Getting closer to God - Post your favourite Christian Quotes & Poetry

Eramen

Hi all,

After prowling for a while on the Christianity section I've grown used to seeing thread after thread of various forms of in-fighting (between atheists, theists or both), conflicting views, 'debate threads', and other negative news stories. Hence I thought it would be fitting to create a place for something more positive and uplifting - a place where we as Christians can unite in our shared praise & fellowship in God.

To this end let this be a space where Christianity's highest principles and central truths find expression, whether they are found through the words of a Saint or sage, an author, king, general, peasant, a rich man, a poor one, the famous or the destitute. It doesn't matter their source, because they all are inspired by God as the originator and progenitor of his Ever-Living truth.

They said: "When will the kingdom come?"

"It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying 'here it is' or 'there it is.' Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, yet men do not see it."

I hope our contributions will aid us in our right thinking and spiritual/religious attentions. Perhaps in this way they will prompt us to better living as followers of Jesus Christ.

---

As it is Lent I thought this quote might be a good starting point to remind us to continue with our abstentions, even if we sometimes fail or think they are too much:


“We should in no way regard ourselves as being far from God, neither on account of our weakness or failings or anything else. And if your greatest sins have ever driven you so far from him that you regard yourself as not being close to God, then you should still regard God as being close to you. For the perfection of virtue is borne in struggle, as St. Paul says: ‘virtue is perfected in weakness’ (2 Cor 12:9)”

- Meister Eckhart


Always remember we come out better people when we strive in selfless service to God. Cervantes reminds us to press onward, even when all seems set against us:


“One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world was better for this.”

– Cervantes , from Don Quixote

(I look forward to reading more quotes)

j80ezgvc3p92xu

Just one of my favorites, I will try to think of more:

"Blessed be the Lord my strength which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight" - Psalm 144

Just reminds me that Christianity is not about sitting around and being "nice" - the world is not Sesame Street. We are given gifts and talents to uphold the Lord's commands and fight inequity wherever we see it. Christians should not cower in fear, because fear is not of the Lord. Do not be afraid to ruffle a few feathers.

Manach

"Please God, make me good, but not just yet" - St. Augustine

Eramen

I love the writings of St. Augustine, they are full of wit, down-to-earth realism, and at the same time are elating and upraising, capable of spurring us to greater understanding of God. Here's a line that is one of my favourites:


"We are what we love. If we love a stone, then we are a stone, if we love a person, then we are that person, if we love God - I hesitate to go on, for if I said that we would then be God, you might want to stone me. But let me refer you to the Scriptures."


- St. Augustine

Eramen

"This food [the Eucharist] of love draws the soul above distinction or difference, beyond resemblance to divine unity. This is what happens to the transfigured spirit. When the divine heat of love has drawn out all the moisture, heaviness, unfitness, then this holy food plunges such a one into the life of God. As Our Lord himself said to St Augustine, 'I am the food of the strong: believe and feast on me. You will not change me into yourself; rather you will be changed into me'."

- Johannes Tauler

hinault

I try to follow the Lectio Divina, as instructed by St.Paul of the Cross.

http://spc-church.org/ministries/faith-formation/452-praying-with-scripture-lectio-divina

http://www.knocklyonparish.ie/lectio-divina-page/

pueblo

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

hinault

CS Lewis

“People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules I’ll reward you, and if you don’t I’ll do the other thing.’ I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature…Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.”

“Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.”

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”

And finally the Serenity Prayer

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;
enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
that I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
forever in the next.

hinault

For the modern age, I find that this resource is an excellent means of getting closer to God.

This site contains hundreds of very interesting homilies, contemplating a whole range of issues in Catholic life.

The homilies in that site, each of them contain interesting quotations from variously the Fathers of the Faith, the popes and the writings of the saints and scholars.
I find this resource very useful when I need to hear words of encourage, words to improve my fortitude, words of comfort. Words to bring me closer to God.

http://www.audiosancto.org/

Eramen

“It is when we attempt to avoid suffering by withdrawing from anything that might involve hurt, when we try to spare ourselves the effort and pain of pursuing truth, love, and goodness, that we drift into a life of emptiness, in which there may be almost no pain, but the dark sensation of meaninglessness and abandonment is all the greater.”

“God is not solitude, but perfect communion. For this reason the human person, the image of God, realizes himself or herself in love, which is a sincere gift of self.”

- Pope Benedict XVI

lazybones32

"Learn to dance, so when you get to Heaven the angels know what to do with you"

- St. Augustine

EirWatcher

"It does not matter what others do, but what we do. What right have we to blame the government when we do not do that which is good ourselves?"
"Those who are still afraid of men have no fear of God, and those who have fear of God have ceased to be afraid of men."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Faith does not involve a search by natural reason to prove what is believed. But it does involve a form of inquiry unto things by which a person is led to belief."

