Cece

“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.”
― Joan D. Chittister, Heart of Flesh: Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men

“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.”
― Joan Chittister, In a High Spiritual Season

“Lord, so many things skitter through my mind, and I give chase to gather them and hold them up in a bunch to you, but they go this way and that while I go that way and this ... So, gather me up instead
and bless what eludes my grasp but not yours: trees and bees, fireflies and butterflies, roses and barbecues, and people ... Lord, the people ... bless the people: birthday people, giving birth people, being born people; conformed people,
dying people, dead people; hostaged people, banged up people, held down people; leader people, lonely people, limping people; hungry people,
surfeited”
― Ted Loder, Guerillas of Grace: Prayers For The Battle

“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.”
― Joan D. Chittister, Heart of Flesh: Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men