Joan D. Chittister Quotes

Nothing weighs more heavily on age than time. Nothing has more meaning ... Now time becomes, with a kind of ruthless honesty, what it has always been: life's most precious commodity. The only difference is that, finally, we know it.

We fail to move beyond what is safe, we abandon our dreams in favor of what is sure rather than strive for what is best for us.

Humble people walk comfortably in every group. No one is either too beneath them or too above them for their own sense of well-being. They are who they are, people with as much to give as to get, and they know it. And because they're at ease with themselves, they can afford to be open with others... Having discovered who we are and having opened ourselves to life and having learned to be comfortable with it, we know that God is working in us. We know, most of all, that whatever happens we have nothing to fear... we are free of the false hopes and false faces and false needs that once held us down. We can fly now. Let all the others scratch and grapple for the plastic copy of life. We have found the real thing.

Precisely because of the greatness of God, we don't have to be great at all. Just in awe.

Hope is what sits by the window and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there isn't an ounce of proof in tonight's black, black sky that it can possible come.

The moment a woman comes home to herself, the moment she knows that she has become a person of influence, an artist of her life, a sculptor of her universe, a person with rights and responsibilities who is respected and recognized, the resurrection of the world begins.

Old age tells us that we ourselves have failed often, have never really done anything completely right, have never truly been perfect - anad that is completely all right. We are who we are - and so is everyone else.

We each should have 2 pockets: in 1 the message, 'I am dust & ashes;' in the other, 'For me the universe was made.'

Failure is the foundation of truth. It teaches us what isn't true, and that is a great beginning. To fear failure is to fear the possibility of truth.

Indeed, the big decisions in life are hardly ever clear - except for one. And that one is piercingly clear: life is a series of dilemmas, of options, of conundrums, of possibilities taken and not taken. Negotiating these moments well is of the essence of the life well lived.

Compassion is not sympathy. Compassion is mercy. It is a commitment to take responsibility for the suffering of others.

Two ideas militate against our consciously contributing to a better world. The idea that we can do everything or the conclusion that we can do nothing to make this globe a better place to live are both temptations of the most insidious form. One leads to arrogance; the other to despair.

Why do people think the spiritual life demands withdrawal from the ordinary? Because they've been taught, at least by implication, that the physical is a block to the spiritual. When we assume that the spiritual, unlike the physical, is impervious to corrosion, then we assume that all things material are not to be honored. But the fact of the matter is, the material is the vehicle of the spiritual.

"Ideals are like stars," Carl Schurz wrote. "You will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like seafarers on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny." Ideals do not determine what we do to make a living in life; They govern what we become as we do it.

Life always comes out of death. The present rises from the ashes of the past. The future is always possible for those who are willing to re-create it.

Superficial people are those who simply go along without a question in the world-asking nothing, troubled by nothing, examining nothing. Whatever people around them do, they do, too. That's a sad and plastic life-routine and comfortable, maybe, but still sad.

Compassion is the ability to understand how difficult it is for people to be the best of what they want to be at all times.

There is a built-in danger in old age which, if we give in to it, makes aging one of the most difficult periods of life, rather than one of the most satisfying - which it should be. Tye danger of old age is that we may start acting old.

But one thing I do know: life and time are ghosted creatures for us all. They belong to us - and are not ours at the same time.

War within ourselves is always a prelude to war outside ourselves. All war starts within our own hearts. When our egos are inflated or our desires insatiable, we go to war with the other for the sad joy of maintaining our one-dimensional worlds.

God is indeed everywhere in everything at all times - in the abstruse as well as the luminous, whether we ourselves can see the hand of God in this moment or not.

For centuries the church has confronted the human community with role models of greatness. We call them saints when what we really often mean to say is 'icon,' 'star,' 'hero,' ones so possessed by an internal vision of divine goodness that they give us a glimpse of the face of God in the center of the human. They give us a taste of the possibilities of greatness in ourselves.

A life of value is not a series of great things well done; it is a series of small things consciously done.

Prayer that is regular confounds both self-importance and the wiles of the world. It is so easy for good people to confuse their own work with the work of creation. It is so easy to come to believe that what we do is so much more important than what we are. It is so easy to simply get too busy to grow. It is so easy to commit ourselves to this century's demand for product and action until the product consumes us and the actions exhaust us and we can no longer even remember why we set out to do them in the first place.

We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. "One's friends," George Santayana wrote, "are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

Solitude is not a way of running away from life ... from our feelings. On the contrary. This is the time we sort them out, air them, get over them, and go on without the burden of yesterday.

