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. 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. 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.

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. 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? Life with someone else, in other words, doesn't show me nearly as much about his or her shortcomings as it does about my own That's how relationships sanctify me.

They show me where holiness is for me. That's how relationships develop me. They show me where growth is for me. If I'm the passive-victim type, then assertiveness may have something to do with coming to wholeness. If I'm the domineering character in every group, then a willingness to listen and to be led may be my call to life.

Alone, I am what I am, but in community I have the chance to become everything I can be. 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.

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. Humble people walk comfortably in every group. No one is either too beneath them or too above them for their own sense of well-being.

They are who they are, people with as much to give as to get, and they know it. And because they're at ease with themselves, they can afford to be open with others Having discovered who we are and having opened ourselves to life and having learned to be comfortable with it, we know that God is working in us. We know, most of all, that whatever happens we have nothing to fear we are free of the false hopes and false faces and false needs that once held us down.

We can fly now. Let all the others scratch and grapple for the plastic copy of life. We have found the real thing. To pray in the midst of the mundane is simply and strongly to assert that this dull and tiring day is holy and its simple labors are the stuff of God's saving presence for me 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. I learned that the Italians are right. 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. life is the vessel we have been given in order to find out what life is really meant to be about. Chittister Following the Path: The Search for a Life of Passion, Purpose, and Joy. It is what we do routinely, not what we do rarely, that delineates the character of a person. Chittister The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life - The Ancient Practices Series.

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. Prayer in Benedictine spirituality is not an interruption of our busy lives nor is it a higher act. Prayer is the filter through which we learn, if we listen hard enough, to see our world aright and anew and without which we live life with souls that are deaf and dumb and blind.

Our thoughts, emotions, and attitudes, according to Dr. 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. Bloom where you are planted,' the poster reads. But the poster does not tell the whole story. 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 to learn to hear on every level at once if we are really to become whole. The problem is that most of us are deaf in at least one ear. We have to learn to listen to Scripture. And we have to learn to listen to life around us. 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. There comes a moment when having everything seems to be the only way to squeeze even a little out of life. There comes a day when this job, this home, this town, this family all seem irritating and deficient beyond the bearable.

There comes a period in life when I regret every major decision I've ever made. This is precisely the time when the spirituality of stability offers its greatest gift.

Stability enables me to outlast the dark, cold places of life until the thaw comes and I can see new life in this uninhabitable place again. But for that to happen I must learn to wait through the winters of my life.

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.

Prayer restores the soul that is dry and dulled by years of trying to create a world that never completely comes. Chittister The Monastery of the Heart: An invitation to the meaningful life.

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. Chittister Radical Spirit: 12 Ways to Live a Free and Authentic Life. 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. Benedictine spirituality, after all, is life lived to the hilt. It is a life of concentration on life's ordinary dimensions.

It is an attempt to do the ordinary things of life extraordinarily well. Chittister The Monastery of the Heart: An Invitation to the Meaningful Life. 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.

Chittister The Monastery of the Heart: An Invitation to a Meaningful Life. Real contemplation, in other words, is not for its own sake. It doesn't take us out of reality. On the contrary, it puts us in touch with the world around us by giving us the distance we need to see where we are more clearly. To contemplate the gospel and not respond to the wounded in our own world cannot be contemplation at all.

That is prayer used as an excuse for not being Christian. That is spiritual dissipation. 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.

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. Chittister, The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life - The Ancient Practices Series. To pray simply because it is prayer time is no small act of immersion in the God who is willing to wait for us to be conscious, to be ready, to be willing to become new in life.

Prayer, Benedictine spirituality demonstrates, is not a matter of mood. To pray only when we feel like it is more to seek consolation than to risk conversion. To pray only when it suits us is to want God on our terms. To pray only when it is convenient is to make the God-life a very low priority in a list of better opportunities.

To pray only when it feels good is to court total emptiness when we most need to be filled. The hard fact is that nobody finds time for prayer. The time must be taken. There will always be something more pressing to do, something more important to be about than the apparently fruitless, empty act of prayer. But when that attitude takes over, we have begun the last trip down a very short road because, without prayer, the energy for the rest of life runs down.

The fuel runs out. We become our own worst enemies: we call ourselves too tired and too busy to pray when, in reality, we are too tired and too busy not to pray. Eventually, the burdens of the day wear us down and we no longer remember why we decided to do what we're doing: work for this project, marry this woman, have these children, minister in this place.

And if I cannot remember why I decided to do this, I cannot figure out how I can go on with it. I am tired and the vision just gets dimmer and dimmer. Holy leisure is the foundation of contemplation.

There is an idea abroad in the land that contemplation is the province of those who live in cloistered communities and that it is out of reach to the rest of us who bear the noonday heat in the midst of the maddening crowd. But if that's the case, then Jesus who was followed by people and surrounded by people and immersed in people was not a contemplative. some of our greatest contemplatives have been our most active and most effective people. No, contemplation is not withdrawal from the human race.

