Joan D. Chittister Quotes & Sayings

Living well has something to do with the spirituality of wholeheartedness, of seeing life more as a grace than as a penance, as time to be lived with eager expectation of its goodness, not in dread of its challenges. — Joan D. Chittister

But we are here to depart from this world as finished as we can possibly become. — Joan D. Chittister

Friendship is the call out of isolation and selfishness in order to teach me how to love and how to serve. But without stability, friendship - real soul-searing friendship, the kind that makes us choose between domination and infatuation and possessiveness and dependence for growth and freedom and depth and responsibility and self-knowledge - is impossible.
Stability is what enables us, in other words, to live totally in God and totally for others. — Joan D. Chittister

Benedictine spirituality, after all,
is life lived to the hilt.
It is a life of concentration
on life's ordinary dimensions.
It is an attempt to do
the ordinary things of life
extraordinarily well. — Joan D. Chittister

The spiritual response is too often a simplistic one: we abandon God or we blame God for abandoning us. — Joan D. Chittister

But one thing I do know: life and time are ghosted creatures for us all. They belong to us - and are not ours at the same time. — Joan D. Chittister

We talk religion in a world that worships the bread but does not distribute it, that practices ritual rather than righteousness, that confesses but does not repent. — Joan D. Chittister

I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don't? Because you don't want any tax money to go there. That's not pro-life. That's pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is. — Joan D. Chittister

God is indeed everywhere in everything at all times - in the abstruse as well as the luminous, whether we ourselves can see the hand of God in this moment or not. — Joan D. Chittister

for beginners. After that, you can set out for — Joan D. Chittister

When I know and accept myself-all my strengths and all my limitations- I am immediately respectful of everyone else because I know they have something beautiful within them that I do not have. — Joan D. Chittister

Hope grows in us, despite our moments of darkness, regardless of our regular bouts of depression. — Joan D. Chittister

We don't change as we get older - we just get to be more of what we've always been. — Joan D. Chittister

If life is really for the living, then the trick to living well is to learn to live it fully, to soak it up, to revel in it. — Joan D. Chittister

Everywhere I looked, hope existed - but only as some kind of green shoot in the midst of struggle. It was a theological concept, not a spiritual practice. Hope, I began to realize, was not a state of life. It was at best a gift of life. — Joan D. Chittister

To be contemplative we must remove the clutter from our lives, surround ourselves with beauty, and consciously, relentlessly, persistently, give clutter away until the tiny world for which we ourselves are responsible begins to reflect the raw beauty that is God. — Joan D. Chittister

Too many times we insist on loving people the way we want to love them instead of the way they need to be loved. — Joan D. Chittister

There is always new life trying to emerge in each of us. Too often we ignore the signs of resurrection and cling to part of life that have died for us. — Joan D. Chittister

Grief is a sign that we loved something more than ourselves ... Grief makes us worthy to suffer with the rest of the world. — Joan D. Chittister

Where will Christian feminists go for spiritual nourishment if the church itself fails to reflect the feminism of Jesus? If tradition becomes a reason for churches, for synagogues, for mosques to refuse to change in the light of new insights and understandings, on what grounds can we expect change from other institutions? — Joan D. Chittister

Freedom, in childhood, may be the right to be totally self-centered. ... But freedom in old age is the ability to be the best of the self I have developed during all those years. — Joan D. Chittister

The vision of a culture lies in what becomes its major institutions, in what it remembers as its most impacting events, in who it sees as its heroes. — Joan D. Chittister

Silence is a frightening thing. Silences leaves us at the mercy of the noise within us. We hear the fears that need to be faced. We hear, then, the angers that need to be cooled. We hear the emptiness that needs to be filled. We hear the cries for humility and reconciliation and centeredness. We hear ambition and arrogance and attitudes of uncaring awash in the shallows of the soul. Silence demands answers. Silence invites us to depth. Silence heals what hoarding and running will not touch. — Joan D. Chittister

The symbolic evidence of women's invisibility in the human race is most clear perhaps in her suppression, her camouflage, her negation even in language. Women are subsumed, excised, erased by male pronouns, by male terminology, by male prayers about brotherhood and brethren, even and always by exclusively male images of God. The tradition that will call God spirit, rock, key door, wind, and bird will never ever call God mother. So much for the creative womb of God; so much for "I am who am." So much for "Let us make human beings in our own image, male and female, let us make them." What kind of spirituality is that? To take the position that using two pronouns for the human race is not important in a culture that has thirty words for car, multiple words for flowers, and dozens of words for dog breeds is to say that women are not important. — Joan D. Chittister