It is not our job to work miracles, but it is our task to try.

If anything diminishes a person, it is the cancer of constant complaining.

Life is a thing of many stages and moving parts. What we do with ease at one time of life we can hardly manage at another. What we could not fathom doing when we were young, we find great joy in when we are old. Like the seasons through which we move, life itself is a never-ending series of harvests, a different fruit for every time.

Try saying this silently to everyone and everything you see for thirty days and see what happens to your own soul: I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future.

Mystery is what happens to us when we allow life to evolve rather than having to make it happen all the time. It is the strange knock at the door, the sudden sight of an unceremoniously blooming flower, an afternoon in the yard, a day of riding the midtown bus. Just to see. Just to notice. Just to be there.

Prophets are those who take life as it is and expand it. They refuse to shrink a vision of tomorrow to the boundaries of yesterday.

Prayer can be an easy substitute for real spirituality. It would be impossible to have spirituality without prayer, of course, but it is certainly possible to pray without having a spirituality at all. How do you know? 'Am I becoming kinder?' is a good place to start.

My limitations make space for the gifts of other people. Without the grace of our limitations we would be isolated, dry, and insufferable creatures indeed.

Work is not slavery, then. Work is creativity. It is the expression of ourselves that no one else can duplicate.

we try so hard to avoid the rest of the year: how do we deal with the God of darkness as well as the Giver of light?

Too many times we insist on loving people the way we want to love them instead of the way they need to be loved.

The spiritual task of life is to feed hope. Hope is not something to be found outside of us. It lies in the spiritual life we cultivate within. The whole purpose of wrestling with life is to be transformed into the self we are meant to become, to step out of the confines of our false securities and allow our creating God to go on creating. In us.

Friendship is the call out of isolation and selfishness in order to teach me how to love and how to serve. But without stability, friendship - real soul-searing friendship, the kind that makes us choose between domination and infatuation and possessiveness and dependence for growth and freedom and depth and responsibility and self-knowledge - is impossible.
Stability is what enables us, in other words, to live totally in God and totally for others.

Beauty scatters the seeds of hope in us.

It is precisely women's experience of God that this world lacks. A world that does not nurture its weakest, does not know God the birthing mother. A world that does not preserve the planet, does not know God the creator. A world that does not honor the spirit of compassion, does not know God the spirit. God the lawgiver, God the judge, God the omnipotent being have consumed Western spirituality and, in the end, shriveled its heart.

The Christmas season is a gift in itself. It releases us from the priorities of ordinary time and gives us the right to party more and pray more and love more.

It is what we do routinely, not what we do rarely, that delineates the character of a person.

Hope grows in us, despite our moments of darkness, regardless of our regular bouts of depression.

It is a pathetic moment in the history of the human condition when the outside world tells us who and what we are - and we start to believe it ourselves. Then, bent over from the weight of the negativity, we start to wither on the outside ...

The symbolic evidence of women's invisibility in the human race is most clear perhaps in her suppression, her camouflage, her negation even in language. Women are subsumed, excised, erased by male pronouns, by male terminology, by male prayers about brotherhood and brethren, even and always by exclusively male images of God. The tradition that will call God spirit, rock, key door, wind, and bird will never ever call God mother. So much for the creative womb of God; so much for "I am who am." So much for "Let us make human beings in our own image, male and female, let us make them." What kind of spirituality is that? To take the position that using two pronouns for the human race is not important in a culture that has thirty words for car, multiple words for flowers, and dozens of words for dog breeds is to say that women are not important.

Stability of heart - commitment to the life of the soul, faithfulness to the community, perseverance in the search for God - is the mooring that holds us fast when the night of the soul is at its deepest dark, and the noontime sun sears the spirit. When

One of the functions of leadership is to lead, and weak managers may simply check and check and check with others because they are not capable of leading when it is required of them to lead. Benedict says that in matters of importance the abbot or prioress is to ask everyone in the community, 'starting with the youngest,' and then the abbot or prioress is to 'do what seems best.

Never confuse desire with vision. Desire has to do with what we want. Vision has to do with what we need.

Life is the ability to start over again.

Blind obedience is itself an abuse of human morality. It is a misuse of the human soul in the name of religious commitment. It is a sin against individual conscience. It makes moral children of the adults from whom moral agency is required. It makes a vow, which is meant to require religious figures to listen always to the law of God, beholden first to the laws of very human organizations in the person of very human authorities. It is a law that isn't even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality.

Every dimension of life, its gains and its losses, are reason for celebration because each of them brings us closer to wisdom and fullness of understanding.