Of all the things we share, the most central is not in the liturgical or theological or canonical dimensions of the religion. I have danced in a Sufi fikre, sat for hours in a Zen Buddhist tea ceremony, been part of a Hindu puja, attended Shabbat services in multiple Jewish synagogues, and never, in any of those moments of worship, did I doubt these people were just as deeply involved in the search for God as I am.

And that God was with us all. And why not? God is everywhere, they told us as children. But the question never goes away: Yes, but - where is God for me? I don't feel God. I don't hear God. I don't know how to know God. So God is surely in all these other places where the consciousness of God is also real, as well. But as much as I knew, even as a child, that it had to be true, that God was everywhere, still God was nowhere in particular in life.

And, though I did not know it at the time, and so struggled through the thought of god for night after night in life, in that reality was all I needed to know about the search for God. It was years, of course, before I realized that I was looking for Something rather than for Everything, and so I found nothing because I was looking for the wrong thing.

And that is the kind of seeking that causes all the pain. 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. Chittister The Monastic Heart: 50 Simple Practices for a Contemplative and Fulfilling Life. 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. and confronting the civic hypocrites who put care in the language but seldom in the budget. 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.

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.

We need to think again about the beauties of age, its freedom and its splendor. 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. 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?

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. 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. Most significant of all, perhaps, is that, of the 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. I have come to understand that the voice of God is all around me. God is not a silent God. God is speaking to me all the time. In everything. Through everyone. I am only now beginning to listen, let alone to hear. 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?

And how can we call ourselves humble—spiritual—if we do? Uniqueness and independence are clearly not synonyms in the mind of Benedict of Nursia. Uniqueness and responsibility go hand in hand in Benedictine spirituality.

By all means I should be who I am and have what I need, but you have a claim on those gifts. Those gifts were given to me so much for your sake as for my own. The community does not exist to make me possible. Together we exist to make the gospel possible. Contemplation is the ability to see the world around us as God sees it.

Add New. edit data. Combine Editions. Joan Ball Average rating: 3. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Quotes by Joan Ball? Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads.

Learn more. tags: habits , self-protection. All the happy thoughts and positive thinking in the world will not keep life from being life. I've come to believe that, as big risks offer the potential for great reward or great failure, the biggest waves bring the swiftest undertow.

As I learned to accept this principle rather than fight it, a deeper understanding of the call to perseverance, which appears so frequently in the Bible, emerged. As I learned to persevere, something mysterious began to happen: the more difficult things became, the deeper I looked at myself, sought God's guidance, and let go. It is like the scripture that reads, "And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

tags: character , holy-spirit , hope , perseverance , tribulation.

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Joan Chittister. Here they are! All of them:. Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight. Beware the religion that turns you against another one. It's unlikely that it's really religion at all. Joan D. Chittister God Speaks in Many Tongues: Meditate with Joan Chittister. Our role in life is to bring the light of our own souls to the dim places around us.

Spirituality without a prayer life is no spirituality at all, and it will not last beyond the first defeats. Prayer is an opening of the self so that the Word of God can break in and make us new. Prayer unmasks. Prayer converts. Prayer impels. Prayer sustains us on the way. Pray for the grace it will take to continue what you would like to quit. We don't change as we get older - we just get to be more of what we've always been. 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.

Chittister Light in the Darkness: New Reflections on the Psalms for Every Day of the Year. 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. Chittister Heart of Flesh: Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men. Everywhere I looked, hope existed - but only as some kind of green shoot in the midst of struggle. It was a theological concept, not a spiritual practice.

Hope, I began to realize, was not a state of life. It was at best a gift of life. 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. Chittister Heart of Flesh: A Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men.

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.

Chittister Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today. I began to trust the questions themselves to lead me beyond answers to understanding, beyond practice to faith. The people who love us do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. They release the best in us; they shoulder us through the rough times in life; they stretch us beyond the confines of our own experiences to wider visions, to truer vistas. 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. 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.

The spiritual response is too often a simplistic one: we abandon God or we blame God for abandoning us. The time is now. 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. We struggle to maintain a dead past in the name of peace and refuse the new life that running water brings to everything.

We miss the power of the paradox that peace is not passivity and that a living death is neither death nor life. Chittister Between the Dark and the Daylight: Embracing the Contradictions of Life. Feminism without spirituality runs the risk of becoming what it rejects: an elitist ideology, arrogant, superficial and separatist, closed to everything but itself. We don't change as we get older - we just get to be ore of what we've always been.

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. 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. 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. The poet Mary Oliver may have written the best definition of what it means to be a prophet in contemporary spirituality. Be astonished. Tell about it.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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?

Life with someone else, in other words, doesn't show me nearly as much about his or her shortcomings as it does about my own That's how relationships sanctify me.

Women live knowing that inside themselves is a capped well, a fount of untapped treasure, a person gone to waste. It is a law that isn't even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality. Feminists are asking women and men not to buy into patriarchal systems that destroy them both. Dateline, founded by John Richard Patterson in , was a rival to Com-Pat. These questions do not call for the discovery of data; they call for the contemplation of possibility.

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