Prayer can change…
Prayer can truly change your life. For it turns your attention away from yourself and directs your mind and your heart toward the Lord.
–Saint John Paul (1920-2005)
Spirituality is vital…
Sometimes people get the mistaken notion that spirituality is a separate department of life, the penthouse of existence. But rightly understood, it is a vital awareness that pervades all realms of our being.
–David Stendl-Rast (1926-
The mystery of repentance…
The mystery of repentance is the greatest and most blessed mystery, which prepares us perfectly beforehand for Heaven…There is no sin on earth which is unforgivable for the person who will repent, and for the God of love Who receives him.
–Elder Ephraim of Philotheou (1927-
One step at a time…
By taking one small step at a time, and by not thinking that in one big step we are going to get any place, we can walk straight to the Kingdom of Heaven — and there is no reason for any of us to fall away from that.
–Seraphim Rose (1934-1982)
Spiritual life means…
Spiritual life does not mean being in the clouds while saying the Jesus Prayer or going through the various motions. It means discovering the laws of this spiritual life as they apply to one’s own position, one’s situation. This comes over the years by attentive reading of the Holy Fathers with a notebook, writing down those passages which seem most significant to us, studying them, finding how they apply to us, and, if need be, revising earlier views of them as we get a little deeper into them, finding what one Father says about something, what a second Father says about the same thing, and so on.
–Seraphim Rose (1934-1982)
That is enlightenment…
“The more you pray,” Angela of Foligno wrote, “the more you will be enlightened.” But I knew better: The statement, as it stands, is both true and false. When we turn God into a vending machine, when we pray to “get” things rather than to get God — there is no “enlightenment” in that. When prayer is a journey into the mind and heart of God, into the nature of life, into the shaping of a holy heart, then it is necessarily enlightening. We come to understand ourselves: our fears, our darkness, our struggles, our resistance. Then we are faced with choice. That is enlightenment.
–Joan Chittester (1936-
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