Grace, Page: Quotes, Quote Topic
God has something unique to say to each one of us. God desires to speak to our hearts words of love and forgiveness or consolation or encouragement, or words that invite us to share more deeply in his life. He may want to say to us words of challenge and inspiration that call us to live more generously and compassionately with and with love to those around us… I believe [these] are words that God desires to speak to our hearts:
You are loved.
You are gifted.
You are forgiven.
You are called.
You are invited.
You are sent.
–Gerald M. Fagin (1938-2012)
Page: Quotes, Quote Topic, Spiritual (life)
Dearly Beloved, each word and deed of Our Saviour Jesus Christ is for us a lesson in virtue and piety. For this end also did He assume our nature, so that every man and every woman, contemplating as in a picture the practice of all virtue and piety, might strive with all their hearts to imitate His example. For this He bore our body, so that as far as we could we might repeat within us the manner of His life. And so therefore, when you hear mention of some word or deed of His, take care not to receive it simply as something that incidentally happened, but raise your mind upwards towards the sublimity of what He is teaching, and strive to see what has been mystically handed down to us.
–Saint Basil the Great (330-379)
Page: Quotes, Quote Topic, Silence
Silence is the beginning of peace. It is in silence that we learn that there is more to life than life seems to offer. There is beauty and truth and vision wider than the present and deeper than the past that only silence can discover… Noise protects us from confronting ourselves, but silence speaks the language of the heart.
–Joan Chittester, (1936-
Page: Quotes, Quote Topic, Silence
Silence is the discipline by which the inner fire of God is tended and kept. –Henri Nouwen (1932–1996)
Page: Quotes, Prayer (how), Quote Topic, Silence
Being useless and silent in the presence of God belongs to the core of all prayer. In the beginning, we often hear our own unruly inner noises more loudly than God’s voice. This is at times very hard to tolerate. But slowly, very slowly, we discover that the silent time makes us quiet and deepens our awareness of ourselves and God. Then, very soon, we start to miss these moments when we are deprived of them, and before we are fully aware of it, an inner momentum has developed that draws us more and more into silence and closer to that still point where God speaks to us.
–Henri Nouwen (1932–1996)
Page: Quotes, Prayer (what), Prayer (why), Quote Topic
Prayer and meditation are as necessary for the life of the spirit as fresh air, food, and sunlight are for the body. If we think of prayer as talking to God, with or without words, our own or those of others, then we can think of meditation as listening to God — an attitude of open, silent receptiveness.
–Molly Monahan (20th Century)
