Best 5 quotes of Joan Chittister on MyQuotes

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.

I began to trust the questions themselves to lead me beyond answers to understanding, beyond practice to faith

I have come to understand that the voice of God is all around me. God is not a silent God. God is speaking to me all the time. In everything. Through everyone. I am only now beginning to listen, let alone to hear.

Of all the things we share, the most central is not in the liturgical or theological or canonical dimensions of the religion. It is in the realm of our personal​ search and experience of God. I have danced in a Sufi fikre, sat for hours in a Zen Buddhist tea ceremony, been part of a Hindu puja, attended Shabbat services in multiple Jewish synagogues, and never, in any of those moments of worship, did I doubt these people were just as deeply involved in the search for God as I am. And that God was with us all. And why not? God is everywhere, they told us as children. But the question never goes away: Yes, but - where is God for me? I don't feel God. I don't hear God. I don't know how to know God. So God is surely in all these other places where the consciousness of God is also real, as well. But as much as I knew, even as a child, that it had to be true, that God was everywhere, still God was nowhere in particular in life. And, though I did not know it at the time, and so struggled through the thought of god for night after night in life, in that reality was all I needed to know about the search for God. It was years, of course, before I realized that I was looking for Something rather than for Everything, and so I found nothing because I was looking for the wrong thing. And that is the kind of seeking that causes all the pain.

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.