A Stone for a Pillow Quotes

“I need to reiterate here what is a basic affirmation for me. When the world was created, as the story is told in the beginning of Genesis, God did not say, “It is finished.” That did not come until the Cross. What God said after making the world was, “It is Good. It is very Good.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“But doesn’t good imply protection?” “No,” I said. No. And then it came to me that the only one who has ever offered protection is Satan. That was one of the temptations given to Jesus on the mountain after his baptism. Worship me, Satan urged him, and you can have it all free, no being deserted by the disciples you had counted on to stay with you, no cross, no pain, no suffering. I will protect you. But does the God of love not offer that kind of protection?”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“God is still the author of the story, and even if the echthroi tear and crumple the pages, or smudge the ink, it is still God’s story, and the Author will correct, revise, retype, redeem, as necessary. Meanwhile, we are part of the story, and we may not know what the lines we are given mean, why we suffer, bleed, die. Perhaps what we see as death is really necessary for rebirth.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“It will still be a long time before we who call ourselves Christians will understand that God is One, that God is All, because we still worship many strange gods. When we set ourselves up as being the only people in Creation who have the truth and who will inherit the kingdom, we are worshipping the little god of our own pride.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“We daily have to make choices between good and evil, and it is not always easy, or even possible, to tell the difference between the two. Whenever we make a choice of action, the first thing to ask ourselves is whether it is creative or destructive. Will it heal, or will it wound? Are we doing something to make ourselves look big and brave, or because it is truly needed? Do we know the answers to these questions? Not always, but we will never know unless we ask them. And we will never dare to ask them if we close ourselves off from wonder.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“Cardinal Suhard writes, “To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“One of J. B. Phillips’s books is entitled Your God Is Too Small. Our God becomes too small when we make God in our own image, instead of heeding the image of God in us. In us, not outside us, but in us, waiting to be recognized. Our call, no matter what our vocation, is to witness to the God within, the God who is One.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“It is often more difficult to accept forgiveness than to give it.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“The world has enough for every man’s need,” said Gandhi, “but not for every man’s greed.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“A phrase much used in Scripture, to give up the ghost. What does it mean? Ghost = spirit = breath. In the liturgy we ask that our thoughts may be cleansed by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that the Spirit may breathe truth and renewal into us. When we give up the spirit, we stop breathing, we give the ghost back to the Creator. When their time came, Abraham and the others of the day gave up the ghost “and were gathered to their fathers.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“Technology’s outer changes are very visible, and we’ve managed to keep up with them fairly well. But we haven’t changed inwardly enough to keep up with the changes we’ve made outwardly, thus creating problems we’re just beginning to recognize. Or to refuse to recognize. For if we recognize that our spiritual development lags woefully behind our intellectual development, and that we must do something to heal this brokenness before we are split completely asunder, then we must open ourselves to God. This is dangerous to our self-satisfaction or complacency. If we open ourselves to the untamed God, we may get hurt. We may make mistakes. We may find that our lives are being turned around. And that takes courage, a childlike courage. We become whole by being all of ourselves, including the aspects of ourselves we like least as well as those of which we are able to approve. When we try to approve of ourselves (rather than to love ourselves) we tend to lose both our senses of humour and of wonder. Only if I retain the irradiating joy as I see the first trout lily in the spring, the first bright red of the partridge berries in the autumn, can I become a “grown-up.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“That is probably the chief difference between reading a book and watching television. In viewing we do not engage in dialogue; we are acted upon; we do not, in any true creative sense, participate. But when we read, we are creators. If the reader cannot create the book along with the writer, then the book is stillborn. The reader is also an artist.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“How often we are given visions, and walk right by them, or through them (like the old man by the river) because we have lost our sense of wonder, our belief in all that lies on the other side of reason.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“Be, O Lord, within me to strengthen me Without me to guard me Over me to shelter me, Beneath me to stablish me Before me to guide me After me to forward me Round about me to secure me.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“When we ask God for help, we can’t insist that help come in the way that we have decided. If we are demanding specific blessings, we may miss the actual ones God has sent to us.