Joan D Chittister Quotes

Beware the religion that turns you against another one. It's unlikely that it's really religion at all.

We don't change as we get older - we just get to be more of what we've always been.

What happens to the spiritual life of a young girl who is made to understand, consciously or subconsciously, that she has no place in the spiritual domain except as a consumer of someone else’s God?

It is precisely women’s experience of God that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion, does not know God the spirit. God the lawgiver, God the judge, God the omnipotent being have consumed Western spirituality and, in the end, shriveled its heart.

We have watched our educational system begin to fray because we have taken weapons for granted and preferred a strong military to an educated population.

The spiritual life, in other words, is not achieved by denying one part of life for the sake of another. The spiritual life is achieved only by listening to all of life and learning to respond to each of its dimensions wholly and with integrity.

The time is now. The time is for reflection on what we’ve lost in life, yes, but for what we have left in life too. It’s time to begin to live life fuller rather than faster.

Feminists are asking women and men not to buy into patriarchal systems that destroy them both. Feminism comes to bring both men and women to the fullness of life, the wholeness of soul, for which we were all made in the image and likeness of God.

The poet Mary Oliver may have written the best definition of what it means to be a prophet in contemporary spirituality. She writes, “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

Silence is a frightening thing. Silences leaves us at the mercy of the noise within us. We hear the fears that need to be faced. We hear, then, the angers that need to be cooled. We hear the emptiness that needs to be filled. We hear the cries for humility and reconciliation and centeredness. We hear ambition and arrogance and attitudes of uncaring awash in the shallows of the soul. Silence demands answers. Silence invites us to depth. Silence heals what hoarding and running will not touch.

It is one thing to speak kindly to an irritating stranger on Monday. It is quite another thing to go on speaking kindly to the same irritating relative, or irritating employee, or irritating child day after day, week after week, year after year and come to see in that what God is asking of me, what God is teaching me about myself in this weary, weary moment.

We struggle to maintain a dead past in the name of peace and refuse the new life that running water brings to everything. We confuse “stagnant” with “calm” and call it holiness. We miss the power of the paradox that peace is not passivity and that a living death is neither death nor life.

Feminism without spirituality runs the risk of becoming what it rejects: an elitist ideology, arrogant, superficial and separatist, closed to everything but itself. Without a spiritual base that obligates it beyond itself, calls it out of itself for the sake of others, a pedagogical feminism turned in on itself can become just one more intellectual ghetto that the world doesn’t notice and doesn’t need.

We don't change as we get older - we just get to be ore of what we've always been.

I learned that the Italians are right. It isn’t what happens to us that counts. It’s what we do with what happens to us that makes all the difference

holiness is made of dailiness, of living life as it comes to me, not as I insist it be.

These questions do not call for the discovery of data; they call for the contemplation of possibility.

life is the vessel we have been given in order to find out what life is really meant to be about.

War within ourselves is always a prelude to war outside ourselves. All war starts within our own hearts. When our egos are inflated or our desires insatiable, we go to war with the other for the sad joy of maintaining our one-dimensional worlds.

Better to walk through life simply and without masks, than to lose ourselves in the pursuit of identities that are purely cosmetic and commercial. Then, at least, we will be known for what we are rather than for what we are not.

As Albert Camus put it: “In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

It is what we do routinely, not what we do rarely, that delineates the character of a person.

If God worked through one woman to bring redemption, how is it that anyone can argue that God does not go on working through other women as well?

This compulsion to look back, to explain to myself, to others, why I did what I did—or, worse, to justify why I didn’t do something else—is one of the most direct roads to depression we have. Our thoughts, emotions, and attitudes, according to Dr. Andrew Weil in his book Healthy Aging, are “key determinants of how we age.” They can threaten the quality of time we bring to the present.

Where will Christian feminists go for spiritual nourishment if the church itself fails to reflect the feminism of Jesus? If tradition becomes a reason for churches, for synagogues, for mosques to refuse to change in the light of new insights and understandings, on what grounds can we expect change from other institutions?

