To eat in a monastery ...

To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay.
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 Kathleen Norris

Quotes from the same author

All that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable.
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 Kathleen Norris
We shortchange ourselves by regarding religious faith as a matter of intellectual assent. This is a modern aberration; the traditional Christian view is far more holistic, regarding faith as a whole-body experience. Sometimes it is, as W.H. Auden described it, 'a matter of choosing what is difficult all one's days as if it were easy.
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 Kathleen Norris
I've come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change.
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 Kathleen Norris
Acedia is a danger to anyone whose work requires great concentration and discipline yet is considered by many to be of little practical value. The world doesn't care if I write another word, and if I am to care, I have to summon all my interior motivation and strength.
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 Kathleen Norris
Only Christ could have brought us all together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.
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 Kathleen Norris