Memory is not about what went on in the past, it is about what is going on inside us right this moment. ... It is made up of the stuff of life in the process of becoming the grist of the soul. — Joan D. Chittister

Getting to know ourselves and learning to control ourselves are the two great tasks of life. Don't make up strange and exotic 'penances.' Simply say no to yourself once a day, and you will be on the road to sanctity for the rest of your life. — Joan D. Chittister

Temptations are part of life, part of growing up. We grapple with them often - in some instances for our lifetime - before we come to realize that it is not so much the victory as it is the struggle that is holy. — Joan D. Chittister

In community we work out our connectedness to God, to one another and to ourselves ... In human relationships I learn that theory is no substitute for love. It is easy to talk about the love of GOD; it is another thing to practice it — Joan D. Chittister

A hard heart makes for hard judgments; a compassionate heart understands the humanity of the one we presume to judge. — Joan D. Chittister

To be a presence of perpetual thanksgiving may be the ultimate goal of life. The thankful person is the one for whom life is simply one long exercise in the sacred. — Joan D. Chittister

An authentic spirituality does not cater to culture; it calls culture to accountability. — Joan D. Chittister

Find the thing that stirs your heart and make room for it — Joan D. Chittister

The spiritual task of life is to feed hope. Hope is not something to be found outside of us. It lies in the spiritual life we cultivate within. The whole purpose of wrestling with life is to be transformed into the self we are meant to become, to step out of the confines of our false securities and allow our creating God to go on creating. In us. — Joan D. Chittister

We each should have 2 pockets: in 1 the message, 'I am dust & ashes;' in the other, 'For me the universe was made.' — Joan D. Chittister

Benedictine spirituality is a consistent one: live life normally, live life thouhtfully, live life profouncly, live life well. Never neglect and never exaggerate. It is a lesson that a world full of cults and fads and workaholics and short courses in difficult subjects needs dearly to learn. — Joan D. Chittister

Contemplation is a very dangerous activity. It not only brings us face to face with God. It brings us, as well, face to face with the world, face to face with the self. And then, of course, something must be done. Nothing stays the same once we have found the God within ... . We carry the world in our hearts: the oppression of all peoples, the suffering of our friends, the burdens of our enemies, the raping of the Earth, the hunger of the starving, the joy of every laughing child. — Joan D. Chittister

It is not our job to work miracles, but it is our task to try. — Joan D. Chittister

Compassion is the ability to understand how difficult it is for people to be the best of what they want to be at all times. — Joan D. Chittister

Feminists are asking women and men not to buy into patriarchal systems that destroy them both. Feminism comes to bring both men and women to the fullness of life, the wholeness of soul, for which we were all made in the image and likeness of God. — Joan D. Chittister

Work is not slavery, then. Work is creativity. It is the expression of ourselves that no one else can duplicate. — Joan D. Chittister

Nothing weighs more heavily on age than time. Nothing has more meaning ... Now time becomes, with a kind of ruthless honesty, what it has always been: life's most precious commodity. The only difference is that, finally, we know it. — Joan D. Chittister

Blind obedience is itself an abuse of human morality. It is a misuse of the human soul in the name of religious commitment. It is a sin against individual conscience. It makes moral children of the adults from whom moral agency is required. It makes a vow, which is meant to require religious figures to listen always to the law of God, beholden first to the laws of very human organizations in the person of very human authorities. It is a law that isn't even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality. — Joan D. Chittister

Better to walk through life simply and without masks, than to lose ourselves in the pursuit of identities that are purely cosmetic and commercial. Then, at least, we will be known for what we are rather than for what we are not. — Joan D. Chittister

If anything diminishes a person, it is the cancer of constant complaining. — Joan D. Chittister

LIKE A GREAT WATERWHEEL, THE LITURGICAL YEAR goes on relentlessly irrigating our souls, softening the ground of our hearts, nourishing the soil of our lives until the seed of the Word of God itself begins to grow in us, comes to fruit in us, ripens in us the spiritual journey of a lifetime. — Joan D. Chittister

The spiritual life, in other words, is not achieved by denying one part of life for the sake of another. The spiritual life is achieved only by listening to all of life and learning to respond to each of its dimensions wholly and with integrity. — Joan D. Chittister

Stability of heart - commitment to the life of the soul, faithfulness to the community, perseverance in the search for God - is the mooring that holds us fast when the night of the soul is at its deepest dark, and the noontime sun sears the spirit. When — Joan D. Chittister

Feminism without spirituality runs the risk of becoming what it rejects: an elitist ideology, arrogant, superficial and separatist, closed to everything but itself. Without a spiritual base that obligates it beyond itself, calls it out of itself for the sake of others, a pedagogical feminism turned in on itself can become just one more intellectual ghetto that the world doesn't notice and doesn't need. — Joan D. Chittister

