My Life with the Saints Quotes

“The problem was that whenever I considered "earning a living," I thought mostly about the "earning" and nothing about the "living.”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self. —Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“Something about the image looked familiar. “Oh yeah,” I said. “I think I saw a movie about her once.” David directed me to a dog-eared copy of The Story of a Soul in the novitiate library. “Read this,” he said. “Then you’ll understand why I like Thérèse so much.” His devotion and my dimly remembered reaction to the movie led me to begin her book that night. And thus began my second introduction to the woman popularly known as the “Little Flower.”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“But my desire to follow God was just starting to take root when I saw the statue of Joan in Orléans. At that time, I was going to church more regularly and paying more attention to the Gospel stories. My life seemed a little nuts, and I felt a little like Joan—not hearing voices, of course, but feeling that my attraction to religion was a crazy thing that had to be trusted anyway. Faith was something that seemed sensible and nonsensical at the same time. Joan found her way to God by learning a language that no one else could hear, and so she is the perfect model for someone on the beginning of a faith journey. She had no idea what path to take to reach her destination, and neither did I. But, as my friend Peggy discovered, lost on the road to Chartres, the road that we seek is often the road we have already found.”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“At the time, I prayed to God only intermittently, and then mainly to ask for things, such as: “Please let me get an A on my next test.” “Please let me do well in Little League this year.” “Please let my skin clear up for the school picture.” I used to envision God as the Great Problem Solver, the one who would fix everything if I just prayed hard enough, used the correct prayers, and prayed in precisely the right way. But when God couldn’t fix things (which seemed more frequent than I would have liked), I would turn to St. Jude. I figured that if it was beyond the capacity of God to do something, then surely it must be a lost cause, and it was time to call on St. Jude.”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“But it is always God who takes the initiative and who surprises us with his presence, as God did with Mary.
When”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“His cassock is done in black marble and his face and hands in white, lending the statue a creepily realistic look. The Jesuit art historian C. J. McNaspy, writing about the otherwise magnificent church, commented, “The statue of St. Stanislaus, upstairs in the sanctuary, however, I find deplorable. One would have thought that the young saint suffered enough in life.”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“who knew John XXIII was so funny? Of course, not all the stories were laugh-out-loud funny. And I had already heard his famous answer to the journalist who asked innocently, “How many people work in the Vatican?” “About half of them,” said His Holiness.”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“It is true that, unlike Francis of Assisi, Ignatius is rarely characterized as endearingly silly (though he liked to perform impromptu Basque dances for melancholy Jesuits) or foolish (though early in his postconversion life he asked his mule to decide, by choosing which fork in the road to take, if he should pursue a man who had just insulted the Virgin Mary). And true, he was not a gifted writer with an instinct for the well-turned phrase, as was his compatriot St. Teresa of Ávila or St. Benedict.”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“The Seven Storey Mountain,”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“Thomas Merton struck me as someone I might like to have known—bright, funny, creative, a fellow who would have made a good friend. He struggled with some of the same things I did—pride, ambition, selfishness. And he struggled with the same questions I was wondering about: What are we made for? Who is God? What is the purpose of our lives? Merton seemed full of wonderful contradictions—a man who sought humility while struggling with an overweening ego, a man in love with the world who decided to, in a sense, flee it. To me Merton’s contradictions, his “multitudes,” as Whitman would say, revealed his deep humanity. As I read the book, his search became my search, and I longed to know where his life would lead.”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“These paradoxes, these Whitmanesque multitudes, helped make Thomas Merton one of the protean figures of twentieth-century Catholicism. His open and honest 1948 memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain, which details his journey to the Trappist monastery, was a publishing phenomenon that even the savvy Merton was unable to foresee. It introduced contemplative prayer to millions of readers and heralded a postwar renewal in monastic life in the United States.”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“But shining through the nineteenth-century piety, like a pale green shoot bursting through dark soil, is a stunningly original personality, a person who, despite the difficulties of life, holds out to us her Little Way and says to us one thing: Love.”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“And she can be found in the hearts of those who feel that, above almost all the saints, she is the one who most understands what it means to be a human being who suffers and rejoices in everyday life. Her life—at once simple and complex, clear and opaque, childlike and mature, humble and bold, joyful and sorrowful—has spoken to millions of people. It spoke to my friend David. And it spoke to me, from the first moment I met her, in that little movie theater in Connecticut.”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“if you read the text closely, what she talks about is that sense that there is sheer nothingness on the other side of death. That would be a particularly acute trial for Thérèse, since her confidence in the reality of heaven had always been so strong and powerful.” Yet though she struggled, wept, and raged, she continued to believe—drawing from a deep well of trust filled from the springs of a lifelong friendship with God. As Kathryn Harrison writes in Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Thérèse’s “dark night” may be the most compelling aspect of her life, the point where many lives intersect with hers. “At last she has taken her place among us,” writes Harrison, “not so much revealed herself as human as given birth to her naked self, plummeting to earth, wet and new and terrified. If we allow her to become a saint, if we believe in her, it’s because here, finally, she has achieved mortality.”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“On the way out of the theater, I brushed away the tears, worried that my friend would notice. Suddenly he turned to me. “What a waste of a life!” he snapped. “All that suffering for nothing!” His comments shocked me. It was the first time I realized that my feelings toward religion might be the opposite of what others experienced.”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints

“Following graduation, and after three years of working with General Electric in New York, I took a job in their office in Stamford, Connecticut. And though I was sad leaving a city where there seemed to be a cinema on every corner, I was happy to learn about a newly opened theater near Stamford specializing in experimental, independent, and classic films. One week an unusual advertisement in the theater’s schedule caught my attention. It was a haunting black-and-white photograph of a woman’s face floating above a single word: Thérèse. Though I wasn’t sure what the film was about—something about the ad seemed vaguely religious—I convinced a coworker to accompany me to the screening. The film, directed by Alain Cavalier, was a bold, spare look at the life of Thérèse of Lisieux, the nineteenth-century French saint, about whom I knew absolutely nothing. The almost complete absence of physical scenery meant that the film focused on the quiet interactions of the few characters.”
― James Martin, My Life with the Saints