- Thomas Aquinas

"Reason can lead us in the direction of faith but it can never confer it.
If you would understand and see as God does you must be willing to die to the merely human.
Faith, precisely because it is a gift of God, comes through prayer.
Prayer is a turning to God and without it our lives become progressively more self-centered.
If you find yourself complaining of the silence of God, it's because you don't open your ears and heart to the words of the gospels
Encounter Christ in your life ... learn to think as he does, to react as he would, to see as he sees ...
He will reveal life's meaning to you and in him you will fulfil your divine destiny."

- Michel Quoist

Delirium

MOD NOTE

Off-topic posts deleted.

Eramen

"Disorder in the society is the result of disorder in the family." - Elizabeth Ann Seton

EirWatcher

"Love of change is a disease that the soul contracts from the body-one sure symptom of it is the inability to contemplate. During contemplation, time really does stand still for the soul, which is one reason why we should practice it: for it means practicing the soul in its own proper element."

"Unhappiness is always unused or ill-used spiritual energy; and man has within himself so many energies made for God that, lacking God, these energies cannot be satisfied, and can only turn in upon the man and rend him."

-Frank Sheed

Nick Park

"The Son of God became the Son of Man that the sons of men might become the sons of God." (John Calvin)

Eramen

"We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being." - John Scotus Eriugena

EirWatcher

"under a veneer of self-assuredness and self-righteousness, the man of today hides a deep knowledge of his wounds and his unworthiness before God. He is waiting for mercy."
- Pope Benedict XVI

"Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes."
- Why I am a Catholic, G.K. Chesterton

Eramen

"While I yet stood in my first cause I had no God and I was my own; I willed nothing and wanted nothing, for I was conditionless being, the knower of myself in divine truth. Then I wanted myself and nothing else. What I willed I was and what I was I willed. I was free from God and all things. But when I escaped from my free will to take on my created nature, then I acquired a God, for before creatures came into existence, God was not God. He was what he was. When creatures came into existence, God was not God in himself, but he was God in creatures."

- Meister Eckhart

EirWatchr

"Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all."

"There is no other case of one continuous intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years. Its [The Catholic Church's] experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and especially nearly all errors. [..] It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. [...] It does not, in the conventional phrase, believe what the Bible says, for the simple reason that the Bible does not say anything. You cannot put a book in the witness-box and ask it what it really means. [...] The Bible by itself cannot be a basis of agreement when it is a cause of disagreement; it cannot be the common ground of Christians when some take it allegorically and some literally. The Catholic refers it to something that can say something, to the living, consistent, and continuous mind of which I have spoken; the highest mind of man guided by God."

- G.K. Chesterton, Why I'm Catholic

EirWatchr

“God’s pursuit of a mind is bound to fail unless the mind is also in pursuit of goodness.”
― Fulton Sheen

“Prayer doesn't change God. But it does change us, making us more like Him, and thus more able to accept His will. Prayer makes us radiate goodness.”
“If we do not fill our mind with prayer, it will fill itself with anxieties, worries, temptations, resentments, and unwelcome memories.”
― Scott Hahn

EirWatchr

“Godly knowing is a humble and non-grasping kind of knowledge; it becomes a beautiful process of communication instead of ammunition and power over. It is basically reverence. Knowing without loving is frankly dangerous for the soul and for society. You’ll critique most everything you encounter and even have the hubris to call this mode of reflexive cynicism ‘thinking’ (whereas it’s really your ego’s narcissistic reaction to the moment.) You’ll position things too quickly as inferior or superior, ‘with me’ or ‘against me,’ and most of the time you’ll be wrong. [..] All human knowing is ‘imperfect’ and ‘[seen] through a glass darkly,’ and must necessarily be held with humility and patience.”

“There are commonly two kinds of human beings: there are people who want certitude and there are people who want understanding; and these two cannot understand one another!”

- Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance

EirWatchr

“Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee.”
- St. Augustine, Confessions (Book 1)

“What we are forever dealing with is an immense grandiosity inside us. There’s a divine energy in us which, precisely because it is divine, never makes easy peace with this world. We carry inside of us divine energies, divine appetites, and divine depth. The spiritual task of our lives then, in essence, is that of ordering those energies, disciplining them, channeling them, and directing them so that they are generative rather than destructive.”
- Ron Rolheiser

“At the root of all misery is unfulfilled desire.”
“We...sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn't good enough.”
― Scott Hahn

“What a man loves with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might - this, for him, is God.”
- Origen

EirWatchr

“In an age of hope men looked up at the night sky and saw ‘the heavens.’ In an age of hopelessness they call it simply ‘space.’“
“Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, [..] fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery.”
― Peter Kreeft

“When you look at the sky during the day and don’t see the stars, can you say they don’t exist?”
- Magdalena Galek

“Pray that, above all things, the gates of light may be opened to you; for those cannot be perceived or understood by all, but only by the man to whom God and his Christ have imparted wisdom.”
- St. Justin, Dialogue with Tryphon

“Christ has said that he is truth, not fashion”
- Tertullian (197 A.D.)

