Ethan

“Religion is of the heart, not of the head; and as long as all our hearts are full of a hatred for everything that our fathers loved, we can go on flatly contradicting each other for ever about what there is to be hated.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion

“The work of the spiritual father consists not so much in teaching us a secret and infallible method for attaining to esoteric experiences, but in showing us how to recognize God’s grace and his will, how to be humble and patient, how to develop insight into our own difficulties, and how to remove the main obstacles keeping us from becoming men of prayer.”
― Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer

“But nothing is more insidious than spiritual pride; nothing is more impervious to identification. No, the monastic mind-set 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 D. Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today

“In the first place, Benedictine spirituality implies, the presence of God demands total response. If I really believe God is present in my life, here and now, then I have no choice but to deal with that. Life, in fact, will not be resolved for me until I do. No manner of other agendas will ever completely smother the insistency of the God one. No amount of noise will ever successfully drown out the need to discover what is most important among all the important things of life. No degree of success will ever feel like success until I am succeeding at the center point of life.”
― Joan D. Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today