Anthony Bloom > Quotes

“To pluck a flower means to take possession of it, and it also means to kill it.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“God can save the sinner you are, but not the saint you pretend to be.”
― Anthony Bloom

“The word 'humility' comes from the Latin word 'humus' which means fertile ground. Humility is the situation of the earth. The earth is always there, always taken for granted, never remembered, always trodden on by everyone, somewhere we cast and pour out all the refuse, all we don't need. It's there, silent and accepting everything and in a miraculous way making out of all the refuse new richness in spite of corruption, transforming corruption itself into a power of life and a new possibility of creativeness, open to the sunshine, open to the rain, ready to receive any seed we sow and capable of bringing thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold, out of every seed.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“So often when we say 'I love you' we say it with a huge 'I' and a small 'you'. We use love as a conjunction instead of it being a verb implying action. It's no good just gazing out into open space hoping to see the Lord; instead we have to look closely at our neighbour, someone whom God has willed into existence, someone whom God has died for. Everyone we meet has a aright to exist, because he has value in himself, and we are not used to this. The acceptance of otherness is a danger to us, it threatens us. To recognise the other's right to be himself might mean recognising his right to kill me. But if we set a limit to this right to exist, it's no right at all. Love is difficult. Christ was crucified because he taught a kind of love which is a terror for men, a love which demands total surrender: it spells death.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“As long as we ourselves are real, as long as we are truly ourselves, God can be present and can do something with us. But the moment we try to be what we are not, there is nothing left to say or have; we become a fictitious personality, an unreal presence, and this unreal presence cannot be approached by God.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“In the life of Moses, in Hebrew folklore, there is a remarkable passage. Moses finds a shepherd in the desert. He spends the day with the shepherd and helps him milk his ewes, and at the end of the day he sees that the shepherd puts the best milk he has in a wooden bowl, which he places on a flat stone some distance away. So Moses asks him what it is for, and the shepherd replies 'This is God's milk.' Moses is puzzled and asks him what he means. The shepherd says 'I always take the best milk I possess, and I bring it as on offering to God.' Moses, who is far more sophisticated than the shepherd with his naive faith, asks, 'And does God drink it?' 'Yes,' replies the shepherd, 'He does.' Then Moses feels compelled to enlighten the poor shepherd and he explains that God, being pure spirit, does not drink milk. Yet the shepherd is sure that He does, and so they have a short argument, which ends with Moses telling the shepherd to hide behind the bushes to find out whether in fact God does come to drink the milk. Moses then goes out to pray in the desert. The shepherd hides, the night comes, and in the moonlight the shepherd sees a little fox that comes trotting from the desert, looks right, looks left and heads straight towards the milk, which he laps up, and disappears into the desert again. The next morning Moses finds the shepherd quite depressed and downcast. 'What's the matter?' he asks. The shepherd says 'You were right, God is pure spirit, and He doesn't want my milk.' Moses is surprised. He says 'You should be happy. You know more about God than you did before.' 'Yes, I do' says the shepherd, 'but the only thing I could do to express my love for Him has been taken away from me.' Moses sees the point. He retires into the desert and prays hard. In the night in a vision, God speaks to him and says 'Moses, you were wrong. It is true that I am pure spirit. Nevertheless I always accepted with gratitude the milk which the shepherd offered me, as the expression of his love, but since, being pure spirit, I do not need the milk, I shared it with this little fox, who is very fond of milk.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“St. John Chrysostom said 'Find the door of your heart, you will discover it is the door of the kingdom of God.' So it is inward that we must turn, and not outward - but inward in a very special way. I'm not saying that we must become introspective. I don't mean that we must go inward in the way one does in psychoanalysis or psychology. It is not a journey into my own inwardness, it is a journey through my own self, in order to emerge from the deepest level of self into the place where He is, the point at which God and I meet.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“There is absolutely no need to run after time to catch it. It does not run away from us, it runs towards us. Whether you are intent on the next minute coming your way, or whether you are completely unaware of it, it will come your way. The future, whatever you do about it, will become thepresent, and so there is no need to try to jump out of the present into the future. We can simply wait for it to be there, and in that respect we can … be completely stable [still] and yet move in time, because it is time that moves. You know the situation when you are in a car or on a train and you sit back, if you are not driving, and you look out of the window; you can read, you can think you can relax, and yet the train moves, and at a certain moment, what was the future, whether it is the next station or the last station to which you are going, will be present.