EirWatchr

“No man has seen him or made him known, but he has revealed himself. He has shown himself through faith, which is the only thing to which it has been granted to behold God.
For God, the Lord and Fashioner of all things, who made all things, and who assigned them their various positions, has proven himself not only a Friend of mankind, but also patient.
[..]
He formed in his mind a great and unspeakable idea, which he communicated to his Son alone. As long as he held and preserved his wise counsel in concealment, he seemed to neglect us and have no care for us. Afterwards, though, when he revealed and laid open, through his beloved Son, the things which have been prepared from the beginning, he conferred every blessing on us at once!
As a result, we partake of his benefits, we see, and we are active.
Which of us could have ever expected these things?”
- Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus (c. 130 AD)

“God shapes us in a given environment, through happy or unhappy events and through his chosen intermediaries. He knows how to lead us through the trials and tribulations of history.”

“Prayer is allowing God a bit of freedom within us. [..] We believe that God dwells and lives in us, but very often we never allow him the freedom to live, act, move and express himself. We occupy all the ground of our interior landscape, all day long and endlessly. We always persist in doing a lot of things, talking a lot, thinking a lot. We have to learn that silence is the path to the close personal encounter with the silent but living presence of God within us. [..] We must not live and grow in interior or exterior commotion, in dissipation and worldly distractions; some pleasures divide, tear apart, separate, and scatter the centre of our life. [..] Interior silence allows us to hear the prayer of the Holy Spirit, which becomes our prayer.”
- Cardinal Sarah

EirWatchr

"By pursuing sanctification outside the Church we are trying to pronunce ourselves holy. [..]
It is contempt of the Body of Christ as a visible fellowship of justified sinners [..]
It is also contempt of the fellowship, for we are then trying to attain sanctification in isolation from our brethren."
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

"Doctrine is like a 'high road' in order to discern together with all people of good will the object and boundaries of the dialogue of values and to give an ever new impetus to the Church’s missionary action, to the force of the truth which is the source of all true values in the world."
- Benedict XVI, The Church Fathers

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.”
“So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.”
- Jesus Christ, John 6:51, 16:22

“[John’s Gospel] is the only one of the canonical Gospels that claims eyewitness authorship.”
- Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses

EirWatchr

"Our Lord typically leads us by small steps, employing tiny miracles of grace — little seeds which almost invisibly take root in our souls and grow, enabling us to recognize God [..]
We find ourselves prompted in delicate ways, and our will has the freedom to instruct the intellect to rationalize, spinning out reasons to reject any given overture. But if we raise no barrier, more grace is given to enable us to carry through. By many little steps, then — frequently by many little and faltering steps — we learn how to recognize and respond to grace. [..]
We are unlikely to find any absolutely decisive moment in which we were compelled to believe. What we find instead is a growing awareness, often through many struggles, of the simple and very quiet fact that God is at work within us."
- Dr. Jeff Mirus

EirWatchr

"It is about the greatness of God, not the significance of man. God made man small and the universe big to say something about himself."
- John Piper

"History of salvation is not a small event, on a poor planet, in the immensity of the universe. It is not a minimal thing which happens by chance on a lost planet. It is the motive for everything, the motive for creation. Everything is created so that this story can exist, the encounter between God and his creature."
- Pope Benedict XVI

"You have a task, my soul, a great task if you so desire. Scrutinize yourself seriously, your being, your destiny; where you come from and where you must rest; seek to know whether it is life you are living or if it is something more. You have a task, my soul, so purify your life: Please consider God and his mysteries, investigate what existed before this universe and what it is for you, where you come from and what your destiny will be. This is you task, my soul; therefore, purify your life."
- Gregory Nazianzen, Carmina

EirWatchr

"Anger at what has happened to us, at the hurt we have sustained in our lives, is likely to be directed at the Source of our lives or at persons or institutions we emotionally associate with that Source. When this happens, anger often will block other affectivity and, until it is expressed to God, will reduce prayer to rational reflection.
[..]
When such feelings are very strong, affective prayer is possible only if you can put them before God and let God accept them. Otherwise, unnoticed negative feelings will stand like a ridge between you and the Holy One."
- William A. Barry

DunnoKidz

"God is love, and as pure love, He is always inclusive, and I believe that we should be, too."
-Mary Vasquez, Love Poems from God

EirWatchr

"Read the Gospel attentively, and you will see that Jesus sacrificed even charity for prayer. And do you know why? To teach us that, without God, we are too poor to help the poor."
- Mother Teresa