Notebook for
Finding Sanctuary: Monastic steps for Everyday Life
PART ONE - Everyday Life
Highlight (yellow) - How Did I Get This Busy? > Location 198
In simple terms, the consumerist lifestyle forces people to work too hard in order to fulfil their consumer ambitions.
Highlight (yellow) - How Did I Get This Busy? > Location 276
Benedictine Order: this is the Latin word for peace, ‘PAX’, surrounded by a crown of thorns. There is no peace without sacrifice and there is no peace without justice.
Highlight (yellow) - How Did I Get This Busy? > Location 320
Virtue is the true door into the sanctuary of infinite space.
Highlight (yellow) - How Did I Get This Busy? > Location 326
It is unique because the sanctuary-dweller is also the sanctuary-builder.
PART TWO - Monastic Steps
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 1: - Silence > Location 417
you should try omitting vulgarity, gossip and ‘just for a laugh’ from your conversation and see what happens.
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 1: - Silence > Location 490
‘Because of the turbulence of life, the one who lives in the midst of activity does not see his sins. But when he is quiet, especially in solitude, then he sees the real state of things.’
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 1: - Silence > Location 509
For Benedict, distractions inside my head are actually noises inside my heart: they are the result of the natural human condition - the condition of not having a pure heart.
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 2: - Contemplation > Location 548
To pray is to address God as a familiar friend - to speak to ‘you’ rather than to think about ‘him’.
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 2: - Contemplation > Location 572
a virtuous circle of awareness to help us do this: pray constantly, in order to have a pure heart, in order to see God everywhere, in order to pray constantly.
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 2: - Contemplation > Location 582
To base a spirituality on a technique for meditation, or a technique for anything, is to reduce what should be a way of life - spiritual living - to a system.
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 3: - Obedience > Location 773
There is nothing wrong with obeying good rules and there is nothing wrong with exercising free choice. The danger lies in claiming to be doing the one while actually doing the other.
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 3: - Obedience > Location 866
A powerful question to ask at this point is: who sets your agenda? Who sets your agenda minute by minute, from day to day? Who sets your agenda in the long run?
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 3: - Obedience > Location 895
People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular - and too lazy to think of anything better.’
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 3: - Obedience > Location 902
Keeping busy is a way of avoiding being true to oneself, so the desire to stop being busy has met the desire to be true to oneself.
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 4: - Humility > Location 1026
Somebody with humility must have learned how to handle their own emotions and how to touch the goodwill of other people in order to involve others in the project of building greatness.
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 4: - Humility > Location 1139
family and community life people can waste a huge amount of time and energy complaining about ‘the management’, grumbling about the conditions and gossiping maliciously. Benedict hates grumbling and forbids it above all other vices: ‘Above all, let them not grumble,’
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 5: - Community > Location 1194
The fellowship of the Church has been overtaken by the individual desire for spiritual comfort. The literal love of neighbour has been replaced by local conciliation services to resolve neighbourhood disputes.
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 5: - Community > Location 1312
They observed that, after polite preliminaries, the first emotion to break out in the group was hate. Through family life, people had learned how to behave one-to-one and in a small
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 5: - Community > Location 1314
group, but nobody had the skill of working in a large group.
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 5: - Community > Location 1314
the participants felt disempowered by the presence of large numbers of people and they translated this frustration into hatred for particular people and for the group in general.
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 5: - Community > Location 1345
Grumbling is the opposite of good conversation; it is the denial of the vow of conversatio morum and so is prohibited in the strongest terms.
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 6: - Spirituality > Location 1507
in the modern view, true spirituality is psychological well-being combined with the moral golden rule.
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 6: - Spirituality > Location 1563
modern spirituality is short-sighted and accommodating, religion is prophetic and challenging.
Highlight (yellow) - STEP 6: - Spirituality > Location 1593
‘Their law is what they like to do, whatever strikes their fancy. Anything they believe in and choose they call holy; anything they dislike they consider forbidden.
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