

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.

Loyal to a fault, Sixes mean it when they say, “Until death do us part.

To know oneself is, above all, to know

what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” he said.

Life hands us a challenging syllabus. We need all the help we can get.

All ministry begins at the ragged edges of our own pain,

...if you want someone who is efficient, ethical, meticulous, reliable, and does the work of two people, then hire a One!

Ones’ passion to improve the world goes bad when they start to believe that in order to be loved they have to be perfect and not make mistakes.

Sixes are sharp, analytically minded troubleshooters. They love being on the underdog team trying to resurrect a company or failing program, particularly when others say it can’t be done.

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

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 . . .

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.

Because Sixes are conscientious, they tend to take on too much work, which leaves them feeling stressed out, resentful and pessimistic. When it all becomes too overwhelming they can overreact, which can ripple out and freak out other people.

Every business needs a loyal skeptic who isn’t afraid to ask hard questions or point out the flaws in a plan. A room full of overcaffeinated, risk-tolerant entrepreneurs may not like it when a Six asks a question that pops the balloon on their big idea, but someone has to be the voice of anxiety!

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.

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.

What It’s Like to Be a Nine I’ll do almost anything to avoid conflict. I’m not a self-starter. Sometimes I get lost in doing trivial tasks, while things that really need to get done get put off. I’m happy to go along with what others want to do. I tend to procrastinate. People seem to want me to be more decisive. When I get distracted and go off task I give my attention to whatever is happening right in front of me. I often choose the path of least resistance. I find routines at work and home comforting, and I feel unsettled when something throws them off. Others see me as more peaceful than I really am. I have a hard time getting started, but once I do I really get things done. I’m a “what you see is what you get” person. I don’t think of myself as being very important. People think I’m a good listener even though I find it hard to pay attention in a long conversation. I don’t like to take work home with me. Sometimes I tune out and think about the past. I don’t enjoy big social gatherings as much as a quiet evening at home with the ones I love. Being outdoors is very soothing for me. I am often quietly stubborn when people put demands on me. It would feel selfish to spend a whole day doing whatever I want to do.

What It’s Like to Be a Six I’m always imagining and planning for the worst. I often don’t trust people who are in authority. People say I am loyal, understanding, funny and compassionate. Most of my friends don’t have as much anxiety as I do. I act quickly in a crisis, but when things settle down I fall apart. When my partner and I are doing really well in our relationship I find myself wondering what will happen to spoil it. Being sure I’ve made the right decision is almost impossible. I’m aware that fear has dictated many of my choices in life. I don’t like to find myself in unpredictable situations. I find it hard to stop thinking about the things I’m worried about. I’m generally not comfortable with extremes. I usually have so much to do it’s hard for me to finish tasks. I’m most comfortable when I’m around people who are pretty much like me. People tell me I can be overly pessimistic. I am slow to start, and once I do get started I find myself continuing to think about what could go wrong. I don’t trust people who give me too many compliments. It helps me to have things in some kind of order. I like to be told I am good at my job, but I get very nervous when my boss wants to add to my responsibilities. I have to know people for a long time before I can really trust them. I am skeptical of things that are new and unknown.

By that hidden way My guide and I did enter, to return To the fair world: and heedless of repose We climbed, he first, I following his steps, Till on our view the beautiful lights of heav’n Dawn’d through a circular opening in the cave: Thus issuing we again beheld the stars.

We must find our real self, in all its elemental poverty, but also in its great and very simple dignity: created to be the child of God, and capable of loving with something of God’s own sincerity and his unselfishness

writes, “Sins are fixations that prevent the energy of life, God’s love, from flowing freely. [They are] self-erected blockades that cut us off from God and hence from our own authentic potential.” As someone who goes to a church basement several mornings a week to meet with others who need support to stay away from just one of my many fixations, this definition rings true. We all have our preferred ways of circumventing God to get what we want, and unless we own and face them head-on they will one day turn our lives into nettled messes.

If you love a Four, you can’t allow yourself to get sucked into their swirling emotional vortex. You have to remain detached and let Fours do their thing until they’re done—but whatever you do, unless they’re really crazy, don’t leave them. If you do, it only confirms their worst fear, which is that they are “irredeemably deficient.” Fours in relationship need to have their feelings acknowledged and need their loved ones to understand that melancholy is not depression. People who love Fours can help them by encouraging them to look at both the positive and negative sides of things.

Equanimity refers to the ability to remain emotionally composed and steady regardless of what’s happening around us. Remember, feelings are like waves on the surface of the ocean. Don’t attach or identify with them but with the vast ocean beneath them. More than once in life I’ve had to say to myself, I am not my feelings.

Christianity is not something you do, so much as something that is done to you.

In 1999, authors Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht released The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. Providing humorous but real-life instructions for what to do in unusually dire circumstances, the book advertised itself as “the essential companion for a perilous age.” Both frightening and funny, it offered pithy chapters on how to perform a tracheotomy, identify a bomb, land a plane, survive if your parachute fails to open, deal with a charging bull, jump from a building into a dumpster and escape from killer bees, among other things. Someone gave me a copy of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook when it came out. I shrugged and said, “Meh.” It sold ten million copies.

To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility

We never know that Jesus is enough until Jesus is all we have left.’ In a weird way, I kind of miss those days.

I’m a world-champion multitasker

The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. THOMAS MERTON, Mystics and Zen Masters

If given my druthers I’d like to be a charming, happy-go-lucky Seven like Stephen Colbert, but I’m a garden-variety “Bob Dylan” Four minus the talent.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life. Virginia Woolf

Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way. General George S. Patton Jr.

A humble self-knowledge is a surer way to God than a search after deep learning.” Thomas À Kempis

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.” Joseph Conrad

As Anne Lamott says, “Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared,” so there’s no sense wanting to be differently screwed up than you already are.

in the words of novelist David Foster Wallace, “The truth will set you free, but not until it’s done with you.

what looks like peace is really just your desire to be unaffected by life.

For centuries great Christian teachers have said knowing yourself is just as important as knowing God. Some people will say that’s feel-good psychology when actually it’s just good theology,” he said.

To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” he said.

Typically introverted and analytical, Fives don’t believe they have enough inner resources or energy to meet the demands of life. They feel drained by prolonged involvement with other people or by having too many expectations placed on them. Every handshake, phone call, business meeting, social gathering or unexpected encounter seems to cost them more than it does other people. Fearful they don’t have sufficient inner resources to function in the world, they detach and withdraw into the mind, where they feel more at home and confident.

Ponder that last line for a moment. It’s when we stop trying to change people and simply love them that they actually have a shot at transformation. 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.

one of which we naturally gravitate toward and adopt in childhood to cope and feel safe.

What we don’t know about ourselves can and will hurt us, not to mention others,” he said, pointing his finger at me and then at himself. “As long as we stay in the dark about how we see the world and the wounds and beliefs that have shaped who we are, we’re prisoners of our history. We’ll continue going through life on autopilot doing things that hurt and confuse ourselves and everyone around us. Eventually we become so accustomed to making the same mistakes over and over in our lives that they lull us to sleep. We need to wake up.” Waking up. There

The cost of the story Ones tell themselves adds up quickly: simmering resentment just below the surface waiting to boil over, self-condemnation and contempt for their imperfections, and exhaustion from always striving to improve and do more. They are usually wound tight and always vigilant about what they need to do to improve everything and everyone around them. They can’t bear for others to lead who don’t share their values or demonstrate their commitment to integrity, but on the other hand they resent always having to make up for the lazy sods who aren’t doing their part. They’re tired and their old story begins to feel