Quotes about Reflection

As I entered a home to make a pastoral visit, the person I came to see was sitting at a window embroidering a piece of cloth held taut on an oval hoop. She said, "Pastor, while waiting for you to come I realized what's wrong with me—I don't have a frame. My feelings, my thoughts, my activities—everything is loose and sloppy. There is no border to my life. I never know where I am. I need a frame for my life like this one I have for my embroidery.

Silence, he told us, was hugely undervalued in our American way of life as a way of being in communion with one another and with God. American Christians were conspicuously deficient. "Think of it as remedial silence." This would be three days for practicing silence. "These might be the quietest three days you will ever spend. Don't waste them."

"Faith" is not a generalized abstraction but a way of life that is expressed in persistent prayer.

Writing to explore and discover what I didn't know. Writing as a way of entering into language and letting language enter me, words connecting with words and creating what had previously been inarticulate or unnoticed or hidden. Writing as a way of paying attention. Writing as an act of prayer.

The way of Jesus cannot be imposed or mapped — it requires an active participation in following Jesus as he leads us through sometimes strange and unfamiliar territory, in circumstances that become clear only in the hesitations and questionings, in the pauses and reflections where we engage in prayerful conversation with one another and with him.

We cannot be too careful about the words we use; we start out using them and they end up using us.

The Bible is not a textbook. Nor is it a manual to be studied, mastered, and mechanically applied. Instead, I believe we should listen to the Word of God and reflect upon it like poetry till it infiltrates the soul.

In Revelation 10, John eats the book—not just reads it—he got it into his nerve endings, his reflexes, his imagination. The book he ate was the Holy Scripture. Assimilated into his worship and prayer, his imagining and writing, the book he ate was metabolized into the book he wrote.

Speaking to people does not have the same personal intensity as listening to them. The question I put to myself is not 'How many people have you spoken to about Christ this week?' but 'How many people have you listened to in Christ this week?

It is easier to find guides, someone to tell you what to do, than someone to be with you in a discerning, prayerful companionship as you work it out yourself. This is what spiritual direction is.

The good and the wise lead quiet lives.

Silence is true wisdom's best reply.