The Shattered Lantern Quotes

“True restfulness, though, is a form of awareness, a way of being in life. It is living ordinary life with a sense of ease, gratitude, appreciation, peace and prayer. We are restful when ordinary life is enough.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“Gratitude is the root of all virtue”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“To be a saint is to be motivated by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less. Gratitude is the root of all virtue. It lies at the base of love and charity. Scripture always and everywhere makes this point.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“As John Shea so aptly put it: "God is not a law to be obeyed but a presence to be seized and acted on."
In an analogy that comes from Jesus - "Take the fig tree as a parable; as soon as its twigs grow supple and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near" - letting God be God means undergoing the presence of God as a tree undergoes the presence of summer. The metaphor is simple and perfectly apt: a tree is brought to bloom by summer. It does not understand summer, conceptualize summer, nor is it able to project what summer will do to it; it simply acts under its presence. To let God be God is to live in openness to the mystery of God without limiting the nature or effect of his presence by any expectations or by withdrawal. The task of contemplation is not to specify what conditions must be met before we believe in God's existence, power, or goodness. Rather the task of contemplation is to let God be God, and like the fig tree, act under his presence. The proper approach to God is not to try to analyze the infinite, but to celebrate it.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“Western culture today is so powerful and alluring that it often swallows us whole. Its beauty, power, and promise generally take away both our breath and our perspective. The lure of present salvation - money, sex, creativity, the good life - has, for the most part, entertained, amused, distracted, and numbed us into a state where we no longer have a perspective beyond that of our culture and its short-range soteriology.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“The road beyond the practical atheism of our everyday consciousness lies in self-abandonment. If John of the Cross were your spiritual director and you went to him with the complaint that God did not seem very alive or real to you, he would prescribe this exercise: "As unpopular as this advice might be in a world that tells you to do your own thing, bend your will according to the beatitudes of Jesus. Stand before your loved ones and before your God and practice saying what Jesus said to his Father in the garden: 'Not my will, but yours, be done.' Then come back in a few years and tell me whether God still seems absent from your life.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“This parable illustrates what Jesus meant when he said that love demands "obedience unto death." It demands that we let go of what we cling to instinctually so as to be able to receive that very thing in its reality and fullness. To be obedient to love, to give oneself over to it, means always hearing the call to self-sacrifice, to self-abandonment.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“Atheism is not, as we so popularly imagine, the result of the human race coming of age and having the courage to rid ourselves of fairy tales and superstitions. Atheism, for the most part, is rooted in the opposite. It questions too little, and it examines too narrowly. Jesus tells us that it is children who will see God.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“The God of ordinary life will be found in the ordinary.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“The road back to a lively faith is not about answers, but about living in a certain way - contemplatively.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“To have a sense of God's presence in everyday life, we don't need the kind of miracles that drastically change ordinary reality and prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that there is a supernatural world beyond our natural world (a miracle in the common sense understanding). No. We need a deeper sense that God is already present and acting in the seemingly ordinary events of our lives.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“But gratitude, like all virtues, is the result of discipline. An earlier generation expressed it this way: Count your blessings. To become grateful, one must practice the asceticism of joy. The greatest compliment one can offer the giver of a gift is to thoroughly delight in his gift. We owe it to our creator to delight in the gift of life and creation.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“To be a saint is never to take anything as owed, but to receive everything as gift.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“The prohibition boils down to this: God has told Adam and Eve that they may receive life as gift, but they may never take life as if it were theirs by right. The condition God places on them is not an arbitrary or petty test. No. It expresses an entire morality: as long as you receive and respect reality as gift it will continue to give you life and goodness. If you attempt to seize it or take it as owed, you will know shame, disharmony, pain, death, and loss of a connection with God.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“Paley tells us to look at the design in our world and especially at the design in ourselves. The human body, with its brain and central nervous system, is such an incredible entity of intelligence and deliberate design that one cannot look at it and say, as one might in the case of a stone, that it does not need anything beyond itself to be here. The intelligent purposeful design of the human body, heart, and mind demand a different answer, require something beyond themselves to explain their existence. That something has to be a reality that itself is not contingent on anything else. It must be the ground of all intelligence, purpose, and existence. In a word, it must be God.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“In our normal consciousness, whenever we approach God, even in formal prayer and in our churches, it is with very measured expectations. The God who is met in the measured expectations of our own desires and imagination dies in his own impotence and irrelevance.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“God's answer to Moses might be stated: "I am the one who cannot be encountered in thought, imagination, or feeling; the one who can never be controlled or manipulated; but who, despite this and because of it, is ever graciously and powerfully present to you. Trust that presence, walk in it, undergo it.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“To fear God is also, as Michael Buckley puts it, to let God "contradict the programs and expectations of human beings in order to fulfill human desires and human freedom at a much deeper level than subjectivity would have measured out in its projections." To fear God means to set aside our own expectations, needs, and imaginings and let God set the agenda and define the limits.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“In affirming that faith is not understanding, this tradition does not affirm that faith goes against understanding or that faith is based upon blind trust. Faith takes us beyond understanding, but does not denigrate it any more than Einstein's physics denigrates grade-school arithmetic, or reality denigrates a photograph, or the light of dawn denigrates a candle burning in the night. It just goes infinitely beyond it. What was grasped in the mind and heart before faith's light eclipsed it was real and remains so. The trust in which we now live takes its root in there. Grade-school arithmetic is still valid after Einstein, a photograph is still real even when you actually see the person in it, and a candle still gives off light even when a bright sun eclipses it; they remain as the foundation from which we move on to a trust in what is greater than they are.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“We can understand this more clearly if we look at where holy fear breaks down in our interpersonal relations. When we examine our deepest resentments, we invariably find that at their roots lies the fact that someone has not respected us. Usually the violation is not blatant. Almost always it is subtle: someone has taken us for granted, has assumed that he understands us and our motives, has boxed us in with her own preconceived notions of who we are; has not respected our uniqueness, mystery, and complexity; or has taken as owed to them what we can only offer as gift. This is a picture of the illusion of familiarity, and it is what is expressed in the axiom "familiarity breeds contempt".
By extension, to live in fear of God means that we live before God and the rest of reality in such a way that there is never contempt within us. We take nothing for granted, everything as a gift. We have respect. We are always poised for surprise before the mystery of God, others, and ourselves. All boredom and contempt is an infallible sign that we have fallen out of a healthy fear of God.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“Contemplation means living in such a way that God can enter into our lives. There are many ways of being open to God. Metaphysically it means that the difference between God and creature is infinitely greater than any similarity, as the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) taught. Consequently the Protestant tradition would not conclude that bad things happening to good people implies that God is not all-powerful. The metaphysical and religious speculations of Job's friends block true contemplation.
Psychologically and intellectually it means that we must respect the fact that all concepts we form of God and God's ways are fundamentally inadequate to understand God.
Emotionally it means that we must learn to live with the insecurity of an understanding of God that is not intellect based, and must accept mystery, unsolved riddles, and unrequited emotional suffering.
