Quotes about Forms

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.

The 'last issue of history' will be a conflict between 'Atheism and its countless forms and Calvinism. The other systems will be crushed as the half-rotten ice between two great bergs.

This implies that all truly serious and spiritual forms of religion aspire at least implicitly to a contemplative awakening both of the individual and of the group.

When the law is separated from Christ, nothing is left but empty forms.

Be assured that Christianity is something more than forms and creeds and ceremonies: there is life, and power, and reality, in our holy faith.

Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.

Faith makes us, and not we it; and faith makes its own forms.

No one should be deceived by the glamor of the ceremonies and entangled in the multitude of pompous forms, and thus lose the simplicity of the mass itself

As I said, this Spirit has two jobs. First, she creates diversity, as exemplified in the metaphor of wind—just breathing out ever-new life in endlessly diverse forms. But then the Spirit has another job: that of the Great Connector—of all those very diverse things! All this pluriform life, the Spirit keeps in harmony and "mutual deference"267—"so there shall be one Christ, loving Himself," as Augustine daringly put it.268

When the heart is far from God, worship is vain, empty, and nonexistent, no matter how proper the forms are. The experience of the heart is the defining, vital, indispensable essence of worship.

There is indeed good and there is indeed evil, and both walk the earth. But good has little to do with the forms of religion, and evil has as little to do with so much behavior condemned by religion. Both good and evil vie for the passions of the heart. For love!

Religion is best when it points beyond itself, like Isaiah or John the Baptist. It is worst when it gives you just enough of the forms to inoculate you against the substance, when it substitutes rituals for reality, the container for the contents, the wineskins for the ecstatic wine.