Joan Chittister

We love by loving

As Aldous Huxley wrote: "There isn't any formula or method. You learn by loving." But sometimes, if we're lucky, we live long enough to grow into it in such a way that because of it we come to recognize the value of life. . . . We learn enough about love to allow things to slip away and ourselves to melt into the God whose love made all of it possible. . . . Sometimes we live long enough to see the face of God in another. Then, in that case, we have loved.

from 40 STORIES TO STIR THE SOUL by Joan Chittister

Hope is what sits by a window

Hope is what sits by a window and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there is not one ounce of proof in tonight's black, black sky that it can possibly come.

by Joan Chittister

Charting a new path to the future

There is a time in every life
when the very act
of looking back and taking stock
becomes essential
to going forward.

Without the light
that shines out of the darkness
of the past,
we cannot chart
a new path
to the future.
 

from MONASTERIES OF THE HEART by Joan Chittister

A spirituality of work

A spirituality of work is based on a heightened sense of sacramentality, of the idea that everything that is, is holy and that our hands consecrate it to the service of God. A spirituality of work puts us in touch with our own creativity ... draws us out of ourselves and, at the same time, makes us more of what we are meant to be. A spirituality of work immerses me in the search for human community. I finally come to know that my work is God's work, unfinished by God because God meant it to be finished by me.

from THERE IS A SEASON by Joan Chittister
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