The symbolic evidence of women’s invisibility in the human race is most clear perhaps in her suppression, her camouflage, her negation even in language. Women are subsumed, excised, erased by male pronouns, by male terminology, by male prayers about brotherhood and brethren, even and always by exclusively male images of God. The tradition that will call God spirit, rock, key door, wind, and bird will never ever call God mother. So much for the creative womb of God; so much for “I am who am.” So much for “Let us make human beings in our own image, male and female, let us make them.” What kind of spirituality is that? To take the position that using two pronouns for the human race is not important in a culture that has thirty words for car, multiple words for flowers, and dozens of words for dog breeds is to say that women are not important.

Life is not about age, about the length of years we manage to eke out of it. It is about aging, about living into the values offered in every stage of life. As E. M. Forster wrote, “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. “One’s friends,” George Santayana wrote, “are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

Bloom where you are planted,' the poster reads. But the poster does not tell the whole story. ' plant yourself where you know you can bloom' may well be the poster we all need to see. Or better yet, "Work the arid soil however long it takes until something that fulfills the rest of you finally makes the desert in you bloom.

We have made money our god and called it the good life. We have trained our children to go for jobs hat bring the quickest corporate advancements at the highest financial levels. We have taught them careerism but not ministry and wonder why ministers are going out of fashion. We fear coddling the poor with food stamps while we call tax breaks for the rich business incentives. We make human community the responsibility of government institutions while homelessness, hunger, and drugs seep from the centers of our cities like poison from open sores for which we do not seek either the cause or the cure. We have created a bare and sterile world of strangers where exploitation is a necessary virtue. We have reduced life to the lowest of values so that the people who have much will not face the prospect of having less. Underlying all of it, we have made women the litter bearers of a society where disadvantage clings to the bottom of the institutional ladder and men funnel to the top, where men are privileged and women are conscripted for the comfort of the human race. We define women as essential to the development of the home but unnecessary to the development of society. We make them poor and render them powerless and shuttle them from man to man. We sell their bodies and question the value of their souls. We call them unique and say they have special natures, which we then ignore in their specialness. We decide that what is true of men is true of women and then say that women are not as smart as men, as strong as men, or as capable as men. We render half the human race invisible and call it natural. We tolerate war and massacre, mayhem and holocaust to right the wrongs that men say need righting and then tell women to bear up and accept their fate in silence when the crime is against them. What’s worse, we have applauded it all—the militarism, the profiteering, and the sexisms—in the name of patriotism, capitalism, and even religion. We consider it a social problem, not a spiritual one. We think it has something to do with modern society and fail to imagine that it may be something wrong with the modern soul. We treat it as a state of mind rather than a state of heart. Clearly, there is something we are failing to see.

Prayer that is regular confounds both self-importance and the wiles of the world. It is so easy for good people to confuse their own work with the work of creation. It is so easy to come to believe that what we do is so much more important than what we are. It is so easy to simply get too busy to grow. It is so easy to commit ourselves to this century’s demand for product and action until the product consumes us and the actions exhaust us and we can no longer even remember why we set out to do them in the first place.

God's will for us is what's left over when we have done everything we can possibly do to get out of doing what we're doing rigth now.

But one thing I do know: life and time are ghosted creatures for us all. They belong to us - and are not ours at the same time.

was greed that broke Wall Street, not the lack of financial algorithms.

Spirituality is not meant to be a panacea for human pain. Nor is it a substitute for critical conscience. Spirituality energizes the soul to provide what the world lacks.

Indeed, the big decisions in life are hardly ever clear—except for one. And that one is piercingly clear: life is a series of dilemmas, of options, of conundrums, of possibilities taken and not taken. Negotiating these moments well is of the essence of the life well lived.

Women learn in such a system that, though they are usually tolerated in life and often loved, they are seldom respected for themselves, for their opinions, for their talents, for their perspectives. The life of a woman shrivels under the weight of an unnatural deference and lost development. Women live knowing that inside themselves is a capped well, a fount of untapped treasure, a person gone to waste. The spiritual life of a woman never knows total maturation in an environment that never seeks her opinions, her interpretations, her insights, and her experience of God. Whatever ministry she was born to perform never comes to light, is lost to the church, dies on the vines that were never cultivated.