Contemplation means living in what mystics have always described as a certain emotional and intellectual darkness. God can reveal himself to us only when we do not block that revelation with our heads, our emotions, and our actions.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“Inevitably the fear of anonymity and mortality overwhelms us. When we feel this - and outside of a deep faith it can be the dominant feeling during the second half of our lives - we begin to believe that we are meaningful only when we accomplish something that sets us apart and ensures that we will be remembered. For most of us, the dominant obsession of adult life is trying to guarantee our own preciousness, lovableness, meaning, immortality, and sanctity. We do not believe we can have these independent of our own accomplishments. And so we fabricate the lie, we try to make a mark for ourselves.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“Like a mother weaning a child, God dries up the feeling of satisfaction and takes away the pleasure in the things of God as well as in things of earth. We become wearied of both God and creature and are left with the painful feeling that we are not serving God or our neighbor properly. We no longer feel the enjoyment, good feelings, and security we used to feel. John says that if we endure and persevere in prayer to God and service to others despite the absence of all satisfaction, then we will begin to act with a new motivation - Christ's. The connection between satisfaction and our motivation to act will have been severed. We will then act and choose not because of the pleasure we bring ourselves but because of something higher, namely, a desire to be of help to everything and everybody in their struggle towards consummation and union in love, beauty, truth, and goodness.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“This restlessness is a nostalgia for the infinite, a holy eroticism, a congenital propensity to embrace everything and to become part of everything. It creates a perpetual tension at the center of our conscious and unconscious lives. We come into life neither restful nor content, but fired by love's urgent longing, our souls dis-eased in an advantageous way.
We experience these longings in many ways, both holy and unholy, during the course of our lives, and they take as their object many things. But the ultimate object of that longing is a complete and ecstatic union with God, others, and the world. We will be restless until that consummation.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“God is not found at the conclusion of a syllogism, nor in a miraculous intervention in ordinary life, but in living a certain way of life. It involves every dimension of our personalities (moral, spiritual, psychological, emotional, physical, sexual, aesthetic) and every dimension of our lives (private and social). At the end of a long journey towards optimal openness, a journey that ultimately demands conversion in every dimension of our personality, God will spontaneously be part and parcel of our ordinary awareness.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“On what basis do we humans possess this stunning ability to affirm graciousness and love as the heart of reality when the here and now demands the opposite affirmation?
The answer to that can only be that somehow we apprehend in the here and now - despite its often brutal suggestion that death and darkness are the final answer - a gracious absolute that lies beyond. Like the classical theist who looks at a rose and is able to perceive the creator and sustainer who gives it existence at that precise moment, so too do we sense the gracious Dancer who is Lord over all dances, including the horrible one that now threatens us, and who will bring us all to a new day and a new loving dance.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“This is true not because God does not exist to be experienced, but because we in Western culture have a very reduced experience of God. God is present to us, but we are no longer present to God because we are no longer contemplative. Our contemplative faculty - like a limb that has been immobilized in a cast and is now healed and healthy but unable to function without rehabilitation - needs exercise and therapy. Or, like a weightlifter who has overdeveloped certain muscles to the detriment of others and has distorted his natural body, we have overfocused on one part of our consciousness and neglected another to the point where our natural consciousness is distorted.
We are living the unexamined life, and its price is a practical atheism. Fortunately, it can be overcome by contemplative awareness. God will be seen in ordinary experience when ordinary experience is fully open to him.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“Narcissism also reduces awareness by falsely enhancing our perception of ourselves as individuals to the point that we incorrectly perceive ourselves as independent when in reality we are radically and organically interdependent with others and the world. The non-contemplative person experiences little sense of the whole, of our radical connectedness (as elucidated in Bell's theorem), of reality as being somehow all of a piece, of the Body of Christ.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“This parable is Jesus's own metaphor for non-contemplative lack of awareness. When life is dominated by the headaches, pressures, and concerns for making a living, running a household, meeting schedules, and measuring up to the demands of an achievement-oriented culture, there is a constant press to manipulate rather than just wonder at the world. When manipulation of reality replaces wonder, there is by definition a reduced awareness. The preoccupation with measuring land and testing oxen reduces the chances of being aware that there is a divinely initiated banquet going on at the heart of ordinary life.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God

“For the contemplative, God's ways are not our ways, his thoughts are not our thoughts. There are two sets of rules for reality, one for the infinite (God) and another for the finite (us). It is understood that the human mind cannot answer questions about things like evil, predestination, or injustice because it is finite and operates with a finite system of symbols. It is by definition limited. Infinite things cannot be grasped by finite minds.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God