Joan D. Chittister Quotes
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.
Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside of us to get better. It is about getting better inside about what is going on outside.
We talk religion in a world that worships the bread but does not distribute it, that practices ritual rather than righteousness, that confesses but does not repent.
Grief is a sign that we loved something more than ourselves. . . . Grief makes us worthy to suffer with the rest of the world.
Compassion makes no distinction between friends and enemies, neighbors and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners. Compassion is the gate to human community.
When souls really touch, it is forever. Then space and time disappear, and all that remains is the consciousness that we are not alone in life.
Compassion is not sympathy. Compassion is mercy. It is a commitment to take responsibility for the suffering of others.
Oppressors do not get to be oppressors in a single sweep. They manage it because little by little, we make them that. We overlook too much in the beginning and wonder why we lost control in the end.
Compassion is the ability to understand how difficult it is for people to be the best of what they want to be at all times.
An authentic spirituality does not cater to culture; it calls culture to accountability.
My limitations make space for the gifts of other people. Without the grace of our limitations we would be isolated, dry, and insufferable creatures indeed.
I begin to understand as never before that holiness is made of dailiness, of living life as it comes to me, not as I insist it be.
Too many times we insist on loving people the way we want to love them instead of the way they need to be loved.
faith isn't faith until it's all we have to hold on to and knowledge fails us. When we pray for faith, we automatically pray for darkness. Think about it.
It's the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us.
Freedom, in childhood, may be the right to be totally self-centered. But freedom in old age is the ability to be the best of the self I have developed during all those years.
Our role in life is to bring the light of our own souls to the dim places around us.
We don't change as we get older - we just get to be more of what we've always been.
The purpose of leadership is not to make the present bearable. The purpose of leadership is to make the future possible.
Life is not meant to be a burden. Life is not a problem to be solved. It is a blessing to be celebrated.
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.
Work is not slavery, then. Work is creativity. It is the expression of ourselves that no one else can duplicate.
Longing is a compass that guides us through life. We may never get what we really want, that's true, but every step along the way will be determined by it.
Life is a series of lessons, some of them obvious, some of them not. We learn as we go that dreams end, that plans get changed, that promises get broken, that our idols disappoint us.
Life always comes out of death. The present rises from the ashes of the past. The future is always possible for those who are willing to re-create it.
A life of value is not a series of great things well done; it is a series of small things consciously done.
Every dimension of life, its gains and its losses, are reason for celebration because each of them brings us closer to wisdom and fullness of understanding.
If the people speak and the king doesn't listen, there is something wrong with the king. If the kings acts precipitously and the people say nothing, something is wrong with the people.
June is the time for being in the world in new ways, for throwing off the cold and dark spots of life.
Prophets are those who take life as it is and expand it. They refuse to shrink a vision of tomorrow to the boundaries of yesterday.
The Christmas season is a gift in itself. It releases us from the priorities of ordinary time and gives us the right to party more and pray more and love more.
Imagine how happy, how holy, life would be if we ever really learn to see beauty.
Awareness of the sacred in life is what holds our world together, and the lack of awareness of the sacred is what is tearing it apart.
Memory is not about what went on in the past, it is about what is going on inside us right this moment. It is made up of the stuff of life in the process of becoming the grist of the soul.
Try saying this silently to everyone and everything you see for thirty days and see what happens to your own soul: I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future.
If life is really for the living, then the trick to living well is to learn to live it fully, to soak it up, to revel in it.
We are living in a period of commerical globalization. What we really need is spiritual globalization.
The vision of a culture lies in what becomes its major institutions, in what it remembers as its most impacting events, in who it sees as its heroes.
Anger is not bad. Anger can be a very positive thing, the thing that moves us beyond the acceptance of evil.
We each should have 2 pockets: in 1 the message, 'I am dust & ashes;' in the other, 'For me the universe was made.'