The historian Arnold Toynbee says of it, “The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves.

When God has become a business, though, it is very hard for people to get the confidence to realize that God is really a personal God, a God who touches us as individuals, a God who is as close to us as we choose to see. We have learned well the remoteness of a God who lived for so long behind communion rails and altar steps and seminary doors and chancery desks that the experience of God, however strong, has always been more private secret than public expectation.

Stability of heart— commitment to the life of the soul, faithfulness to the community, perseverance in the search for God— is the mooring that holds us fast when the night of the soul is at its deepest dark, and the noontime sun sears the spirit. When

Friendship is the call out of isolation and selfishness in order to teach me how to love and how to serve. But without stability, friendship - real soul-searing friendship, the kind that makes us choose between domination and infatuation and possessiveness and dependence for growth and freedom and depth and responsibility and self-knowledge - is impossible. Stability is what enables us, in other words, to live totally in God and totally for others.

To simply withdraw from the arena of ideas, from public discourse on public issues, from the value formation of the young—to shrug our shoulders and say, “I don’t know” or, worse, “I don’t care about those things anymore”—is to abandon the young to the mercy of their own ideas without the benefit of experience to guide them.

God is indeed everywhere in everything at all times—in the abstruse as well as the luminous, whether we ourselves can see the hand of God in this moment or not.

Everything new is not the end of the world. Instead, it is the beginning of a new way of being alive that is based on the past but has already grown beyond it.

preoccupation with fantasies of success; exhibitionism and insatiable attention-getting maneuvers;

We don’t change as we get older—we just get to be more of what we’ve always been.

Prayer restores the soul that is dry and dulled by years of trying to create a world that never completely comes.

Benedict sets up a community, a family. And families, the honest among us will admit, are risky places to be if perfection is what you are expecting in life.

We should employ our passions in the service of life,” Sir Richard Steele wrote, “not spend life in the service of our passions.

Humility does not necessarily require me to agree and comply with everyone else’s position, but it does demand that I be willing to understand and respect the many sides of every issue.

Statio—stopping to collect our hearts and minds before we begin something new—is the sign that we know we are about to do the will of God for the world. We know that we must not go at it when we are scattered of heart.

For the Jew, Passover is a sign of salvation, of “God with us” at a particular historical moment in the past. For the Christian, Easter is a sign of “God with us” in the past, but with us now also and at a time to come, as well.

Rogue waves are the dangerous ones; they are the ones that no one takes note of or prepares to manage. These are the movements we should have seen but did not. Or, worse, they are what we saw coming but refused to acknowledge in the hope that ignoring them would make them go away.

Risk, the willingness to accept an unknown future with open hands and happy heart, is the key to adventures of the soul. Risk stretches us to discover the rest of ourselves - our creativity, our self-sufficiency, our courage. Without risk we live in a small world of small dreams and lost possibilities.

Like a great waterwheel, the liturgical year goes on relentlessly irrigating our souls, softening the ground of our hearts, nourishing the soil of our lives until the seed of the Word of God itself begins to grow in us, comes to fruit in us, ripens in us the spiritual journey of a lifetime. So goes the liturgical year through all the days of our lives. /it concentrates us on the two great poles of the faith - the birth and death of Jesus of Nazareth. But as Christmas and Easter trace the life of Jesus for us from beginning to end, the liturgical year does even more: it also challenges our own life and vision and sense of meaning. Both a guide to greater spiritual maturity and a path to a deepened spiritual life, the liturgical year leads us through all the great questions of faith as it goes. It rehearses the dimensions of life over and over for us all the years of our days. It leads us back again and again to reflect on the great moments of the life of Jesus and so to apply them to our own ... As the liturgical year goes on every day of our lives, every season of every year, tracing the steps of Jesus from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, so does our own life move back and forth between our own beginnings and endings, between our own struggles and triumphs, between the rush of acclamation and the crush of abandonment. It is the link between Jesus and me, between this life and the next, between me and the world around me, that is the gift of the liturgical year. The meaning and message of the liturgical year is the bedrock on which we strike our own life's direction. Rooted in the Resurrection promise of the liturgical year, whatever the weight of our own pressures, we maintain the course. We trust in the future we cannot see and do only know because we have celebrated the death and resurrection of Jesus year after year. In His life we rest our own. ― Joan D. Chittister, The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life - The Ancient Practices Series

