Sacred Rhythms Quotes

“Your desire for more of God than you have right now, your longing for love, your need for deeper levels of spiritual transformation than you have experienced so far is the truest thing about you. You might think that your woundedness or your sinfulness is the truest thing about you or that your giftedness or your personality type or your job title or your identity as husband or wife, mother or father, somehow defines you. But, in reality, it is your desire for God and your capacity to reach for more of God than you have right now that is the deepest essence of who you are.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“The purpose of journeying together in spiritual friendship and spiritual community (whether there are just two of you or whether you are in a small group) is to listen to one another's desire for God, to nurture that desire in each other and to support one another in seeking a way of life that is consistent with that desire. ”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“Discernment is first of all a habit, a way of seeing that eventually permeates our whole life. It is the journey from spiritual blindness (not seeing God anywhere or seeing him only where we expect to see him) to spiritual sight (finding God everywhere, especially where we least expect it).”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“Most of us are more tired than we know at the soul level. We are teetering on the brink of dangerous exhaustion, and we cannot do anything else until we have gotten some rest...we can't really engage [any spiritual disciplines] until solitude becomes a place of rest for us rather than another place for human striving and hard work.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“One thing we can know for sure is that when we are confessing our sin to God but not to the people around us in ordinary, nitty-gritty life, there is not much real spiritual transformation going on”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“Desire has its own rhythms. Sometimes it ebbs and sometimes it flows. But in the end it is the deepening of spiritual desire and the discipline to arrange our life around our desire that carries us from the shallow waters of superficial human wanting into our soul’s movement in the very depths of God. Sometimes the tide brings us closer in to the shore and the soul frolics in the waves. But increasingly we find our life to be hidden in the depths of God, and whatever is seen on the surface springs up from those depths full of beauty and grace.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“As Robert Mulholland says: “Our cross is the point of our unlikeness to the image of Christ, where we must die to self in order to be raised to God into the wholeness of life in the image of Christ. . . . So the process of being conformed to the image of Christ takes place right there at that point of our unlikeness to Christ.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“The depth of desire has a great deal to do with the outcome of our life. Often, those who accomplish what they set out to do in life are not those who are the most talented or gifted or who have had the best opportunities. Often they are the ones who are most deeply in touch with how badly they want whatever they want; they are the ones who consistently refuse to be deterred by the things that many of us allow to become excuses.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“Your desire for more of God than you have right now, your longing for love, your need for deeper levels of spiritual transformation than you have experienced so far is the truest thing about you. You might think that your woundedness or your sinfulness is the truest thing about you or that your giftedness or your personality type or your job title or your identity as husband or wife, mother or father, somehow defines you. But in reality, it is your desire for God and your capacity to reach for more of God than you have right now that is the deepest essence of who you are.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“Many of us try to shove spiritual transformation into the nooks and crannies of a life that is already unmanageable, rather than being willing to arrange our life for what our heart most wants. We think that somehow we will fall into transformation by accident.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“The sad truth is that many of us approach the Scriptures more like a textbook than like a love letter. In Western culture in particular, we are predisposed to a certain kind of reading. We have been schooled in an informational reading process that establishes the reader as the master of the text. As the reader, I employ key techniques that allow me to use the text to advance my own purposes. With this kind of reading, the intent is to cover as much ground as possible as quickly as possible. Our emphasis is primarily on mastery, that is, controlling the text for our own ends—gathering information, interpreting or applying the information, proving our point about something, gaining a ministry tool or solving a problem.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“Although I wouldn’t have known how to talk about it then, slowly but surely the Scriptures were becoming a place of human striving and intellectual hard work. Somehow, I had fallen into a pattern of using the Scriptures as a tool to accomplish utilitarian purposes rather experiencing them primarily as a place of intimacy with God for my own soul’s sake.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“I cannot transform myself, or anyone else for that matter. What I can do is create the conditions in which spiritual transformation can take place, by developing and maintaining a rhythm of spiritual practices that keep me open and available to God.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“The truth is that spiritual transformation takes place as we embrace the challenges and opportunities associated with each season of our life.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“good. Over time, as we surrender ourselves to new life rhythms, they help us to surrender old behaviors, attitudes and practices so that we can be shaped by new ones.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“but we really can’t engage any of them until solitude becomes a place of rest for us rather than another place for human striving and hard work.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“The real surprise was not that this happened but the fact that the shift was so subtle. After all, the purposes for which I was using the Scriptures were not bad in and of themselves. It’s just that over time, without my awareness, those purposes had trumped the greater purpose for which the Scriptures have been given: to allow my own heart and soul to be penetrated by an intimate word from God. My mind remained engaged, but my heart and soul had drifted far away.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“study of Scripture is important, but if we stop there, we will eventually hit a wall spiritually. Information”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“when applied to Scripture, this approach does not serve the deeper longing of our heart—the longing to hear a word from God that is personal and intimate and takes us deeper into the love that our soul craves.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“What shapes our actions is basically what shapes our desire. Desire makes us act and when we act what we do will either lead to a greater integration or disintegration within our personalities, minds, and bodies - and to the strengthening or deterioration of our relationship to God, others, and the world. The habits and disciplines we use to shape our desire form the basis for a spirituality.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“None of us exists in this world apart from being one gender or another, and in fact our existence as male and female is one of the most complete ways God has revealed the diverse aspects of his own being.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms Participant's Guide with DVD: Spiritual Practices that Nourish Your Soul and Transform Your Life

“Ask me not where I live      or what I like to eat. . . .      Ask me what I am living for      and what I think is keeping me      from living fully for that. THOMAS MERTON, Thoughts in Solitude”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“In the realm of spiritual transformation, the questions we are willing to ask ourselves are more important than the answers we think we know. At”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“Without a balanced approach to spiritual disciplines, we run the risk of cultivating a one-sided spirituality that will disintegrate under pressure from the part of us we have left undeveloped.”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation