67 Quotes About Spiritual-disciplines
"The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to His Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God's love for us that He not only gives us His Word but also lends us His ear. So it is His work that we do for our brother and sister when we learn to listen to them."
"Prayer in Benedictine spirituality is not an interruption of our busy lives nor is it a higher act. Prayer is the filter through which we learn, if we listen hard enough, to see our world aright and anew and without which we live life with souls that are deaf and dumb and blind."
"It is not great faith we need so much as faith in a great God." - Hudson Taylor"
"The balance of truth regarding solidarity and corporate prayer in the Bible seems to be that no-one can engage in public prayer who does not know what it is to engage with God in private. But the man or woman who has begun to pray in private will gravitate to the fellowship of praying people in the church."
"As I grow in my prayer life, my soul becomes a delightfully cluttered attic, filled with random graces that do not all fit together in some perfectly ordered system. The purpose of some graces will be immediately apparent in my life, but the meaning of others might evade me for a while. I must resist the temptation to clean up the messiness of my graces and must not try to come up with immediate answers for the questions that arise from them."
"The story is told of Mother Theresa that when an interviewer asked her. "What do you say when you pray?" she answered, "I listen." The reporters paused a moment, then asked, "Then what does God say?" and she replied, "He listens." It is hard to imagine a more succinct way to get at the intimacy of contemplative prayer."
"Because we don't know yet how to act without an outer reason, we discover that we don't know what to do with ourselves, and then we begin to be increasingly bored. So first of all, you must learn to sit with yourselves and face boredom, drawing all the possible conclusions."
"But if roteness is a danger, it is also the way liturgy works. When you don't have to think all the time about what words you are going to say next, you are free to fully enter into the act of praying; you are free to participate in the life of God."
"Sure, sometimes it is great when, in prayer, we can express to God just what we feel; but better still when, in the act of praying, our feelings change. Liturgy is not, in the end, open to our emotional whims. it re-points the person praying, taking him somewhere else."