Ian Morgan Cron > Quotes

“A boy needs a father to show him how to be in the world. He needs to be given swagger, taught how to read a map so that he can recognize the roads that lead to life and the paths that lead to death, how to know what love requires, and where to find steel in the heart when life makes demands on us that are greater than we think we can endure.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me: A Memoir. . . of Sorts

“The Enneagram is a tool that awakens our compassion for people just as they are, not the people we wish they would become so our lives would become easier.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“The Enneagram doesn’t put you in a box. It shows you the box you’re already in and how to get out of it.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“Once you know the dark side of your personality, simply give God consent to do for you what you’ve never been able to do for yourself, namely, bring meaningful and lasting change to your life.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“Beauty can break a heart and make it think about something more spiritual than the mindless routine we go through day after day to get by. Francis was a singer, a poet, an actor. He knew that the imagination was a stealth way into people's souls, a way to get all of us to think about God. For him, beauty was its own apologetic. That's why a church should care about the arts. They inspire all of us to think about the eternal.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale

“Risking vulnerability and love is what takes courage.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“Anyone who says they’re “trying” to be a good Christian right away reveals they have no idea what a Christian is. Christianity is not something you do as much as something that gets done to you. Once you know the dark side of your personality, simply give God consent to do for you what you’ve never been able to do for yourself, namely, bring meaningful and lasting change to your life.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“Ironically, the term personality is derived from the Greek word for mask ( persona), reflecting our tendency to confuse the masks we wear with our true selves, even long after the threats of early childhood have passed.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“your number is not determined by what you do so much as by why you do it.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“All of us are meaning-seekers. We approach every painting, novel, film, symphony, or ballet unconsciously hoping it will move us one step further on the journey toward answering the question ‘Why am I here?’ People living in the postmodern world, however, are faced with an excruciating dilemma. Their hearts long to find ultimate meaning, while at the same time their critical minds do not believe it exists. We are homesick, but have no home. So we turn to the arts and aesthetics to satisfy our thirst for the Absolute. But if we want to find our true meaning in life, our search cannot end there. Art or beauty is not the destination; it is a signpost pointing toward our desired destination.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“Either way, always maintain a compassionate stance toward yourself as God does. Self-contempt will never produce lasting, healing change in our lives, only love.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“Miss Annie, is it wrong for me to believe it was Jesus who asked my forgiveness?" I asked her.

She frowned and shook her head, "Lord, what do they teach you at that school?" she said. Then she faced me head-on. "Did God humble himself by becoming a man?" she asked, every word spoken more loudly than the one before.

"Yes, ma'am," I said. I'd never used the word ma'am before, but it seemed an excellent time to start.

"Did he humble himself by dying on the cross to show us how much he loved us? she asked, waving her spatula at me.

My eyes widened and I nodded, yes.

Miss Annie's body relaxed, and she put her hand on her hip. "So why wouldn't Jesus humble himself and tell a boy he was sorry for letting him down if he knew it would heal his heart?" she asked.

"But if Jesus is perfect--"

Miss Annie ambled the five or six feet that separated us and took my hand. "Son," she said, rubbing my knuckles with her thumb, "love always stoops.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me: A Memoir. . . of Sorts

“Francis taught me that if we spent less time worrying about how to share our faith with someone on an airplane and more time thinking about how to live radically generous lives, more people would start taking our message seriously.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale

“How, as John Calvin put it, “without knowledge of self there is no knowledge of God.” “For”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“First, if Francis were around today, he'd say our church community relies too much on words to tell others about our faith. For Francis, the gathered community was as potent a form of witness as words. He was convinced that how we live together is what attracts people to faith.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale

“the source of most of your problems is you.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“Sooner or later we must distinguish between what we are not and what we are. We must accept the fact that we are not what we would like to be. We must cast off our false, exterior self like the cheap and showy garment that it is”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“..."love always stoops.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me: A Memoir. . . of Sorts

“There is a law in physics that applies to the soul. No two objects can occupy the same space at the same time; one thing must displace another. If your heart’s crammed tight with material things and a thirst for wealth, there’s no space left for God. Francis wanted a void in his life that could only be filled with Jesus. Poverty wasn’t a burden for him — it was a pathway to spiritual freedom.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“Beauty can break a heart and make it think about something more spiritual than the mindless routine we go through day after day to get by.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“I'm beginning to see that there's a difference between art that trusts beauty's simple power to point people to God and Christian art that's consciously propagandistic. My Uncle Kenny, with whom I spent most of my time in Italy, said something profound--that you can make art about the Light, or you can make art that shows what the Light reveals about the world.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale

“His will to live was waning, and it made him almost transparent, as though rather than dying, he might just disappear one day, leaving behind only a vague scent of regret.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me: A Memoir. . . of Sorts

“Atticus tells her, “Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“I love a lot of people, understand none of them.” Flannery O’Connor”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“Life always comes down to who's driving”
― Ian Morgan Cron

“Human beings are wired for survival. As little kids we instinctually place a mask called personality over parts of our authentic self to protect us from harm and make our way in the world. Made up of innate qualities, coping strategies, conditioned reflexes and defense mechanisms, among lots of other things, our personality helps us know and do what we sense is required to please our parents, to fit in and relate well to our friends, to satisfy the expectations of our culture and to get our basic needs met.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“May you recognize in your life the presence, power, and light of your soul. May you realize that you are never alone, that your soul in its brightness and belonging connects you intimately with the rhythm of the universe. May you have respect for your individuality and difference. May you realize that the shape of your soul is unique, that you have a special destiny here, that behind the façade of your life there is something beautiful and eternal happening. May you learn to see your self with the same delight, pride, and expectation with which God sees you in every moment.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery

“When the church first began, it was a pacifistic movement known for its outspoken criticism of any form of bloodshed or violence. After Constantine legalized Christianity, ‘just war’ theory emerged, which meant that Christians could participate in wars if certain criteria were satisfied. By the year 1100, Christians were launching Crusades and telling the faithful that killing Muslims would secure them a spot in heaven! What happened? Somewhere along the way we forgot that Jesus intended the Sermon on the Mount to be an actual, concrete program for living. He wanted us to actually live it, not just admire it as a nice but unrealistic ideal. I mean, what would happen if Christians dedicated themselves to peacemaking with the same discipline and focus that armies do for war? What difference could it make? We have to revisit the early church’s teachings about reconciliation, peacemaking, and the Sermon on the Mount and ask ourselves if we’re living them out or tiptoeing around them.”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale

“The artist’s job is to reveal the real nature of things through picture or story or song, to show the rest of us what is really there when we are content with the misleading surface of things. As Pope John Paul II has written, “Artists are constantly in search of the hidden meaning of things, and their torment is to succeed in expressing the world of the ineffable.” Through their work, in the words of the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes, “the knowledge of God can be better revealed and the preaching of the Gospel can become clearer to the human mind.” DAVID MILLS, “Imaginative Orthodoxy: The Art of Telling the Christian Story,” Touchstone”
― Ian Morgan Cron, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim’s Tale