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“I must take care above all that I cultivate communion with Christ, for though that can never be the basis of my peace - mark that - yet it will be the channel of it.”
― Charles Spurgeon

“Ask and you shall receive; everyone that asks receives.  This is the fixed eternal law of the kingdom:  If you ask and receive not, it must be because there is something amiss or wanting in the prayer. Hold on; let the Word and Spirit teach you to prat aright, but do not let go the confidence he seeks to waken:  Everyone who asks receives....Let every learner in the school of Christ therefore take the Master's word in all simplicity....Let us beware of weakening the word with our human wisdom.”
― Andrew Murray

“So do not expect always to get an emotional charge or a feeling of quiet peace when you read the Bible. By the grace of God you may expect that to be a frequent experience, but often you will get no emotional response at all. Let the Word break over your heart and mind again and again as the years go by, and imperceptibly there will come great changes in your attitude and outlook and conduct. You will probably be the last to recognize these. Often you will feel very, very small, because when your eyes close for the last time in death, and never again read the Word of God in Scripture you will open them to the Word of God in the flesh, that same Jesus of the Bible whom you have known for so lng, standing before you to take you for ever to His eternal home.”
― Geoffrey Thomas, Reading the Bible

“As it is the sister of reading, so it is the mother of prayer. Though a man's heart be much indisposed to prayer, yet, if he can but fall into a meditation of God, and the things of God, his heart will soon come off to prayer....Begin with reading or hearing. Go on with meditation; end in prayer....Reading without meditation is unfruitful; meditation without reading is hurtful; to meditate and to read without prayer upon both, is without blessing.”
― William Bridge

“. . .fasting gives me singularly happy afternoons.”
― Adalbert De Vogue, AIMER LE JEÛNE

“When a person eats shortly before going to bed, digestion accompanies sleep. The two great physiological functions are completed together, leaving the maximum of freedom to the mind during the day.”
― Adalbert De Vogue, AIMER LE JEÛNE

“In the afternoon the digestion of the meal deprives me of the incomparable lightness which characterizes the fast days.”
― Adalbert De Vogue, AIMER LE JEÛNE

“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.”
― Joan Chittister

“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.”
― Joan Chittister

“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.”
― Joan Chittister

“From matters as crucial as the death of Jesus, to those as mundane as eating and drinking, the Bible presents the glo ry of God as the ultimate priority and the definitive criterion by which we should evaluate everything.”
― Donald S. Whitney, Simplify Your Spiritual Life: Spiritual Disciplines for the Overwhelmed

“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.”
― Joan Chittister

“Contemplation is the ability to see the world around us as God sees it. Contemplation is a sacred mindfulness of my holy obligation to care for the world I live in. Contemplation is awareness of God within me and in the people around me. Contemplation is consciousness of the real fullness of life. Contemplatives don't let one issue in life consume all their nervous energy or their hope. ... God is calling me on and on and on, beyond all these partial things, to the goodness of the whole of life and my responsibility to it.”
― Joan Chittister

“There is no quick and easy way to make the life of God the life we lead. It takes years of sacred reading, years of listening to all of life, years of learning to listen through the filter of what we have read. A generation of Pop Tarts and instant cocoa and TV dinners and computer calculations and Xerox copies does not prepare us for the slow and tedious task of listening and learning, over and over, day after day, until we can finally hear the people we love and love the people we've learned to dislike and grow to understand how holiness is here and now for us. But someday, in thirty years and thirty days perhaps, we may have listened enough to be ready to gather the yield that comes from years of learning Christ in time, or at least, in the words of the Rule of Benedict, to have made "a good beginning.”
― Joan Chittister

“Dom Cuthbert Butler made the point that it is not the presence of activity that destroys the contemplative life but the absence of contemplation. The genius Benedictinism is its concentration on living the active life contemplatively. ... Life is not divided into parts holy and mundane in the Rule of Benedict. All of life is sacred. All of life is holy. All of life is to be held in anointed hands. ...

