“I have a strong feeling that my intellectual formation is just as much a hindrance as a help to prayer.  It is hard not to desire good insights during prayer and not to fall into a long inner discussion with myself.

Every time some kind of insight comes to me, I find myself wondering how I can use it isn a lecture, a sermon, or an article, and very soon I am far away from God and all wrapped up in my own preoccupations.  

Maybe this what makes the Jesus prayer so good for me.  Simply saying, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” a hundred times, a thousand, ten thousand times, as the Russian peasant did, might slowly clean my mind and give God a little chance.”

-Henri Nouwen, The Genesee Diary

“I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of;

for to have been thought about,

born in God’s thought,

and then made by God,

is the dearest, grandest and

most precious thing in all thinking.”

-George MacDonald

“Each time an unexpected discovery is made in the world of knowledge,it shakes the religious establishment of the day. Now, we are often taught that it is unfaithful to question, traditional religious beliefs, but I believe we must question them, continually-Not God, not Christ, who are the center of our lives as believers-but what human beings say about God and about Christ; otherwise, like those of the church establishent of Galileo’s day, we truly become God’s frozen people. Galileo’s discoveries did nothing whatsoever to change the nature of God; they threatened only man’s rigid ideas of the nature of God. We must be constantly open to new revelation, which is another way of hearing God, with loving obedience.”

-Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections of Faith and Art

“It is not the level of our spirituality that we can depend upon.

It is God and nothing less than God.

For the work is God’s and the call is Gods and everything is summoned by Him to His purpose.”

-Elizabeth Elliott