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“If we have to be perfect before we can know ourselves blessed, we will never ask for the transfiguring power of God’s love, because of course we are unworthy. But we don’t have to be worthy, we just have to acknowledge our need, to cry out, “Help me!” God will help us, even if it’s in an unexpected and shocking way, by swooping down on us to wrestle with us. And in the midst of the wrestling we, too, will be able to cry out, “Bless me!”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“God loves us as we are, even at our most ungracious. And to bless, no matter how little we may feel like it, is to participate in love. Cursing is a boomerang. If I will evil toward someone else, that evil becomes visible in me.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“God loves us as we are, even at our most ungracious. And to bless, no matter how little we may feel like it, is to participate in love.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“We must bless without wanting to manipulate. Without insisting that everything be straightened out right now. Without insisting that our truth be known. This means simply turning whoever it is we need to bless over to God, knowing that God’s powerful love will do what our own feeble love or lack of it won’t.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“We must be careful in our right and proper protests against the folly of nuclear stockpiling that we are protesting truly, that we are not being false prophets fearing only for our own selves, our own families, our own country. Our concern must be for everybody, for the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, for our entire fragile planet, and everybody on it. And for all of God’s creation, because we cannot blow ourselves up in isolation. Indeed, we must protest with loving concern for the entire universe.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“How do we tell the false prophet from the true prophet? The true prophet seldom predicts the future. The true prophet warns us of our present hardness of heart, our prideful presuming to know God’s mind. And the final test of the true prophet is love. God came to us as Jesus because of love. All the ills of the Fall will be righted and redeemed in the Second Coming because of love.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“There’s a story of a good man who dies and goes to heaven, and who is welcomed at the pearly gates, which are thrown open for him to enter. He goes through them in a daze of bliss, because it is everything he has been taught, golden streets, milk and alabaster and honey and golden harps. He wanders the streets lost in happiness, until after a while he realizes that he is all alone; he hasn’t seen anybody at all. He walks and walks, and he sees nobody. So he goes back to the gates, and asks, “Peter?” “Yes, my son?” “This really is heaven?” “Oh, yes, my son. Don’t you like it?” “Oh, it’s just wonderful! But where is everybody? Where are the prophets? Where is the Holy Family? Where are the saints?” Peter looks at him kindly. “Oh, them? They’re all down in hell, ministering to the damned. If you’d like to join them, I’ll show you the way.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“It would seem that the majority of those who see nuclear warfare and the Second Coming together are those who see Christ’s coming in glory as exclusively for them and their fellow brand of believers. They, and they only, will be raptured up to heaven, and everybody else will burn in hell. Heaven is somewhat like a restricted country club for a favoured few, and the Lord of Love is quite willing to curse everybody else.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“Of one thing only am I certain: The Second Coming is an action of Love. The judgment of God is the judgment of love, not of power plays or vindication or hate. The Second Coming is the redemption of the entire cosmos, not just one small planet.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“Those of us blessed with a good education have the responsibility to use vocabulary judiciously, not carelessly. And to bless, not curse. To affirm, not damn. In this muddled world it is not always easy to bless, but that is our calling. To curse is not only to wound another, it is to put ourselves in bondage. To bless is to be made free to bear God’s love.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“As human beings, we think in human terms; there is, for us, no other way. But the image of God within us is love. And God is a spirit.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“We separate ourselves from the stars and from God when we separate ourselves from any part of Creation.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“And the power of prayer is greater than the Pentagon. It is greater than the greed and corruption which can still conceive of a nuclear holocaust as survivable. It is greater than the bomb. It can help bring wisdom to our knowledge, wisdom which is all that will keep us from destroying ourselves with our knowledge.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“The guest at our table must be honoured thereafter; you cannot break bread with someone and then stab that person.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob

“It is, as always, paradox. God will not force us, take away our free will, demand that we do the work of love like robots. We are free not to listen, to damn our enemies rather than pray for them. God will not intervene in our self-destruction unless we are willing. We will not hear God unless we listen. We can’t just turn it all over to God; it is up to us, too. And yet, we can’t do anything until we turn it all over to God. This turning it over is not a passive sitting back—an okay, you take care of it, Pop—but an active listening to the power of love, and a willingness to love our enemies as well as our friends.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob