Aldo Capitini Quotes

Thus God is not to be lived in contemplation but in acts, in actual practice. In giving of our best, in the intrinsic value of every act, God descends as person and strengthens us.

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.

The fundamental importance of the inner self frees us from the conception of evolution as a purely natural process. The Spirit is not something, which evolves before our eyes, flowing as if it were a river. This is a naturalistic conception of the Spirit, which ignores the inner self as that centre through which everything passes, in whose moral conscience all reality is idealised. If reality evolved by itself there would be no place to speak of duty and conscience. But God does not consist in being, but in choosing. We cannot define God because we can experience him only in the present and in the act which comes from our inner self.

Every act involves a discovery of finite beings and seeing them as such, one understands ever better the reality of God's presence, since finiteness by itself would be insufficient. God is the continuous miracle. It may be said that if it is continuous it is no longer a miracle. But miracle there is, although it does not consist in any outstanding or exceptional event. The miracle is that without God all finite things and their mutual relationships fade away into abstractions – whereas with God, they live in our spirit, in a conscious relationship. The essential construction of reality lies in this and not in the activism of the materialists who have little awareness of the intimate religious relationship.

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

We approach one another as if we were separate entities and see the other only from a limited point of view – not as part of us; we do not open ourselves to others with complete faith. When we first encounter objects or persons we think, because of this feeling of separateness, that they are just as we find them and nothing else. But if my attitude towards this person is of love, interest, oneness, then I will lose that first impression of having accidentally found them and will grow beyond my limitations towards something at once more intimate and more vast.

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.

The true synthesis is only with the unforeseen.

From here the sure beginning of infinity,

To confess to freedom, the highest habit;

Oh special day, unveil your essence which redeems –

Beyond the tragic blows and the brooding over violence,

I am reborn when I say a * “thou”.

From a high tower I have looked to the four points of the horizon.

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