Christian Quotes on Detachment

"When you give yourself away you find that a new and more real self has somehow been given to you." 

- Peter Kreeft

"Once we take our eyes away from ourselves, from our interests, from our own rights, privileges, ambitions - then they will become clear to see Jesus around us." 

- Mother Teresa

"To be a real man is to be unattached - not from responsibility or justice - but from those dependencies that inhibit responsibility and justice."

- Tarek Saab, Gut Check

'One of the things which we must be very firm about, if we are to please our Lord, is to cast far from us everything that could remove us from the love of our brethren. We should make every effort to love them with a tender charity, for Supreme Truth has said: This is how all will know you are my disciples, etc. [John 13:35]'

--St. Ignatius of Loyola

'Seeing that this divine Shepherd has taken so many steps seeking you, you will return Him thanks for it and, uniting all your steps to His, ask His help to walk henceforth only in the way of His love. Say often to Him: O my kind Shepherd, detach me from all earthly things and from myself, that I may be united to Thee.'

--St. Margaret Mary Alacoque

St. John of the Cross on Detachment, taking spirituality to its fullness; Prayer and Fasting are not enough; spiritual poverty

This passage from St. John of the Cross criticizes our conditional love for God, our desire to get good feelings from God, warm and fuzzies that make us feel like God is with us.  But true spiritual poverty, which we must have in order to be fully obedient to God, is to love God even without having those feelings, even if we don't feel His presence at all.  After reading this, I thought that all relationships are really this way.  Sometimes parents have to be absent from their children for the sake of the children's growth and benefit.  Many marriages end up in divorce when the good feelings are gone because the love for each other was only conditional love, due to their attachment to a false idea of what a marriage should be.  If marriage reflects God's relationship with us, then we should expect times when we don't sense comforting feelings from our spouses, periods of dryness, and we should know that these periods will pass but we have to wait patiently and trust in God's plan for us.  In the end, the joy is amazing!

St. John of the Cross, 3.8: … and continuing in prayer and pursuing mortification; but they attain not to detachment and …

5. Oh, that one could show us how to understand, practise and experience what this counsel is which our Saviour here gives us concerning self-denial,[246] so that spiritual persons might see in how different a way they should conduct themselves upon this road from that which many of them think proper! For they believe that any kind of retirement and reformation of life suffices; and others are content with practising the virtues and continuing in prayer and pursuing mortification; but they attain not to detachment and poverty or selflessness[247] or spiritual purity (which are all one), which the Lord here commends to us; for they prefer feeding and clothing their natural selves with spiritual feelings and consolations, to stripping themselves of all things, and denying themselves all things, for God's sake. For they think that it suffices to deny themselves worldly things without annihilating and purifying themselves of spiritual attachment. Wherefore it comes to pass that, when there presents itself to them any of this solid and perfect spirituality, consisting in the annihilation of all sweetness in God, in aridity, distaste and trial, which is the true spiritual cross, and the detachment of the spiritual poverty of Christ, they flee from it as from death, and seek only sweetness and delectable communion with God. This is not self-denial and detachment of spirit, but spiritual gluttony. Herein, spiritually, they become enemies of the Cross of Christ; for true spirituality seeks for God's sake that which is distasteful rather than that which is delectable; and inclines itself rather to suffering than to consolation; and desires to go without all blessings for God's sake rather than to possess them; and to endure aridities and afflictions rather than to enjoy sweet communications, knowing that this is to follow Christ and to deny oneself, and that the other is perchance to seek oneself in God, which is clean contrary to love. For to seek oneself in God is to seek the favours and refreshments of God; but to seek God in oneself is not only to desire to be without both of these for God's sake, but to be disposed to choose, for Christ's sake, all that is most distasteful, whether in relation to God or to the world; and this is love of God.