Aldo Capitini Quotes

If I conceive God as existing separately from the world my ideal will be likewise; but if God is nearness to the world I will stay at my post. My spiritual life will then consist in continually relating my particular personality to the centre of all personalities. The world is not everything, but neither is it nothing, it is a multiplicity of finite beings for whom God is absolute nearness.

“We must become better and make ourselves present

“The two main directions of modern ethics with their affirmation of the importance of individual conscience and the extension of moral concern for all rational beings, as worthy of equal rights, imply a hard struggle to deny absolute value to ecclesiastical or state institutions.

If in our life and spiritual experience we have become accustomed to transcending our particular individuality, thus realising more clearly in our faith the universal and liberating value of this act, free from any objectivistic idolatry and if we centre down in our soul, in the reality of all things and all persons, then our meeting with death will be more serene, because already in our life we will have overcome the feeling of our limits as something terrible, insuperable and absolute. Absolute instead will be the act performed in the self, the celebration of God's presence.

If we cannot take away all the grief, all the evil, all the death, we will start with loving everyone, trying ourselves not to give the grief, the evil, the death, with the faith that the rest of the grief, evil and death will disappear.

Even the death we feel approaching is not absolute but only incidental. At that moment we perform yet another act. The act is the form, the way in which death is faced.

I conceive the essential relationship between God and the world to be not one of power and violence, as might think the primitive man, who worships physical strength and imagines that it is a superior power shaking the earth with earthquakes or hurling a thunderbolt through space; it is nearness, something which might seem insignificant but which brings spiritual awareness.

This spiritual freedom, the opposite of insensitivity or laziness, freedom to suffer and to know error, is the nearness and very redemption of God.

Oh special day, unveil your essence which redeems –

In my inner self, where is duality, I am heard.

Grief like anything else – like a stone – is content only; God gives us the form, that serenity, purity and self-possession with which to surround and live grief.

History must change and today we see our problems in a different light, we say that our revolution today here and straightaway has something different, because it is made together with everybody, with our spirit united to everyone, even those not here, it is revolution for everybody and with everybody, not excluding and not destroying for ever, and not eternally damning anyone. It is a choral revolution.

“By now the idea is spreading that revolutions so far are not enough and we must develop a revolution which will remedy their faults and go a step forward. This new revolution is the open revolution”.

I wanted to go away, in the midst of something entirely different,

God involves continuous awareness of finiteness, supreme capacity to feel grief, the renouncing of divine attributes in order to become pure giving, infinite love, redemption and consolation.