"If we view our spiritual lives as nothing more than another endeavor that we must conquer, then we are always subtly pulled towards an ongoing self-improvement project....So maybe the answer is to continue to hang out with Jesus in a variety of different settings, having many different conversations, and finding our life through His Life."
~ Giff

"I believe that a temptation for us in the MSFL program could be respond to the problem of the 'fire-insurance' Gospel which is saturating the Church. By responding I mean, matching it with a form of Christianity that is just as 'easy' to adhere to, but just dressed up as more 'spiritual'."
~ Chadwick

"To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all seeing, within you."
~Theophan the Recluse (as quoted by Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline)

"Meditation is the duty of all."
~Jeremy Taylor (as quoted by Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline)

"More enslaving than our occupations...are our preoccupations. To be preoccupied means to fill our time and place long before we are there....It is a mind filled with 'ifs.'"

"Not only being occupied but also being preoccupied is highly encouraged by our society...Their unrelenting insistence that we will miss out on something very important is we do not read this book, see this movie, hear this speaker, or buy this new product deepens our restlessness and adds many fabricated preoccupations to the already existing ones. Sometimes it seems as if our society has become dependent on the maintenance of these artificial worries."
~Henri Nouwen

"As long as we have only a vague inner feeling of discontent with our present way of living, and only an indefinite desire for 'things spiritual,' our lives will continue to stagnate in a generalized melancholy. We often say, 'I am not very happy. I am not content with the way my life is going. I am not really joyful or peaceful, but just don't know how things can be different, and I guess I have to be realistic and accept my life as it is.' It is this mood of resignation that prevents us from actively searching for the life of the Spirit."

"We must honestly unmask our self-deceptive games."
~Henri Nouwen

"I am being driven forward
Into an unknown lane....
Shall I ever get there?
There where life resounds,
A clear pure note
In the silence."
~Dag Hammarskjold (as quoted by Richard Foster, Streams of Living Water)

"Meditation is the growing inner availability to the word so that the Word can guide us, can open us, can remove our fears, cna come to dwell in us. True meditation is thus letting the Word become flesh in us. It is through this incarnation of the Word in us that we enter eternal life."
~Henri Nouwen, The Selfless Way of Christ

"Through the discipline of the Book, the Word of God can continue to become flesh in us. Reading the Scriptures as God's most intimate word for us is thus the realization of the incarnation in the concrete reality of our present life."
~Henri Nouwen, The Selfless Way of Christ