So, contemplation does not take non-work; contemplation takes holy leisure. Contemplation takes discipline.”
― Joan Chittister

“In the monastic mind, work is not for profit. In the monastic mentality work is for giving, not just for gaining. In monastic spirituality, other people have a claim on what we do. Work is not a private enterprise. Work is not to enable me to get ahead; the purpose of work is to enable me to get more human and to make my world more just.”
― Joan Chittister

“Humility is not a false rejection of God's gifts. To exaggerate the gifts we have by denying them may be as close to narcissism as we can get in life. No, humility is the admission of God's gifts to me and the acknowledgment that I have been given them for others. Humility is the total continuing surrender to God's power in my life and in the lives of others.”
― Joan Chittister

“People who are really humble, who know themselves to be earth or humus - the root from which our word "humble" comes 0 have about themselves, an air of self-containment and self-control. There's no haughtiness, no distance, no sarcasm, no put downs, no airs of importance or disdain. The ability to deal with both their own limitations and the limitations of others, the recognition that God in life and that they are not in charge of the universe brings serenity and hope, inner peace and real energy. 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.”
― Joan Chittister

“... nothing is more insidious than spiritual pride; nothing is more impervious to identification. No, the monastic mind0set says, spiritual development is not an event. Spiritual development is a process of continuing conversion. "What do you do in the monastery?" an ancient tale asks. "Oh, we fall and we get up. We fall and we get up," the old monastic answers. In monastic spirituality, we never arrive; we are always arriving.”
― Joan Chittister

“Humility is reality to the full.”
― Joan Chittister

“Unless we learn in our own personal relationships, as the ancient definition of heaven and hell indicates, to live for someone besides ourselves, how shall we as a nation ever learn to hear the cries of the starving in Ethiopia and the illiterate in Africa and the refugees in the Middle East and the war weary in Central America? What will become of a nation in this day and age that has no sense of community? What, indeed, will become of the planet? the warning of the wise is clear:

'In hell,' the Vietnamese write, 'the people have chopsticks but they are three feet long so they cannot reach their mouths. In Heaven, the chopsticks are the same length, but in heaven the people feed one another.' The message is no less new, no less important today.”
― Joan Chittister

“There are three stages of spiritual development,' a teacher taught. 'The carnal, the spiritual, and the divine.'
'What is the carnal stage?' the disciple asked.
'That's the stage,' the teacher said, 'when trees are seen as trees and mountains are seen as mountains.'
'And the spiritual?' the disciple asked eagerly.
'That's when we look more deeply into things. Then trees are no longer trees and mountains are no longer mountains,' the teacher answered.
'And the divine?' the disciple said breathlessly.
'Ah,' the teacher said with a smile. 'That's enlightenment - when the trees become trees again the and the mountains become mountains.'

We pray to see life as it is, to understand it, and to make it better than it was. We pray so that reality can break into our souls and give us back our awareness of the Divine Presence in life. We pray to understand things as they are, not to ignore and avoid and deny them.

We pray so that when the incense disappears we can still see the world as holy.”
― Joan Chittister

“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.”
― Joan Chittister

“Into the midst of all this indistinguishable cacophony of life, the bell tower of every Benedictine monastery rings "listen." Listen with the heart of Christ. Listen with the lover's ear. Listen for the voice of God. Listen in your own heart for the sound of truth, the kind that comes when a piece of quality crystal is struck by a metal rod.”
― Joan Chittister

“Listening is, indeed, a fundamental value of Benedictine spirituality. More than that, Benedictine listening is life lived in stereo. The simple fact is that everybody lives listening to something. But few live a life attuned on every level. Benedictine spirituality doesn't allow for selective perception; it insists on breadth, on a full range of hearing, on total alert. 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.”
― Joan Chittister

“The spiritual life... 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.”
― Joan Chittister

“When we set out on a consciously chosen course of action that accents the good of others and is, for the most part, a hidden work, a deep change occurs in our spirits.”
― Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth

“Our seasons of fasting and prayer at the tabernacle have been high days indeed; never has heaven’s gate stood wider; never have our hearts been nearer the central glory.”
― C. H. Spurgeon

“For it is easier to be altogether silent than it is not to exceed in word. It is easier to remain hidden at home than to keep sufficient guard upon thyself out of doors.”
― Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ Thomas A Kempis

“The first major area of life in which we need to be spiritually disciplined is our attention.”
― Mason King, A Short Guide to Spiritual Disciplines: How to Become a Healthy Christian