Longing is a compass that guides us through life. We may never get what we really want, that's true, but every step along the way will be determined by it.

Was greed that broke Wall Street, not the lack of financial algorithms.

Only ideas keep ideas flowing. When we close our minds to what is new, simply because we decide not to bother with it, we close our minds to our responsibility to ourselves - and to others - to keep on growing.

Women learn in such a system that, though they are usually tolerated in life and often loved, they are seldom respected for themselves, for their opinions, for their talents, for their perspectives. The life of a woman shrivels under the weight of an unnatural deference and lost development. Women live knowing that inside themselves is a capped well, a fount of untapped treasure, a person gone to waste. The spiritual life of a woman never knows total maturation in an environment that never seeks her opinions, her interpretations, her insights, and her experience of God. Whatever ministry she was born to perform never comes to light, is lost to the church, dies on the vines that were never cultivated.

All of us wrestle with the angels of our inabilities all the time. We live in fear that our incapacities will be exposed. We posture and evaluate and assess and criticize mercilessly.

Imagination begins when it' s raining too hard to go out and play and you become really absorbed in something you would never have thought of doing had the sun come out as usual. In which case, thank God for the rain.

When I know and accept myself-all my strengths and all my limitations- I am immediately respectful of everyone else because I know they have something beautiful within them that I do not have.

I learned that the Italians are right. It isn't what happens to us that counts. It's what we do with what happens to us that makes all the difference

Contemplation is a very dangerous activity. It not only brings us face to face with God. It brings us, as well, face to face with the world, face to face with the self. And then, of course, something must be done. Nothing stays the same once we have found the God within ... . We carry the world in our hearts: the oppression of all peoples, the suffering of our friends, the burdens of our enemies, the raping of the Earth, the hunger of the starving, the joy of every laughing child.

We are each called to go through life reclaiming the planet an inch at a time until the Garden of Eden grows green again.

We have learned that the things we amassed to prove to ourselves how valuable, how important, how successful we were, didn't prove it at all. In fact, they have very little to do with it. It's what's inside of us, not what's outside of us that counts.

Silence is a frightening thing. Silences leaves us at the mercy of the noise within us. We hear the fears that need to be faced. We hear, then, the angers that need to be cooled. We hear the emptiness that needs to be filled. We hear the cries for humility and reconciliation and centeredness. We hear ambition and arrogance and attitudes of uncaring awash in the shallows of the soul. Silence demands answers. Silence invites us to depth. Silence heals what hoarding and running will not touch.

Awareness of the sacred in life is what holds our world together, and the lack of awareness of the sacred is what is tearing it apart.

Assuming that tomorrow will be the same as today is poor preparation for living. It equips us only for disappointment or, more likely, for shock. To live well, to be mentally healthy, we must learn to realize that life is a work in process.

To insist on living until we die may be one of life's greatest virtues.

Today we live in a world that judges its achievements by speed and busyness. ... We are so busy making things happen that we have little time left to think about the value of what is happening. We urgently need people who concentrate on the meaning of life rather than simply the speed.

I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.

Life is a series of lessons, some of them obvious, some of them not. We learn as we go that dreams end, that plans get changed, that promises get broken, that our idols disappoint us.

Faith isn't faith until it's all we have to hold on to and knowledge fails us. When we pray for faith, we automatically pray for darkness. Think about it.

for beginners. After that, you can set out for

Everywhere I looked, hope existed - but only as some kind of green shoot in the midst of struggle. It was a theological concept, not a spiritual practice. Hope, I began to realize, was not a state of life. It was at best a gift of life.

The liturgical year is the year that sets out to attune the life of the Christian to the life of Jesus, the Christ. It proposes, year after year, to immerse us over and over again into the sense and substance of the Christian life until, eventually we become what we say we are - followers of Jesus all the way to the heart of God

To simply withdraw from the arena of ideas, from public discourse on public issues, from the value formation of the young - to shrug our shoulders and say, "I don't know" or, worse, "I don't care about those things anymore" - is to abandon the young to the mercy of their own ideas without the benefit of experience to guide them.

Persistence may not solve everything - at least in our lifetime - but it is truer to the meaning of life for us to wait for another plowing, another seeding, another harvest, then not.

