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When you can no longer tell your own story without telling his, that’s when you have become a Christian.

— Fr. Charles Stanley, OFM Cap., source  <link>

The Church Is Always God Hung Between Two Thieves

The church is always God hung between two thieves. Thus no one should be surprised or shocked at how badly the church has betrayed the gospel and how much it continues to do so today. It has never done very well. Conversely, however, nobody should deny the good the church has done either. It has carried grace, produced saints, morally challenged the planet, and made, however imperfectly, a house for God to dwell in on this earth.

To be connected with the church is to be associated with scoundrels, warmongers, fakes, child-molesters, murderers, adulterers and hypocrites of every description. It also, at the same time, identifies you with saints and the finest persons of heroic soul within every time, country, race and gender. To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of soul….because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves.

— Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing  <link>

To Be Converted

“To be converted” means to follow Jesus, to walk with him, on his way. But let us again insist on the fact that God “brings us back,” converts us. Conversion is not human self-realization, and man is not the architect of his own life. Conversion consists essentially in that decision by which man ceases to be his own creator, ceases to seek his own self and his self-realization, but accepts his dependence on the true Creator, on creative love, accepts that his dependence is true freedom and that the freedom of autonomy emancipated from the Creator is not freedom but illusion, deception.

— Pope Benedict XVI, from book Journey to Easter  <link>

The Catholic writer, in so far as he has the mind of the Church, will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.

— Flannery O’Connor, “The Church and the Fiction Writer”, 1957  <link>

…by virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation,
nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.

— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin  <link>

Jesus Christ is both the medium and the message.

— Richard Rohr, Things Hidden  <link>

Jesus was precisely the “once and for all” sacrifice given to reveal the lie and absurdity of the very notion and necessity of “sacrificial” religion itself.

— Richard Rohr, Things Hidden  <link>

For Whatever Reason

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.

— Dorothy L. Sayers  <link>

Never forget what Jesus did for you. Never take lightly what it cost Him. And never assume that if it cost Him His very life, that it won’t also cost you yours.

— Rich Mullins  <link>

If you’re a big enough fool to climb a tree and like a cat refuse to come down, then someone who loves you has to make as big a fool of himself to rescue you.

— Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos  <link>

We are the mother of Christ when we carry him in our heart and body by love and a pure and sincere conscience. And we give birth to him through our holy works which ought to shine to others by our example.

— St. Francis of Assisi  <link>

My soul breathes only in thy infinite soul;
I breathe, I think, I love, I live but thee.

— George MacDonald, Diary of an Old Soul  <link>