Those who insist on preserving yesterday when today has already swept it away like sand on a beach lose the opportunity to guide the present. Rather they insist on resisting the present to the point that it simply fails to notice them anymore. It is a choice whether to run the risk of becoming part of a comfortable but insignificant cult in a society that is passing or participate in the efforts of a society that is rushing to regain its balance in a headwind of major proportions.

old ways of doing things. It is the ability to make ancient truth the living memory of today. Only the elderly have lived through both the good and the bad decisions of the past. It is they, then, who have the wisdom to alert us to alternatives, to evaluate present choices from the perspective of history. The role of

Any law that violates the will of God for the good of the world is a law to be questioned. Any law that puts my submission to a system over the law of God is a law to be resisted.

Other people begin to look different to me, too. They are as transformed as I am. I no longer see them as roles. They are people now, individuals—not problems, not “connections,” not a measure of my own value. My value now rests entirely in me, in what kind of person I am with others.

we try so hard to avoid the rest of the year: how do we deal with the God of darkness as well as the Giver of light?

Knowledge of God and knowlegde of self give birth to humility.

We need to think again about the beauties of age, its freedom and its splendor. It is the “fresh life within” that age reveals to us, if we only give it a chance.

The young hear memory in the voice of their elders and, delighted by these voices from the past or bored by them, too often miss the content behind the content. Memory is not about what went on in the past. It is about what is going on inside of us right this moment. It is never idle. It never lets us alone.

The service that the whole world needs from the elders is not the service of hours spent and time put in and documents finished and machines fixed. There are untold numbers of people who can do all of those things. No, the service of the elders is not a service of labor, it is a service of enlightenment, of wisdom, of discernment of spirits. Only the carriers of generations past can give us those things, because wisdom is what lasts after an experience ends.

Life is meant to form us in independence, usher us into an adulthood that begins in apprenticeship and ends in mastery, and then, those tasks accomplished, to bring us to the acme of integrity, of wisdom, of eldership in the community of the world. It is a process of ripening as we go, getting stronger, getting more caring, becoming more procreative, sharing more wisdom as we grow—so that those who come after us can walk a clearer path.

Whatever happens to the body, what toll age takes on the physical, the spirit does not grow old. In our dreams, in the way we ourselves see ourselves, we are forever becoming. Our dreams are always the vision of a younger self, a self-contained, energetic, self-determining person with a will of steel. Our dreams reveal to us the basic truth of life: years are biological; the spirit is eternal. The number of our years do not define us. There is in the human being a life force that never dies. It is the life force that proves to us that age does not fossilize us. Down deep, where our souls live, we stay forever young. It is this surging, driving force that brings us to the bar of life every day of our lives, whatever our age, however much we have been through, prepared to live life to the hilt again.

LIKE A GREAT WATERWHEEL, THE LITURGICAL YEAR goes on relentlessly irrigating our souls, softening the ground of our hearts, nourishing the soil of our lives until the seed of the Word of God itself begins to grow in us, comes to fruit in us, ripens in us the spiritual journey of a lifetime.

for beginners. After that, you can set out for

A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.

Benedict sets up a community, a family. And families, the honest among us will admit, are risky places to be if perfection is what y ou are expecting in life.

One of the functions of leadership is to lead, and weak managers may simply check and check and check with others because they are not capable of leading when it is required of them to lead. Benedict says that in matters of importance the abbot or prioress is to ask everyone in the community, 'starting with the youngest,' and then the abbot or prioress is to 'do what seems best.

It’s when freedom isn’t freedom at all that the confusion of time soon becomes a confusion of soul. It doesn’t take long to figure out that to have no fixed time for the major parts of life is to have bartered our freedom away.

Are you Jesus? people ask us silently every day. And the answer liturgical spirituality forms in us if we live it with constancy, with regularity, with fidelity, is surely, yes.

