It is one of the ironies of the ministry that the very man who works in God's name is often hardest put to find time for God. The parents of Jesus lost Him at church, and they were not the last ones to lose Him there.

Excitement is not enjoyment: in calmness lies true pleasure. The most precious wines are sipped, not bolted at a swallow.

Fixing our thoughts on Jesus requires time, for true reflection cannot happen with a glance. No one can see the beauty of the country if he hurries through it on the interstate.

Turn your car into a monastery.

The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God. . . Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there's some hand to hold: if we just do the right things, someone will appreciate us and take care of us. . . Nontheism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves.

It's a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately fill up the space. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness.

Maybe the only enemy is that we don't like the way reality is *now* and therefore wish it would go away fast. but what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

The contemplative life not only does not exclude, but requires, the active life.

When you ask them what's wrong with the world, they never say there is not enough religion. They say there is not enough peace, prosperity, security, comfort, health care, or environmental responsibility. In other words, not enough human control over nature and human nature.

We want to complexify our lives. We don't have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.

De Caussade makes this matter of duty very simple, too, as he makes everything simple: "We have two duties to fulfill: we must actively seek to carry God's will into effect and passively accept all that his will sends us" (p. 73). That's all. That's it.

Aristotle had discovered only half the principle of inertia—that a body at rest remains at rest unless moved by another—but not the other half—that a body in motion remains in motion unless acted on by another.