Quotes about Reflection

A man doesn't grow old because he has lived a certain number of years. A man grows old when he deserts his ideal. The years may wrinkle his skin, but deserting his ideal wrinkles his soul.

We must go out into a desert of some kind (your backyard will do) and come into a personal experience of the awesome love of God.

Wrong thinking about God and people often begins with a debased image of ourselves.

One of my realizations in such an earthy atmosphere was that many of the burning theological issues in the church were neither burning nor theological.

The most important thing that ever happens in prayer is letting ourselves be loved by God. "Be still, and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10).

When "doing" becomes divorced from "being", pious thoughts become a poor substitute for washing dirty feet.

As a fringe benefit, practicing silent solitude enables us to sleep less and to feel more energetic. The energy expended in the impostor's exhausting pursuit of illusory happiness is now available to be focused on the things that really matter—love, friendship, and intimacy with God.

It is interesting that whenever the evangelists Mark, Luke, or John mention the apostles, they call the author of the first Gospel either Levi or Matthew. But in his own Gospel, he always refers to himself as "Matthew the publican," never wanting to forget who he was and always wanting to remember how low Jesus stooped to pick him up. We are publicans just like Matthew.

We have so theologized the passion and death of this sacred man that we no longer see the slow unraveling of His tissue, the spread of gangrene, His raging thirst.

In prayer Jesus slows us down, teaches us to count how few days we have, and gifts us with wisdom. He reveals to us that we are so caught up in what is urgent that we have overlooked what is essential. He ends our indecision and liberates us from the oppression of false deadlines and myopic vision.

Silence is not simply the absence of noise or the shutdown of communication with the outside world, but rather a process of coming to stillness.

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God's grace means. As Thomas Merton put it, "A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God.