“A Sufi tells of the old, old woman who was on pilgrimage to the shrine at the top of the mountain at the height of the monsoon season. ‘You will never be able to climb that mountain in weather like this’, the innkeeper said on a dark, wet night. ‘Oh, my friend’, the old woman said, ‘that will be no problem at all. My heart has been there all my life. Now it is simply a matter of taking my body there as well.’ It is time now in religious history to form from pilgrimage; to ignore the storms around us and to press on, press on, press on to where our hearts await our bodies this very day.” —Joan Chittister OSB
Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wild, editors, The Monastic Way: Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Living; A Book of daily readings, (Grand Rapids, Michgan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2006), p. 17.