Chasing Francis Quotes

“Beauty can break a heart and make it think about something more spiritual than the mindless routine we go through day after day to get by. Francis was a singer, a poet, an actor. He knew that the imagination was a stealth way into people's souls, a way to get all of us to think about God. For him, beauty was its own apologetic. That's why a church should care about the arts. They inspire all of us to think about the eternal.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale

“All of us are meaning-seekers. We approach every painting, novel, film, symphony, or ballet unconsciously hoping it will move us one step further on the journey toward answering the question ‘Why am I here?’ People living in the postmodern world, however, are faced with an excruciating dilemma. Their hearts long to find ultimate meaning, while at the same time their critical minds do not believe it exists. We are homesick, but have no home. So we turn to the arts and aesthetics to satisfy our thirst for the Absolute. But if we want to find our true meaning in life, our search cannot end there. Art or beauty is not the destination; it is a signpost pointing toward our desired destination.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“Francis taught me that if we spent less time worrying about how to share our faith with someone on an airplane and more time thinking about how to live radically generous lives, more people would start taking our message seriously.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale

“There is a law in physics that applies to the soul. No two objects can occupy the same space at the same time; one thing must displace another. If your heart’s crammed tight with material things and a thirst for wealth, there’s no space left for God. Francis wanted a void in his life that could only be filled with Jesus. Poverty wasn’t a burden for him — it was a pathway to spiritual freedom.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“First, if Francis were around today, he'd say our church community relies too much on words to tell others about our faith. For Francis, the gathered community was as potent a form of witness as words. He was convinced that how we live together is what attracts people to faith.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale

“When the church first began, it was a pacifistic movement known for its outspoken criticism of any form of bloodshed or violence. After Constantine legalized Christianity, ‘just war’ theory emerged, which meant that Christians could participate in wars if certain criteria were satisfied. By the year 1100, Christians were launching Crusades and telling the faithful that killing Muslims would secure them a spot in heaven! What happened? Somewhere along the way we forgot that Jesus intended the Sermon on the Mount to be an actual, concrete program for living. He wanted us to actually live it, not just admire it as a nice but unrealistic ideal. I mean, what would happen if Christians dedicated themselves to peacemaking with the same discipline and focus that armies do for war? What difference could it make? We have to revisit the early church’s teachings about reconciliation, peacemaking, and the Sermon on the Mount and ask ourselves if we’re living them out or tiptoeing around them.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“The artist’s job is to reveal the real nature of things through picture or story or song, to show the rest of us what is really there when we are content with the misleading surface of things. As Pope John Paul II has written, “Artists are constantly in search of the hidden meaning of things, and their torment is to succeed in expressing the world of the ineffable.” Through their work, in the words of the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, “the knowledge of God can be better revealed and the preaching of the Gospel can become clearer to the human mind.” DAVID MILLS, “Imaginative Orthodoxy: The Art of Telling the Christian Story,” Touchstone”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“What if, now and then, we put the drums and guitars away, turned off the projectors, shut down the sound system, and waited quietly for God to emerge from the woods? Do we have enough faith to believe he’d appear to us as a community?”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“Father Alexander Schmemann is an Orthodox scholar who wrote a book called For the Life of the World. He says the liturgy is a journey that proceeds from the kingdom of this world into a brief encounter with the kingdom of God, and then back out again to bear witness to it.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“Beauty can break a heart and make it think about something more spiritual than the mindless routine we go through day after day to get by.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“I'm beginning to see that there's a difference between art that trusts beauty's simple power to point people to God and Christian art that's consciously propagandistic. My Uncle Kenny, with whom I spent most of my time in Italy, said something profound--that you can make art about the Light, or you can make art that shows what the Light reveals about the world.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale

“A peace lover is someone who enjoys the absence of conflict, but a peacemaker is someone who is proactively engaged in works of reconciliation in every sphere of life, from the personal to the global. That”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“I struggled to find words to explain why I’d lost my composure, but as I was about to speak, Thomas squeezed my hand. “Not to worry; sometimes prayers are wet,” he said.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“It’s like what Gandhi said: “The world is so hungry for God that God could only come as a piece of bread. We so long for joy that God even risked coming into the world in the form of intoxication, that risky thing called wine.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“All ministry begins at the ragged edges of our own pain,”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“Unlike most preachers in the medieval era, Francis was conflicted and sometimes even hostile toward academics and theologians. He believed that book knowledge was like material possessions — too much of it occasioned pride and got in the way of simple devotion to Jesus. (In The Last Christian, Adolf Holl imagined Francis meeting Augustine, Barth, Aquinas, and Bultmann in heaven for the first time and asking them what they would be without their books. When they can’t come up with an answer, Francis says, “Without your books perhaps you might have become Christians” [p. 63].) When Francis preached, he avoided theological arguments and polemics like the plague. Rather, his preaching was more autobiographical than intellectual, more performative than argumentative, more spontaneous than scripted, more genuine than contrived, more about transformation than about information. The endgame was to help his listeners find peace, reconciliation, and shalom with God, themselves, others, and creation. As Francis said, “We have been called to heal wounds, to unite what has fallen apart, and to bring home those who have lost their way.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“Think of it this way,” he continued. “A pilgrimage is a way of praying with your feet. You go on a pilgrimage because you know there’s something missing inside your soul, and the only way you can find it is to go to sacred places, places where God made himself known to others. In sacred places, something gets done to you that you’ve been unable to do for yourself.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible. SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“But there is an old Rwandan proverb: ‘He who seeks vengeance is like a man who drinks poison, hoping that it will kill his enemy,’ ” Emmanuel said, a fleeting smile appearing”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“the object of all great art is beauty, and it makes us nostalgic for God. Whether we consider ourselves people of faith or not, art arouses in us what the pope calls a ‘universal desire for redemption.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“Unlike animals, we’re endowed with reason. That gift comes with a God-given responsibility to care for creation. It’s pretty obvious that Christians have dropped this ball in a really big way.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“(In Catholic universities, a doctorate in theology is not referred to as a PhD but as an STD, Doctor of Sacred Theology. It’s an unfortunate name for a degree. It must be hard for someone’s mother to say, “I’m so proud of my little boy. He went to seminary and got an STD.”)”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“Now I see the Story more like a painting filled with glory, poetry, and even blurry lines.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“So you have failed? You cannot fail. You have not failed; you have gained experience. Forward! SAINT JOSEMARíA ESCRIVá”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“Or maybe it was the Eucharist itself — the host mingling with my brokenness, dissolving in saliva, coming to rest in the shallows of my heart’s confusion. Kneeling at the altar, I was overwhelmed by the sense that my fragmented and discontinuous life might actually make sense.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“I’d passed through a border into the depths and found I could still breathe there.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“passed through a border into the depths and found I could still breathe there.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“You once said, “Above all the grace and the gifts that Christ gives to his beloved is that of overcoming self.” My self could use a little overcoming.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“The two of them had a profound love for each other, but it never crossed the border into being romantic. It was more mystical and sublime. They were soul mates who wanted to help each other grow in their common love for Jesus; their relationship was less important than their calling. Franciscan historians say Clare was Francis’s dearest friend,” he said.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“It was this: the object of all great art is beauty, and it makes us nostalgic for God. Whether we consider ourselves people of faith or not, art arouses in us what the pope calls a ‘universal desire for redemption.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale