Valerie Hess

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• Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.

  St. Catherine of Siena

  Symptoms of soul neglect include self-absorption, shame, apathy, toxic anger, physical fatigue, isolation, stronger temptation to sin, drivenness, feelings of desperation, panic, insecurity, callousness, a judgmental attitude, cynicism and lack of desire for God.

  Mindy Caliguire

  What we do in life echoes in eternity.

  Maximus (in 'Gladiator')

  Don't ask the mountain To move, just take a pebble Each time you visit.

  John Paul Lederach

  You get to mercy by way of imagination, sympathy, tenderness of heart - which are not weaknesses.

  Wendell Berry

  There are victories far worse than defeats; and to overcome an angel too gentle to put out all his strength, and ride away in triumph on the back of a devil, is one of the poorest.

  George MacDonald

  There are two extremes to avoid: being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far from the wound you want to heal.

  Henri Nouwen

  What word of hope do we have to offer to the millions of people in the world who see no meaning in their lives? For most people in the world the question is not, 'Is there a life on the other side of death?' It is, rather, 'Is there life on this side of death?' Until we Christians give evidence that there is life on this side of death, the world has no reason to believe our dogmas or our giant churches. It doesn’t need our words of hell. It needs some evidence of heaven.

  Richard Rohr

  More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.

  Robert Smith Surtees

  We need a theology of brokenness. We need a theology which teaches us that even though we cannot unscramble an egg, God's grace lets us live happily and with renewed innocence far beyond any eggs we may have scrambled. We need a theology that teaches us that God does not give us one chance, but that every time we close a door [God] opens another one for us.

  Ronald Rolheiser

  Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  If they won't sing it, they don't believe it!

  Martin Luther

  Some things have to be believed to be seen.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  The human mind has this amazing ability to forget what we are meant to remember and remember what we are meant to forget.

  R. Zacharias

  While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions.

  Stephen R. Covey

  Another word to describe mystical moments is emancipation. If it isn’t an experience of newfound freedom, I don’t think it is an authentic God experience. God is always bigger than we imagined, expected, or even hoped. When you see people going to church and becoming smaller instead of larger, you have every reason to question whether the practices, sermons, sacraments, or liturgies are opening them to an authentic God experience.

  Fr. Richard Rohr

  If you want a good litmus test of your spiritual growth, simply examine the nature and quality of your relationships with others. Are you more loving, more compassionate, more patient, more understanding, more caring, more giving, more forgiving than you were a year ago? If you cannot answer these kinds of questions in the affirmative and, especially, if others cannot answer them in the affirmative about you, then you need to examine carefully the nature of your spiritual life and growth.

  M. Robert Mulholland, Jr.

  Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.

  Simone Weil

  Grief is always proportional to the unworked out residue of a broken relationship.

  Unknown

  If you're not at the table, you'll end up on the menu.

  Margaret Gordon

  The deepest revelation of our character is what we choose to dwell on in thought, what constantly occupies our mind.

  Dallas Willard

  Life is like a coin; you can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once.

  Lillian Dickson

  When good things become god things, they become bad things.

  Mark Driscoll

  Your present circumstances don't determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.

  Nido Qubein

  We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

  Fr. Richard Rohr

  God comes to you disguised as your life.

  Paula D'Arcy

  As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff is bad for you.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Evil is the defective use of good.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Is your religion helping you to transform your pain? We all carry our past hurts in a big black bag and it gets heavier as we get older—betrayals, rejections, disappointments, and wounds that appear along the way. If we do not find some way to help us transform our pain, I can tell you with 100% certitude, we will transmit it to others around us. We either transform it or transmit it.

  Richard Rohr

  Disturb us, Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves, When our dreams have come true Because we have dreamed too little, When we arrived safely Because we sailed too close to the shore.

  Sir Francis Drake

  We need not add how strongly we believe in God. We're doing what we believe, and we're not doing what we don't.

  David Dark

  Whereas discipline without discipleship leads to rigid formalism, discipleship without discipline ends in sentimental romanticism.

  Henri Nouwen

  Remember that it was God who decided on a 24-hour day, and he must have felt it was enough. We can never do all that we expect ourselves to do, and we can rarely do all that others expect us to do, but we can always do all that God expects us to do.

  Scott Sernau

  Words are as strong and powerful as bombs, as napalm.

  Dorothy Day

  While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

  Ray Bradbury

  Emerging Christianity is going to have to emphasize orthopraxy (walking the talk) much more than mere orthodoxy (talking the walk). It is the walking that changes you and reveals your own deeper self to yourself (in ways that are not always flattering). Spiritual practices must invade, touch, and heal the unconscious, where 95% of our real motivation lies. Faith-filled actions, contemplative prayer, solitude, silence, and many life events have the power to expose and change our unconscious agendas and motivations. Most “belief systems” are just laid on top of our egoic world view, and unfortunately do little damage to it. We can say all the right words, practice all the right rituals, and our heart can remain cold and unconnected.

  Richard Rohr

  In daily life, we obviously are not concerned in the least about what is within. All we care about is getting the outside clean. Each day we walk forth with clean clothes, clean hair, clean teeth but with a mind stuffed with worthless anxieties, dull resentments, stale outlooks, toxic prejudices, and an endless array of shabby self-images. We haven't even bothered to sweep out the mental junk we picked up yesterday, not to speak of the debris we have been hauling around for a lifetime.