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“Theophan the Recluse said, 'Most people are like a shaving of wood which is curled round its central emptiness.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“As Christians we are always in tension - in an anguish and at the same time in bliss. This is mad, ridiculous. But it is true - accepting the dark night just as we accept the brilliance of the day. We have to make an act of surrender - if I am in Christ, there are moments when I must share the cry of the Lord on the cross and the anguish in the garden of Gethsemane. There is a way of being defeated, even in our faith - and this is a way of sharing the anguish of the Lord. I don't believe that we should ever say, 'This cannot happen to you.' If we are Christians we should go through this life, accepting the life and the world, not trying to create a falsified world.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“Abandon all, you will receive heaven.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“The day when God is absent, when He is silent—that is the beginning of prayer. Not when we have a lot to say, but when we say to God, "I can't live without You, why are You so cruel, so silent?" This knowledge that we must find or die—that makes us break through to the place where we are in the Presence.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“There are other ways too in which God is "absent." As long as we ourselves are real, as long as we are truly ourselves, God can be present and can do something with us. But the moment we try to be what we are not, there is nothing left to say or have; we become a fictitious personality, an unreal presence, and this unreal presence cannot be approached by God.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“Because we don't know yet how to act without an outer reason, we discover that we don't know what to do with ourselves, and then we begin to be increasingly bored. So first of all, you must learn to sit with yourselves and face boredom, drawing all the possible conclusions.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“Have you never noticed that to be rich always means an impoverishment on another level? It is enough for you to say 'I have this watch, it is mine', and close your hand on it, to be in possession of a watch and to have lost a hand. And if you close your mind on your riches, if you close your heart so that you can keep what is in it safe, never to lose it, then it becomes as small as the thing on which you have closed yourself in.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“...one of our great spiritual guides, Theophan the Recluse, says: 'The awareness of God shall be with you as clearly as a toothache.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“The basic thing is that I never ask myself what the result of any action will be--that is God's concern. The only question I keep asking myself in life is: what should I do at this particular moment? What should I say? All you can do is to be at every single moment as true as you can with all the power in your being—and then leave it to God to use you, even despite yourself.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“Very often we do not find sufficient intensity in our prayer, sufficient conviction, sufficient faith, because our despair is not deep enough. We want God in addition to so many other things we have, we want His help, but simultaneously we are trying to get help wherever we can, and we keep God in store for our last push. We address ourselves to the princes and the sons of men, and we say "O God, give them strength to do it for me." Very seldom do we turn away from the princes and sons of men and say "I will not ask anyone for help, I would rather have Your help." If our despair comes from sufficient depth, if what we ask for, cry for, is so essential that it sums up all the needs of our life, then we find words of prayer and we will be able to reach the core of the prayer, the meeting with God.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“You cannot, having never prayed before, start with eighteen hours of dialogue and prayer with God continuously like this while you do other things. But you can easily single out one or two moments and put all your energy into them. Simply turn your eyes Godwards, smile at Him and go into it. There are moments when you can tell God 'I simply must have a rest, I have not strength to be with You all the time', which is perfectly true. You are still not capable of bearing God's company all the time. Well, say so. God knows that perfectly well, whatever you do about it. Go apart, say for a moment 'I'll just have a rest. For a moment I accept to be less saintly'.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“One of the dangers in prayer is to try to find words that will be somehow on the level of God. Unfortunately, as none of us are on a level with God, we fall short and waste a great deal of time in trying to find the right words.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“Generally, it is greed, fear and curiosity which make us live outwardly. A French scientist who worked in America, Alexis Carrel, said in a book called "Man the Unknown" that if you ask yourself where your personality ends you will see that the tongue of a greed person is projected like tentacles towards all the edibles of the world; the eyes of the curious person are like tentacles projected and attached to everything around; the ears of the eavesdropper become long and wide and go far far afield. If you could draw a picture of what you look like in those terms you would see that precious little is left of you inside, because everything is extroverted. So that the first thing one must do is to detach the tentacles and bring them in. You cannot go inwards if you are completely outward.