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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

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Joan D. Chittister
Life
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Spirituality
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More quotes by Joan D. Chittister

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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
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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
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We don't change as we get older - we just get to be more of what we've always been.
Joan D. Chittister
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It's the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us.
Joan D. Chittister
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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
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Humility is authenticity. It comes from the Latin word humus, meaning earth. As the church has taught, we're made of dust, and unto dust we shall return.
Joan D. Chittister
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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
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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
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We must learn to pray out of our weaknesses so that God can become our strength.
Joan D. Chittister
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Fear is not the opposite of courage. Fear is the catalyst of courage.
Joan D. Chittister
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Hope grows in us, despite our moments of darkness, regardless of our regular bouts of depression.
Joan D. Chittister
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Beware the religion that turns you against another one. It's unlikely that it's really religion at all.
Joan D. Chittister
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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
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To insist on living until we die may be one of life's greatest virtues.
Joan D. Chittister
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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
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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