  Hugh Prather

  Greatness emerges when, above all else, people are confident. When we believe—together—that life is good, God is good and humanity is good, we become very safe and salutary people for others. What we seem to suffer from today is a lack of confidence, which would become a calm self confidence. St. Therese of Lisieux wisely said that her entire spirituality was about “confidence and gratitude”! We can all do exciting and imaginative things when we are confident that we are a part of a story line that is going somewhere and is connected to something good. Without this, it is very hard to be either confident or grateful.

  Richard Rohr

  Asked for his name, God gave Moses a verb.

  Marilyn Chandler McEntryre

  Just once I wanted a task that required all the joy I had.

  Annie Dillard

  May all that is unforgiven in you be released. May your fears yield their deepest tranquilities. May all that is unlived in you blossom into a future graced with love.

  John O'Donohue

  All false religion proceeds in a certain sense from one illusion. When people say piously, “Thy kingdom come” out of one side of their mouth, they need also to say, “My kingdom go!” out of the other side. The kingdom of God supersedes and far surpasses all kingdoms of self and society or personal reward.

  Fr. Richard Rohr

  Poverty is always experienced in the soul before it is felt in the pocket book.

  Sarah Ban Breathnach

  Until you are convinced that prayer is the best use of your time, you will not find time for prayer.

  Fr. Hilary Ottensmeyer

  I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

  Anna Quindlen

  I will keep the ground that God has given me and perhaps in his grace, he will ignite me again. But ignite me or not, in his grace, in his power, I will hold the ground.

  John Knox

  How you do anything is finally how you do everything.

  Fr. Richard Rohr

  While the Bible never takes seriously the existence of other gods than Yahweh as real gods, it always assumes their reality as objects of worship.

  Leon Morris

  Has [prayer] transported her for a few short moments into a spiritual ecstasy that vanishes when everyday life returns, or has it lodged the Word of God so soberly and so deeply in her heart that it holds and strengthens her all day, impelling her to active love, to obedience, to good works? Only the day can decide.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  In our culture, we are conditioned to expect growth to involve acquisition of new facts and understandings. To put it neurologically, the functional systems of our brains are used to elaborating upon themselves as growth happens. We have, in a way, become attached to the very process of expanding our attachments. But spiritual growth is different. It cannot be packaged, programmed or taught…. The essential process is one of transformation, not education. It is, if anything, an unlearning process in which our old ways are cleansed, liberated and redeemed…. Obviously, we cannot ‘conduct’ spiritual growth. At bottom it is God’s work. It is grace.

  Dr. Gerald G. May

  I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

  James Joyce

  Tradition is handing on the flame, not praying over the ashes.

  Karl Richter

  Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for--in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.

  Ellen DeGeneres

  Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

  Mark Twain

  Now do not let the word “mystic” scare you. It simply means one who has moved from mere belief systems or belonging systems to actual inner experience. All spiritual traditions agree that such a movement is possible, desirable, and available to everyone. In fact, Jesus seems to say that this is the whole point! (See, for example, John 10:19-38.)

  Fr. Richard Rohr

  Don't worry about being effective. Just concentrate on being faithful to the truth.

  Dorothy Day

  A Virgin's Womb and an Empty Tomb: “Despite our efforts to keep him out, God intrudes. The life of Jesus is bracketed by two impossibilities: a virgin’s womb and an empty tomb. Jesus entered our world through a door marked, ‘No Entrance’ and left through a door marked, ‘No Exit.’'

  Peter Larson

  We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.

  Dennis Bakke

  There is always enough, and enough is plenty.

  Guillermo (a native of Balearic Islands, Spain)

  May the devastating beauty of God's grace lay waste to the lies we tell ourselves and those we wish others to believe.

  From "Unvirtuous Abbey"

  Never confuse a well-oiled machine with the joyous wedding banquet that Jesus uses as his most common metaphor for eternity. Sadly some people prefer machines to parties.

  Richard Rohr

  Don't put the key to your happiness in someone else's pocket.

  Unknown

  We are commanded to love our neighbor; this must mean that we can.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Maybe learning to separate the freedom to hope from the compulsion to know is part of growing up.

  Shirley Nelson

  For me, almost the best litmus test of whether a person has healthy or unhealthy religion is, “What do they do with their pain?”

  Richard Rohr

  Terrorists as well as saints have had a spiritual formation.

  Dallas Willard

  When there is no time to do it, that's when you most need to unclutter the calendar and go apart to pray. When the gridlock of your schedule relentlessly forbids it is the time you most need retreat. That is when your heart beats against the prison walls of your enslavement and says, 'Yes, Lord, I want to spend time with you.'

  Emilie Griffin

  Worry is not believing God will get it right, and bitterness is believing God got it wrong.

  Tim Keller

  A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

  Simone Weil

  Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.

  Daniel Patrick Moynihan

  The God of Christianity never claims to be fair. He goes beyond fair. The Bible teaches that he decided not to give us what we deserve- that's mercy. In addition, God decided to give us exactly what we didn't deserve- we call that grace.

  Andy Stanley

  Guard against the arrogance of privilege, against the indulgence of feeling that I don't have enough, and the poverty of spirit that refuses to acknowledge what is daily given me. Keep me truthful in knowing where I spend, where my values actually are...Instruct me in judicious spending and in gratitude with no holds barred.

  Gunilla Norris