Martin Thornton > Quotes

“Our souls, that is our selves, are like a jumbled heap of pins: interests, thoughts, emotions, volitions, and feelings -- our life at work, our life of play, our domestic and social life, our life in the limelight, and our life alone -- all a heap of pins pointing in all directions and getting in one another's way. But the slow approach of a magnet sorts the jumble out in a remarkable way, confusion becomes a pattern, each pin points in the same direction, and all is achieved by the focus of magnetic power. It is superfluous to add that the only magnet which can sort out all the intricacies of the human soul is God. In short the state of perfect recollection is that most characteristic expression of the work of the Holy Ghost; the creation of order out of chaos.”
― Martin Thornton, Christian Proficiency

“When the Prayer Book is studied and used, publicly, privately, and constantly, then it takes on its true character of a comprehensive system. And the more it is used privately, the more it is seen to be the basis of an integrated religious life; something to be found not neatly stacked in the church bookcase but in the kitchen and in one's pocket.”
― Martin Thornton, English Spirituality: An Outline of Ascetical Theology According to the English Pastoral Tradition

“Christianity is Christ. It is religion, which means an active quest for Christ, it is Prayer of seeking encounter and living relation with Christ.”
― Martin Thornton, Pastoral Theology: A Reorientation

“The effective lives under the shadow of the other Cross, the tense and terrifying Cross of tragedy. Once more Julian of Norwich indicates the ideal: the Cross is appalling, but because of it, all manner of thing shall be well. The effective symbol is the suffering Christ on the naked crucifix. The speculative emblem is Christus Rex.”
― Martin Thornton, Spiritual Direction

“To speak of the presence of God is dangerously simple to speak of his absence is sophisticated and safe.”
― Martin Thornton, My God: A reappraisal of normal religious experience

“… according to orthodoxy, doctrine is to be translated into ascetic—prayer based on doctrine—from which moral action springs; the Christian metaphysic, its essential dogma, is translated by prayer into the existential ‘encounter with the living Christ’, which is precisely what ascetical theology is all about.”
― Martin Thornton, The Purple Headed Mountain

“Silence is the environment of creativity, the essential condition for letting-be, the birthplace of love.”
― Martin Thornton, Prayer: A New Encounter

“Recollection is not just a religious exercise but that which controls and colours practical daily life: to the Carolines all the duties of one's station, to the Benedictine, manual labour.”
― Martin Thornton, English Spirituality: An Outline of Ascetical Theology According to the English Pastoral Tradition

“Theology cannot be divorced from prayer, meditation is the source, not only of devotion but of knowledge”
― Martin Thornton, Pastoral Theology: A Reorientation

“Ascetical theology and spiritual direction, far from being esoteric subjects on the fringe of Christianity, are at the very heart of all theology which can claim to be incarnational, and of all pastoral practice whatsoever.”
― Martin Thornton, English Spirituality: An Outline of Ascetical Theology According to the English Pastoral Tradition

“The Eucharist is the living heart of the Body of Christ, of the Office as its continual beat, its pulse, and private prayer as the circulation of the blood giving life is strength of its several members”
― Martin Thornton, Christian Proficiency

“Pride makes men want to be angels, presumption makes good honest Christians want to be Mystics.”
― Martin Thornton, The Purple Headed Mountain

“Margery (Kempe) gently teaches and guides. Julian (of Norwich) is the mystical professor: Margery is the Sunday-school teacher and comparative values apart, it is the latter whom most of us need.”
― Martin Thornton, Margery Kempe

“She (Margery Kempe) may be a little over-emotional, she may be an ‘enthusiast’, she may be a pest; but she is as English as a Norfolk hedgerow.”
― Martin Thornton, Margery Kempe

“Spiritual direction is the application of theology to the life of prayer. Since prayer, as progressive relationship with God in Christ, is carried on in the world, it ultimately controls all aspects of life.”
― Martin Thornton, Spiritual Direction

“Development can arise only out of the growth of a living tradition; the Church itself must lead, and it is only from a revivified spirituality within the Church that a larger Christian influence upon the modern world can spring. Any attempt to create a radical spirituality which will be immediately embraced by the modern masses, the attempt to scrap everything and start from scratch, is impossibly naïve and unrealistic.”
― Martin Thornton, Rock and the River

“The spiritual director is a physician of the soul, one who heals, absolves, restores and maintains spiritual health, thus producing the conditions for growth.”
― Martin Thornton, Spiritual Direction

“Only the living God of experience closed the creed with flesh and blood, exuding redemptive power upon the world.”
― Martin Thornton, My God: A reappraisal of normal religious experience

“The Pattern of sacrament, office, personal encounter and recollection, though changing in detail through the ages, remains the unchallenged norm throughout the Church’s history. It alone can instruct ordinary Christians in how to respond to grace and grow in the love of God for the service of the world. It alone can guide modern man in what to do rather than in what to believe or how to think. And however anxious it is to avoid intellectualism, the “how to think” of modern Protestantism is no less theoretical than the “what to believe” of the Middle Ages. Both need the mediation of ascetical theology and spiritual guidance.”
― Martin Thornton, Rock and the River

“The point is that theology can never be of practical use without prayer, but I passionately distain any suggestion that rendering theology useful is the purpose of prayer: Theology should serve prayer, not vice versa.”
― Martin Thornton, The Function of Theology

“The whole life of Christ was one of unbroken adoration, but because it was spent in the world of humankind it was an adoration which burst forth into every aspect of life and carried the whole world with it.”
― Martin Thornton, Pastoral Theology: A Reorientation

“There can be no creative religion without discipline and no redemption without suffering.”
― Martin Thornton, The Purple Headed Mountain

“God might be disclosed in the sanctuary, but he is most certainly in the kitchen.”
― Martin Thornton, My God: A reappraisal of normal religious experience

“Numinous experience is no practical guide to prayer, no short cut to mysticism; but an explanation of what does sometimes happen;—of what is or is not: and which is always beyond our control.”
― Martin Thornton, Rural synthesis;: The religious basis of rural culture

“Faith in the Real Presence, however interpreted, means encounter with the risen and glorified Lord; Thanksgiving for the redemption of the world created universe enters in. The Eucharist takes on a cosmic significance as it moves from a discursive series of prayers towards an integrated act.”
― Martin Thornton, Spiritual Direction

“I am extremely doubtful about the survival of the modern world while remaining convinced that the Mystical Body of Christ is the one thing that can never be destroyed. But the Church, which is both rock and river, has a more vital commission than merely to survive; it is to serve, sanctify and redeem. And if the rock is a supremely safe and not altogether uncomfortable place, it offers no inducement to dogmatic slumber.”
― Martin Thornton, Rock and the River

“The spirituality to which our speculations are pointing is more of a life than a rule, more of a journey than a map, or more precisely, a journey in which the map, the useful, remains in the background.”
― Martin Thornton, Prayer: A New Encounter

“The book of Common Prayer is fundamental to our understanding of all ages of English spirituality. It is the development and con- summation of our patristic and biblical tradition, it embodies principles for which the fourteenth-century asceticists had been groping, and in its final form it is the product' of the Caroline age.”
― Martin Thornton, English Spirituality: An Outline of Ascetical Theology According to the English Pastoral Tradition

“You can make so much noise scaring off the demons that you can never hear God knocking; You can take such pains to avoid sin that there is no outlet, or inlet, for grace.”
― Martin Thornton, My God: A reappraisal of normal religious experience

“The Eucharist is the creed in dramatic action.”
― Martin Thornton, Prayer: A New Encounter