Never saying no to the self becomes the holy grail in a world more intent on the material than on the spiritual.

Regret claims to be insight. But how can it be spiritual insight to deny the good of what has been for the sake of what was not? No, regret is not insight. It is, in fact, the sand trap of the soul. It fails to understand that there are many ways to fullness of life, all of them different, all of them unique.

Benedict understood clearly that the function of leadership is to call us beyond ourselves, to stretch us to our limits, to turn the clay into breathless beauty. But first, of course, we have to allow it to happen.

struggle.

We must take our whole selves there—mind and heart—as well as our bodies. And we must be there five minutes before prayer starts.

It is on Sunday when, lost in the singing and reading and breaking of the bread, we discover a bit more about God.

Who will call a world on the brink of death by technological self-destruction to the cry of hu-man community if not you and ?

Who will call a world on the brink of death by technological self-destruction to the cry of hu-man community if not you and I?

I grew to realize that for those whose faith is mature, only God is God. Not the institution. Not the system. Not the history. Not the pope. God is in the church, not in the chancery. The church is a vehicle for the faith, not the end of it.

We cannot expect life to be perfect. But we can expect to see life come from death. We can expect to see morning after night. We can expect that acceptance of the struggle will give rise to the victory over self.

My clear obligation now is to see that God’s will for people everywhere is not being deliberately thwarted, not being ignored in favor of our own. How can we enslave a people to make our shoes and our children’s toys and our clothes in sweatshops across the world? How can we agree to buy without protest foreign imports that pay their makers—often children under twelve years old—$0.70 a day to send us what we will sell here for $125.00? How can we allow the genetic manipulation of seeds that cannot reproduce so that we become the food basket of the world as well as the arms merchant of the world? How can we count our will to power and wealth a greater good than others’ will for a decent life? And how can we call ourselves humble—spiritual—if we do?

Most significant of all, perhaps, is that, of the 613 laws in the Torah, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out, not one uses the word obey. God, the rabbi says, does not impose the intractable on Israel. God uses the word shema. Attend to.

Most important of all, perhaps, all the childhood images of God—God the Magician, God the Santa Claus, God the wrathful Judge, God the Puppeteer—disappear. We know now that the God of Creation has shared power with us and remains with us to help us see life through. Our role is to do our part, to do our best, to trust the path.

The essence of life is not to find the one thing that satisfies us but to realize that nothing can ever completely satisfy us. And that's all right.

It is storms, we see, that change and freshen and reshape the nature of the land. It is a study in the movement of the human heart. No wonder we find it difficult to sleep at night as the ocean within us roars and rolls and carries us adrift from one place in life to another.

Humility, in other words, is the basis for right relationships in life.

We separate spirit and matter as if they were two different things, though we know now, from quantum physics, that matter is simply fields of force made dense by the spirit of energy that is the base of everything. We are one with the universe, in other words. We are not separate from it or different from it. And we are not above it. And we are in it-all of us and ev-erything-swimming in an energy that is God. And so we are not separate from one another, or different from each other either. We are, each of us, simply one more sliver of humanity seeking to become more human, trying to be godly, and we will never be it either by diminishing ourselves or by degrading others. To be enlightened is to see behind all the forms life takes to the God who holds them in being. Enlightenment sees, too, be-hind the shapes, icons, and language that intend to personalize God to the God who is too personal, too encompassing, to be any single shape or form or name. Enlightenment takes us beyond our parochialisms to the pres-ence of God everywhere, in everyone, in the universe. It ignores color. It disdains gender. It releases gifts and listens to voices not its own precisely because they are not its own. To be enlightened is to be in touch with the God within us and around us, in ourselves and in others, more than it is to be engulfed in any single way, any one manifestation, any specific denominational or nationalistic or sexual construct, however good, however well-intentioned that kind of benign ungodli-ness may be. God is radiant light, blazing fire, asexual spirit, colorless wind. God is the magnet of our souls, the breath of our hearts, the stuff of our lives. God is no one's pigment, no one's flag, and no one's gender. And those who certify their God under any of those cre-dentials make a new idol in the desert. To be enlightened we must let God speak to us through everything and everyone through whom God shines in life.