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“First of all, it is very important to remember that prayer is an encounter and a relationship, a relationship which is deep, and this relationship cannot be forced either on us or on God. The fact that God can make Himself present or can leave us with the sense of His absence is part of this live and real relationship. If we could mechanically draw Him into an encounter, force Him to meet us, simply because we have chosen this moment to meet Him, there would be no relationship and no encounter.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“Then at a certain moment they lose heart, and the storm that was outside comes inside -- the storm is within them too. Anguish, death no longer simply circle round, they come inside. And then they turn to Christ and do what we very often do with God: we look at God in time of stress and tragedy, and we are indignant that He is so peaceful. The story in the Gospel underlines it by saying that Christ was sleeping with His head on a pillow- the final insult. They are dying and He is comfortable. This is exactly what we feel about God so often. How dare He be blissful, how dare He be so comfortable when I am in trouble? And the disciples do exactly what we do so very often. Instead of coming to God and saying 'You are peace, you are the Lord, say a word and my servant will be healed, say a word and things will come right', they shake Him out of His sleep and say 'Don't you care that we are perishing?' In other words, 'If you can do nothing, at least don't sleep. If you can do nothing better, then at least die in anguish with us.' Christ reacts, He gets up and says 'Men of little faith!' and brushing them aside, He turns towards the storm and, projecting His inner stillness, His harmony and peace on the storm He says 'Be still, be quiet' and everything is quiet again.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“The moment you reach rock bottom, the moment you are aware of your utter dispossession of all things, then you are on the fringe of the kingdom of God, you are nearly aware that God is love and that He is upholding you by His love. And at that point you can say two things simultaneously. You can pray out of your utter misery, dereliction and poverty, and you can rejoice that you are so rich with the love of God. But this is only if you have come to the point of discovering it, because as long as you imagine you are rich there is nothing to thank God for, and you cannot be aware of being loved. Too often the kind of thanksgiving we offer is too much a general thanksgiving, and the kind of repentance we bring to God is too much a general repentance.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“We want something from Him, not Him at all. Is that a relationship? Do we behave in that way with our friends? Do we aim at what friendship can give us or is it the friend whom we love? Is this true with regard to the Lord?”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“We go away from him, but he does not go away from us. He waits for our return, he longs for our return; he cries over our misery and our betrayal of him and of ourselves, and the moment we appear in the distance, he is there waiting for us, rushing towards us to greet us, so that, when we come, we do not come as mendicants, we do not come as beggars, we do not have to come kneeling down before him who would stand there as a judge condemning us by his own righteousness. He rushes towards us, so that we can know that we are longed for, we are loved in our misery and in our sinfulness, not approved in our sinfulness, but loved with a love that never falters, never diminishes, that burns bright, that is perhaps more tragically deep than the quiet and peaceful love which a father can have for his son when there is nothing wrong in his life. This is, I believe, the best image of confession as an encounter with God, and there is nothing else in confession that matters. We, like the Prodigal Son, come in order to meet God from whom we have parted, whom we have rejected, whom we have discarded, and are met by a Father with open arms. This we must remember, because he is not meeting us as Judge but as Saviour.”
― Anthony Bloom, Coming Closer to Christ

“What we call forgiveness is often putting the other one on probation, nothing more; and lucky are the forgiven people if it is only probation and not remand.”
― Anthony Bloom, Living Prayer: The Pocket Library of Spiritual Wisdom

“Whenever I speak I speak with all the conviction and belief which is in me. I stake my life on what I am saying. It's not the words themselves that are important but reaching down to the level of people's convictions. This is the basis of communication, this is where we really meet one another. If people want to ridicule me, that's fine; but if it produces a spark in them and we can talk, then it means we are really talking about something which concerns us deeply.”
― Anthony Bloom

“So often when we say "I love you" we say it with a huge "I" and a small "you." We use love as a conjunction instead of it being a verb implying action. It's no good just gazing out into open space hoping to see the Lord; instead we have to look closely at our neighbor, someone whom God has willed into existence, someone whom God has died for.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray

“And there is that time when there is a longing in the heart for God Himself, not for His gifts, but for God Himself.”
― Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray