Joan Chittister on Enlightenment

Some quotes from the book 'Illuminated Life'

'The important thing to remember in the spiritual life is that religion is a means, not an end. When we stop at the level of the rules and the laws, the doctrines and the dogmas - good guides as these may be - and call those things the spiritual life, we have stopped far short of the meaning of life, the call of the divine, the fullness of the self.'

'Enlightenment is the ability to see beyond all the things we make God to find God.'

'We make religion God and so fail to see godliness where religion is not, though goodness is clear and constant in the simplest of people, the remotest of places. We make national honor God and fail to see the presence of God in other nations, particularly non-christian nations. We make personal security God and fail to see God in the bleak and barren dimensions of life. We make our own human color the color of God and fail to see God in the one who comes in different guise. We give God gender and miss the spirit of God everywhere in everyone.'

'Enlightenment sees, too, beyond the shapes and icons that intend to personalize God to the God that is too personal, too encompassing, to be any one shape or for or name. Enlightenment takes us beyond our parochialisms to the presence of God everywhere, in everyone, in the universe.'

'To be contemplative I must put down my notions of separateness from God and let God speak to me through everything that seeps through the universe into the pores of my minuscule little life.'