We have made money our god and called it the good life. We have trained our children to go for jobs hat bring the quickest corporate advancements at the highest financial levels. We have taught them careerism but not ministry and wonder why ministers are going out of fashion. We fear coddling the poor with food stamps while we call tax breaks for the rich business incentives. We make human community the responsibility of government institutions while homelessness, hunger, and drugs seep from the centers of our cities like poison from open sores for which we do not seek either the cause or the cure. We have created a bare and sterile world of strangers where exploitation is a necessary virtue. We have reduced life to the lowest of values so that the people who have much will not face the prospect of having less.
Underlying all of it, we have made women the litter bearers of a society where disadvantage clings to the bottom of the institutional ladder and men funnel to the top, where men are privileged and women are conscripted for the comfort of the human race. We define women as essential to the development of the home but unnecessary to the development of society. We make them poor and render them powerless and shuttle them from man to man. We sell their bodies and question the value of their souls. We call them unique and say they have special natures, which we then ignore in their specialness. We decide that what is true of men is true of women and then say that women

A hard heart makes for hard judgments; a compassionate heart understands the humanity of the one we presume to judge.

In scripture God brings the animals to the human for naming. In that simple act the human is brought to recognize the particular personality and worth of each living creature. Too bad we forget so often.

Sometimes we exclude things in ourselves in order to be like everybody else around us-our ethnicity, our social backgrounds, our ideas. What kind of world is it that will not allow me to be myself, and is it really good for me to be there? What part of me will die a slow death if I stay?

Prophets are so dangerous because they cry in season and out of season, politely and impolitely, loud and long.

No one finds time for prayer. You either take time for it or you don't get it.

June is the time for being in the world in new ways, for throwing off the cold and dark spots of life.

Happiness does not come quickly. It is not conferred by any single event, however exciting or comforting or satisfying the event may be. It cannot be purchased, whatever the allure of the next, the newest, the brightest, the best. Happiness, like Carl Sandburg's fog, "comes on little cat feet," often silently, often without our knowing it, too often without our noticing.

We talk religion in a world that worships the bread but does not distribute it, that practices ritual rather than righteousness, that confesses but does not repent.

LIKE A GREAT WATERWHEEL, THE LITURGICAL YEAR goes on relentlessly irrigating our souls, softening the ground of our hearts, nourishing the soil of our lives until the seed of the Word of God itself begins to grow in us, comes to fruit in us, ripens in us the spiritual journey of a lifetime.

Life is an exercise in the development of feeling. When we repress feelings, we become sour and judgmental. When we live awash in great feeling over small things, we become jaded long before we have even begun to enjoy. When feelings are in balance they sweeten long days and great distances with gratitude and hope.

To be contemplative we must remove the clutter from our lives, surround ourselves with beauty, and consciously, relentlessly, persistently, give clutter away until the tiny world for which we ourselves are responsible begins to reflect the raw beauty that is God.

Our role in life is to bring the light of our own souls to the dim places around us.

What happens to the spiritual life of a young girl who is made to understand, consciously or subconsciously, that she has no place in the spiritual domain except as a consumer of someone else's God?

life is the vessel we have been given in order to find out what life is really meant to be about.

We cannot expect life to be perfect. But we can expect to see life come from death. We can expect to see morning after night. We can expect that acceptance of the struggle will give rise to the victory over self.

Temptations are part of life, part of growing up. We grapple with them often - in some instances for our lifetime - before we come to realize that it is not so much the victory as it is the struggle that is holy.

Better to walk through life simply and without masks, than to lose ourselves in the pursuit of identities that are purely cosmetic and commercial. Then, at least, we will be known for what we are rather than for what we are not.

Lent is the time for trimming the soul and scrapping the sludge off a life turned slipshod. Lent is about taking stock of time, even religious time. Lent is about exercising the control that enables us to say no to ourselves so that when life turns hard of its own accord we have the stamina to yes to its twists and turns with faith and hope. Lent is the time to make new efforts to be what we say we want to be.

Hospitality means we take people into the space that is our lives and our minds and our hearts and our work and our efforts. Hospitality is the way we come out of ourselves. It is the first step towards dismantling the barriers of the world. Hospitality is the way we turn a prejudiced world around, one heart at a time.

Prayer restores the soul that is dry and dulled by years of trying to create a world that never completely comes.

Don't worry about wearing the sign; be the sign. You don't have to wear a sandwich board saying, "I am religious and spiritual and know what you should do." You do have to be the best of the mystical presence that your tradition brings. Certainly in Christianity, that means that you begin to go through life putting on the mind of Jesus, trying to see the world as Jesus saw the world.

We are living in a period of commerical globalization. What we really need is spiritual globalization.

"When we do not know what harbor we are making for," the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, "no wind is the right wind." Persons have vision only when they have a dream that drives them on.