Fear is not the opposite of courage. Fear is the catalyst of courage. — Joan D. Chittister

Religion is pointing toward the moon — Joan D. Chittister

In Benedictine spirituality, work is what we do to continue what God wanted done ... God goes on creating through us. Consequently a life spent serving God must be a life spent giving to others what we have been given. — Joan D. Chittister

I began to trust the questions themselves to lead me beyond answers to understanding, beyond practice to faith — Joan D. Chittister

Prayer can be an easy substitute for real spirituality. It would be impossible to have spirituality without prayer, of course, but it is certainly possible to pray without having a spirituality at all. How do you know? 'Am I becoming kinder?' is a good place to start. — Joan D. Chittister

Life is an exercise in the development of feeling. When we repress feelings, we become sour and judgmental. When we live awash in great feeling over small things, we become jaded long before we have even begun to enjoy. When feelings are in balance they sweeten long days and great distances with gratitude and hope. — Joan D. Chittister

We may well be the ones Proverbs warns when it reminds us: "Kings take pleasure in honest lips; they value the one who speaks the truth." The point is clear: If the people speak and the king doesn't listen, there is something wrong with the king. If the king acts precipitously and the people say nothing, something is wrong with the people. — Joan D. Chittister

Never confuse desire with vision. Desire has to do with what we want. Vision has to do with what we need. — Joan D. Chittister

Compassion is not sympathy. Compassion is mercy. It is a commitment to take responsibility for the suffering of others. — Joan D. Chittister

Spirituality without a prayer life is no spirituality at all, and it will not last beyond the first defeats. Prayer is an opening of the self so that the Word of God can break in and make us new. Prayer unmasks. Prayer converts. Prayer impels. Prayer sustains us on the way. Pray for the grace it will take to continue what you would like to quit. — Joan D. Chittister

Indeed, the big decisions in life are hardly ever clear - except for one. And that one is piercingly clear: life is a series of dilemmas, of options, of conundrums, of possibilities taken and not taken. Negotiating these moments well is of the essence of the life well lived. — Joan D. Chittister

Longing is a compass that guides us through life. We may never get what we really want, that's true, but every step along the way will be determined by it. — Joan D. Chittister

Life is a series of lessons, some of them obvious, some of them not. We learn as we go that dreams end, that plans get changed, that promises get broken, that our idols disappoint us. — Joan D. Chittister

It is in community that we come to see God in the other. It is in community that we see our own emptiness filled up. It is community that calls me beyond the pinched horizons of my own life, my own country, my own race, and gives me the gifts I do not have within me. — Joan D. Chittister

Goodness is a process of becoming, not of being. What we do over and over again is what we become in the end. — Joan D. Chittister

Hope is what sits by the window and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there isn't an ounce of proof in tonight's black, black sky that it can possible come. — Joan D. Chittister

In scripture God brings the animals to the human for naming. In that simple act the human is brought to recognize the particular personality and worth of each living creature. Too bad we forget so often. — Joan D. Chittister

My limitations make space for the gifts of other people. Without the grace of our limitations we would be isolated, dry, and insufferable creatures indeed. — Joan D. Chittister

Happiness does not come quickly. It is not conferred by any single event, however exciting or comforting or satisfying the event may be. It cannot be purchased, whatever the allure of the next, the newest, the brightest, the best. Happiness, like Carl Sandburg's fog, "comes on little cat feet," often silently, often without our knowing it, too often without our noticing. — Joan D. Chittister

There is no amount of darkness that can extinguish the inner light. The important thing is not to spend our lives trying to control the environment around us. The task is to control the environment within us. — Joan D. Chittister

It's the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. — Joan D. Chittister

Lent is the time for trimming the soul and scrapping the sludge off a life turned slipshod. Lent is about taking stock of time, even religious time. Lent is about exercising the control that enables us to say no to ourselves so that when life turns hard of its own accord we have the stamina to yes to its twists and turns with faith and hope. Lent is the time to make new efforts to be what we say we want to be. — Joan D. Chittister

Don't worry about wearing the sign; be the sign. You don't have to wear a sandwich board saying, "I am religious and spiritual and know what you should do." You do have to be the best of the mystical presence that your tradition brings. Certainly in Christianity, that means that you begin to go through life putting on the mind of Jesus, trying to see the world as Jesus saw the world. — Joan D. Chittister

Every dimension of life, its gains and its losses, are reason for celebration because each of them brings us closer to wisdom and fullness of understanding. — Joan D. Chittister

