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Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation QUOTES

Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation QUOTES

1 " We become either agents of God's healing and liberating grace or carriers of the sickness of the world. "

― M. Robert Mulholland Jr. , Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

2 " Everyone is in a process of spiritual formation. We are being shaped into either the wholeness of the image of Christ or a horribly destructive caricature of that image--destructive not only to ourselves but also to others, for we inflict our brokenness upon them . . . The direction of our spiritual growth infuses all we do with intimations of either Life or Death. "

― M. Robert Mulholland Jr. , Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

3 " Our cross is the point of our unlikeness to the image of Christ, where we must die to self in order to be raised by God into wholeness of life in the image of Christ right there at that point.

So the process of being conformed to the image of Christ takes place at the points of our unlikeness to Christ, and the first step is confrontation. "

― M. Robert Mulholland Jr. , Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

4 " Our attitudes, our perspectives, our ways of relating to others, our methods of responding to the circumstances of the world around us, our self-image, even our understanding of God have all been shaped by the destructive values and dehumanizing structures of the world's brokenness. "

― M. Robert Mulholland Jr. , Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

5 " We depend upon cognitive assent and affective assurances to substantiate the reality of our relationship with God. If we can't "know" or "feel" God, we customarily doubt our relationship with God. But such "knowing" and "feeling" restrict God to the narrow limits of our minds and senses and reduce our relationship with God to the maintenance of such feedback. "

― M. Robert Mulholland Jr. , Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

6 " purgation deals essentially with our "trust structures," especially those deep inner postures of our being that do not rely on God but on self for our well-being. "

― M. Robert Mulholland Jr. , Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

7 " Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.4 "

― M. Robert Mulholland Jr. , Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

8 " As long as we try to fill this yearning with things other than God and activities other than God's purposes, we are unfulfilled and incomplete. "

― M. Robert Mulholland Jr. , Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

9 " Our relationship with God, not our doing, is the source of our being. "

― M. Robert Mulholland Jr. , Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

10 " This means that our spiritual journey is not our setting out (by gathering information and applying it correctly) to find God (as an object "out there" to be grasped and controlled by us). It is a journey of learning to yield ourselves to God and discovering where God will take us. "

― M. Robert Mulholland Jr. , Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

11 " If you want a good litmus test of your spiritual growth, simply examine the nature and quality of your relationships with others. "

― M. Robert Mulholland Jr. , Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

12 " We fail to realize that the process of spiritual shaping is a primal reality of human existence. Everyone is in a process of spiritual formation! Every thought we hold, every decision we make, every action we take, every emotion we allow to shape our behavior, every response we make to the world around us, every relationship we enter into, every reaction we have toward the things that surround us and impinge upon our lives-all of these things, little by little, are shaping us into some kind of being. We are being shaped into either the wholeness of the image of Christ or a horribly destructive caricature of that image-destructive not only to ourselves but also to others, for we inflict our brokenness upon them. "

― M. Robert Mulholland Jr. , Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

13 " In this section we will develop a fourfold definition of spiritual formation as (1) a process (2) of being conformed (3) to the image of Christ (4) for the sake of others. "

― M. Robert Mulholland Jr. , Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation

14 " Spiritual formation is not an option! The inescapable conclusion is that life itself is a process of spiritual development. The only choice we have is whether that growth moves us toward wholeness in Christ or toward an increasingly dehumanized and destructive mode of being. "

― M. Robert Mulholland Jr. , Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation