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

When God has become a business, though, it is very hard for people to get the confidence to realize that God is really a personal God, a God who touches us as individuals, a God who is as close to us as we choose to see. We have learned well the remoteness of a God who lived for so long behind communion rails and altar steps and seminary doors and chancery desks that the experience of God, however strong, has always been more private secret than public expectation. — 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

The liturgical year is the year that sets out to attune the life of the Christian to the life of Jesus, the Christ. It proposes, year after year, to immerse us over and over again into the sense and substance of the Christian life until, eventually we become what we say we are - followers of Jesus all the way to the heart of God — 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

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

Superficial people are those who simply go along without a question in the world-asking nothing, troubled by nothing, examining nothing. Whatever people around them do, they do, too. That's a sad and plastic life-routine and comfortable, maybe, but still sad. — Joan D. Chittister

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

It is one thing to speak kindly to an irritating stranger on Monday. It is quite another thing to go on speaking kindly to the same irritating relative, or irritating employee, or irritating child day after day, week after week, year after year and come to see in that what God is asking of me, what God is teaching me about myself in this weary, weary moment. — 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

The message we have internalized is clear - we are what we do and what we own, not what we are inside ourselves. Where it counts! — Joan D. Chittister

For the Jew, Passover is a sign of salvation, of "God with us" at a particular historical moment in the past. For the Christian, Easter is a sign of "God with us" in the past, but with us now also and at a time to come, as well. — 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

preoccupation with fantasies of success; exhibitionism and insatiable attention-getting maneuvers; — 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

Humble people walk comfortably in every group. No one is either too beneath them or too above them for their own sense of well-being. They are who they are, people with as much to give as to get, and they know it. And because they're at ease with themselves, they can afford to be open with others... Having discovered who we are and having opened ourselves to life and having learned to be comfortable with it, we know that God is working in us. We know, most of all, that whatever happens we have nothing to fear... we are free of the false hopes and false faces and false needs that once held us down. We can fly now. Let all the others scratch and grapple for the plastic copy of life. We have found the real thing. — Joan D. Chittister

The moment a woman comes home to herself, the moment she knows that she has become a person of influence, an artist of her life, a sculptor of her universe, a person with rights and responsibilities who is respected and recognized, the resurrection of the world begins. — 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

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

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

In our dreams lies our unfinished work for the world. — Joan D. Chittister

I learned that the Italians are right. It isn't what happens to us that counts. It's what we do with what happens to us that makes all the difference — 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

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

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

We fail to move beyond what is safe, we abandon our dreams in favor of what is sure rather than strive for what is best for us. — 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

The question is not, do we go to church; the question is, have we been converted. The crux of Christianity is not whether or not we give donations to popular charities but whether or not we are really committed to the poor. — 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

We should employ our passions in the service of life," Sir Richard Steele wrote, "not spend life in the service of our passions. — 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

Try saying this silently to everyone and everything you see for thirty days and see what happens to your own soul: I wish you happiness now and whatever will bring happiness to you in the future. — Joan D. Chittister

Judaism calls for us to honor the rhythm of human life, the demands of the human community around us, the call of the divine order as the filter and scale for the decisions that drive our own small lives. We do not rule the universe, Judaism reminds us. God does. We are not its standard or its norms. We are only its keepers, its agents, its stewards. To do right by the universe at large is the measure of a happiness framed with the entire cosmos in mind but lived in microcosms across time. — 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

Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside of us to get better. It is about getting better inside about what is going on outside. — Joan D. Chittister

We have learned that the things we amassed to prove to ourselves how valuable, how important, how successful we were, didn't prove it at all. In fact, they have very little to do with it. It's what's inside of us, not what's outside of us that counts. — Joan D. Chittister

To be enlightened is to know that heaven is not "coming." Heaven is here. — 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

War within ourselves is always a prelude to war outside ourselves. All war starts within our own hearts. When our egos are inflated or our desires insatiable, we go to war with the other for the sad joy of maintaining our one-dimensional worlds. — 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

A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility - and the morality - of the church itself. — Joan D. Chittister

Compassion for the other comes out of our ability to accept ourselves. Until we realize both our own weaknesses and our own privileges, we can never tolerate lack of status and depth of weakness in the other. — 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

This compulsion to look back, to explain to myself, to others, why I did what I did - or, worse, to justify why I didn't do something else - is one of the most direct roads to depression we have. Our thoughts, emotions, and attitudes, according to Dr. Andrew Weil in his book Healthy Aging, are "key determinants of how we age." They can threaten the quality of time we bring to the present. — 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

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

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

To simply withdraw from the arena of ideas, from public discourse on public issues, from the value formation of the young - to shrug our shoulders and say, "I don't know" or, worse, "I don't care about those things anymore" - is to abandon the young to the mercy of their own ideas without the benefit of experience to guide them. — Joan D. Chittister