One of the functions of leadership is to lead, and weak managers may simply check and check and check with others because they are not capable of leading when it is required of them to lead. Benedict says that in matters of importance the abbot or prioress is to ask everyone in the community, 'starting with the youngest,' and then the abbot or prioress is to 'do what seems best. — Joan D. Chittister

Only ideas keep ideas flowing. When we close our minds to what is new, simply because we decide not to bother with it, we close our minds to our responsibility to ourselves - and to others - to keep on growing. — Joan D. Chittister

The Christmas season is a gift in itself. It releases us from the priorities of ordinary time and gives us the right to party more and pray more and love more. — Joan D. Chittister

We are each called to go through life reclaiming the planet an inch at a time until the Garden of Eden grows green again. — Joan D. Chittister

We must learn to pray out of our weaknesses so that God can become our
strength. — Joan D. Chittister

When souls really touch, it is forever. Then space and time disappear, and all that remains is the consciousness that we are not alone in life. — Joan D. Chittister

Two ideas militate against our consciously contributing to a better world. The idea that we can do everything or the conclusion that we can do nothing to make this globe a better place to live are both temptations of the most insidious form. One leads to arrogance; the other to despair. — Joan D. Chittister

It's possible to have too much in life. Too many clothes jade our appreciation of new ones; too much money can out us out of touch with life; too much free time and dull the edge of the soul. We need sometimes to come very near the bone so tha we can taste the marrow of life, rather than its superfluities. — Joan D. Chittister

Beware the religion that turns you against another one. It's unlikely that it's really religion at all. — Joan D. Chittister

No one finds time for prayer. You either take time for it or you don't get it. — Joan D. Chittister

Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight. — Joan D. Chittister

We are living in a period of commerical globalization. What we really need is spiritual globalization. — Joan D. Chittister

life is the vessel we have been given in order to find out what life is really meant to be about. — Joan D. Chittister

To insist on living until we die may be one of life's greatest virtues. — Joan D. Chittister

The kind of "blind obedience" once theologized as the ultimate step to holiness, is itself blind. It blinds a person to the insights and foresight and moral perspective of anyone other than an authority figure. — Joan D. Chittister

Our role in life is to bring the light of our own souls to the dim places around us. — Joan D. Chittister

Compassion makes no distinction between friends and enemies, neighbors and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners. Compassion is the gate to human community. — Joan D. Chittister

Awareness of the sacred in life is what holds our world together, and the lack of awareness of the sacred is what is tearing it apart. — Joan D. Chittister

The secret of life is to let every segment of it produce its own yield at its own pace. Every period has something new to teach us. The harvest of youth is achievement; the harvest of middle-age is perspective; the harvest of age is wisdom; the harvest of life is serenity. — Joan D. Chittister

Bloom where you are planted,' the poster reads. But the poster does not tell the whole story. ' plant yourself where you know you can bloom' may well be the poster we all need to see. Or better yet, "Work the arid soil however long it takes until something that fulfills the rest of you finally makes the desert in you bloom. — Joan D. Chittister

There comes a moment when having everything seems to be the only way to squeeze even a little out of life. There comes a day when this job, this home, this town, this family all seem irritating and deficient beyond the bearable. There comes a period in life when I regret every major decision I've ever made. This is precisely the time when the spirituality of stability offers its greatest gift. Stability enables me to outlast the dark, cold places of life until the thaw comes and I can see new life in this uninhabitable place again. But for that to happen I must learn to wait through the winters of my life. — Joan D. Chittister

Prayer that is regular confounds both self-importance and the wiles of the world. It is so easy for good people to confuse their own work with the work of creation. It is so easy to come to believe that what we do is so much more important than what we are. It is so easy to simply get too busy to grow. It is so easy to commit ourselves to this century's demand for product and action until the product consumes us and the actions exhaust us and we can no longer even remember why we set out to do them in the first place. — Joan D. Chittister

Hospitality is simply love on the loose. — Joan D. Chittister

Oppressors do not get to be oppressors in a single sweep. They manage it because little by little, we make them that. We overlook too much in the beginning and wonder why we lost control in the end. — Joan D. Chittister

A life of value is not a series of great things well done; it is a series of small things consciously done. — Joan D. Chittister

Solitude is not a way of running away from life ... from our feelings. On the contrary. This is the time we sort them out, air them, get over them, and go on without the burden of yesterday. — Joan D. Chittister

June is the time for being in the world in new ways, for throwing off the cold and dark spots of life. — Joan D. Chittister

Indifference is the acid of life. It erodes all the spirit that's in us and makes us useless to anyone else. We all have to stand for something, or our souls cease to breathe. — Joan D. Chittister