Quote collection
497 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The life-converting experience is not the discovery that I have choices to make that determine the way I live out my existence, but the awareness that my that my existence itself is not in the center. Once I 'know' God, that is, once I experience God's love as the love in which all my human experiences are anchored, I can desire only one thing: to be in that love."
"Ministry is a very confronting service. It does not allow people to live with illusions of immortality and wholeness. It keeps reminding others that they are mortal and broken, but also that with the recognition of this condition, liberation starts."
"Through discipline, discipline is the other side of discipleship. If you want to follow Jesus, you have to have discipline."
"Prayer is the way to both the heart of God and the heart of the world - precisely because they have been joined through the suffering of Jesus Christ Praying is letting one's own heart become the place where the tears of God's children merge and become tears of hope."
"[Praying] demands that you take to the road again and again, leaving your house and looking forward to a new land for yourself and your [fellow human]. This is why praying demands poverty, that is, the readiness to live a life in which you have nothing to lose so that you always begin afresh."
"Friendship has always belonged to the core of my spiritual journey."
"Community always calls us back to solitude, and solitude always calls us to community. Community and solitude, both, are essential elements of ministry and witnessing."
"If you want to know anything about community, you have to realize that the contemplative side is essential. Community without retreating and quiet time never survives."
"Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going?-are not questions with an answer but questions that open us up to new questions which lead us deeper into the unshakeable mystery of existence."
"I speak of God's love and grace and redemption and freedom, but when I say "in the context of this community," it is heard differently. To be with people so obviously broken, so obviously handicapped, and here to discover real joy and peace - that makes the Word of God come alive."
"Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. The question is not 'How am I to find God?' but 'How am I to let myself be found by him?' The question is not 'How am I to love God?' but 'How am I to let myself be loved by God?'"
"In 1970 I felt so lonely that I could not give; now I feel so joyful that giving seems easy. I hope that the day will come when the memory of my present joy will give me the strength to keep giving even when loneliness gnaws at my heart."
"[The Return of the Prodigal book] came out of my emotional and spiritual journey during the four months I was gone from Daybreak because of depression."
"Jesus was a revolutionary, who did not become an extremist, since he did not offer an ideology, but Himself. He was also a mystic, who did not use his intimate relationship with God to avoid the social evils of his time, but shocked his milieu to the point of being executed as a rebel. In this sense he also remains for nuclear man the way to liberation and freedom."
"People who pray stand receptive before the world. They no longer grab but caress, they no longer bite but kiss, they no longer examine but admire."
"I am learning that the best cure for hypocrisy is community. Hypocrisy is not so much the result of not living what I preach but much more of not confessing my inability to fully live up to my own words."
"In the face of the oppressed I recognize my own face, and in the hands of the oppressor I recognize my own hands. Their flesh is my flesh, their blood is my blood, their pain is my pain, their smile is my smile."
"It is to this silence [contemplative prayer] that we all are called."
"In our production-oriented society, being busy, having an occupation, has become one of the main ways, if not the main way, of identifying ourselves. Without an occupation, not just our economic security but our very identity is endangered."
"In community, where you have all the affection you could ever dream of, you feel that there is a place where even community cannot reach. That's a very important experience. In that loneliness, which is like a dark night of the soul, you learn that God is greater than community."