Acceptance is the universal currency of real friendship ... It does not warp or shape or wrench a person to be anything other than what they are. — Joan D. Chittister

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

we try so hard to avoid the rest of the year: how do we deal with the God of darkness as well as the Giver of light? — Joan D. Chittister

Today we live in a world that judges its achievements by speed and busyness. ... We are so busy making things happen that we have little time left to think about the value of what is happening. We urgently need people who concentrate on the meaning of life rather than simply the speed. — Joan D. Chittister

Life is not meant to be a burden. Life is not a problem to be solved. It is a blessing to be celebrated. — 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

I celebrate myself," the poet Walt Whitman wrote. The thought is so delicious it is almost obscene. Imagine the joy that would come with celebrating the self - our achievements, our experiences, our existence. Imagine what it would be like to look into the mirror and say, as God taught us, "That's good. — Joan D. Chittister

Prayer restores the soul that is dry and dulled by years of trying to create a world that never completely comes. — 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

Learning to celebrate joy is one of the great practices of the spiritual life. — Joan D. Chittister

Life is the ability to start over again. — 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 now surrender to the obligation to understand and to care. We must surrender ourselves to becoming conscious, thinking members of the human race. We must put down the temptation to powerlessness and surrender to the questions of the moment. — Joan D. Chittister

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

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

Beware of your definition of success: If it has more to do with what other people think of you than it does with what you know of your own abilities, you may be confusing applause with achievement. — Joan D. Chittister

Sometimes we exclude things in ourselves in order to be like everybody else around us-our ethnicity, our social backgrounds, our ideas. What kind of world is it that will not allow me to be myself, and is it really good for me to be there? What part of me will die a slow death if I stay? — Joan D. Chittister

All of us wrestle with the angels of our inabilities all the time. We live in fear that our incapacities will be exposed. We posture and evaluate and assess and criticize mercilessly. — Joan D. Chittister

Benedict sets up a community, a family. And families, the honest among us will admit, are risky places to be if perfection is what y ou are expecting 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

Failure is the foundation of truth. It teaches us what isn't true, and that is a great beginning. To fear failure is to fear the possibility of truth. — Joan D. Chittister

Mystery is what happens to us when we allow life to evolve rather than having to make it happen all the time. It is the strange knock at the door, the sudden sight of an unceremoniously blooming flower, an afternoon in the yard, a day of riding the midtown bus. Just to see. Just to notice. Just to be there. — 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

Peace comes from living a measured life. Peace comes from attending to every part of my world in a sacramental way. My relationships are not what I do when I have time left over from my work ... Reading is not something I do when life calms down. Prayer is not something I do when I feel like it. They are all channels of hope and growth for me. They must all be given their due. — Joan D. Chittister

A seeker searched for years to know the secret of achievement and success in human life. One night in a dream a sage appeared bearing the answer to the secret. The sage said simply: "Stretch out your hand and reach what you can." "No, it can't be that simple," the seeker said. And the sage said softly, "You are right, it is something harder. It is this: Stretch out your hand and reach what you cannot." Now that's vision. — Joan D. Chittister

Imagine how happy, how holy, life would be if we ever really learn to see beauty. — 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

Assuming that tomorrow will be the same as today is poor preparation for living. It equips us only for disappointment or, more likely, for shock. To live well, to be mentally healthy, we must learn to realize that life is a work in process. — 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

It is what we do routinely, not what we do rarely, that delineates the character of a person. — 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

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

We punish the body and strip the earth. And we do it in pursuit of a so-called holiness that smacks of the bogus, that denies the gifts of God, that makes us marauders on the earth. — 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

We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. "One's friends," George Santayana wrote, "are that part of the human race with which one can be human. — Joan D. Chittister

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

Persistence may not solve everything - at least in our lifetime - but it is truer to the meaning of life for us to wait for another plowing, another seeding, another harvest, then not. — 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

What is the spirituality we need for the 21st century? We face a choice: to retire from this fray into some marshmallow paradise where we can massage away the heat of the day, the questions of the time, the injustice of the age, and live like pious moles in the heart of a twisted world. Or, we can gather our strength - our spiritual strength - for the struggle it will take to wake up from this pious sleep. — Joan D. Chittister

Life with someone else, in other words, doesn't show me nearly as much about his or her shortcomings as it does about my own.... That's how relationships sanctify me. They show me where holiness is for me. That's how relationships develop me. They show me where growth is for me. If I'm the passive-victim type, then assertiveness may have something to do with coming to wholeness. If I'm the domineering character in every group, then a willingness to listen and to be led may be my call to life. Alone, I am what I am, but in community I have the chance to become everything I can be. — Joan D. Chittister