Quotes about Struggle

I worry about "true believers" who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all, as Thomas the Apostle and Mother Teresa learned to do.

You are supposed to struggle with spiritual texts, but when you make the Bible into a quick answer book, you largely remain at your present level of awareness. There are groups who would describe the Bible as an answer book for all of life's problems. The Bible is actually a conflict book. It is filled with seeming contradictions or paradoxes and, if you read it honestly and humbly, it should actually create problems for you!

You cannot avoid sin or mistake anyway (Romans 5:12), but if you try too fervently, it often creates even worse problems.

Without a transcendent connection, each of us is stuck in his own little psyche, struggling to create meaning and produce an identity all by himself. When we inevitably fail at this-because we can't do it alone-we suffer shame and self-defeat. Or we try to pretend that our small universe of country, ethnicity, team, or denomination is actually the center of the world.

Almost all people are carrying a great and secret hurt, even when they don't know it.

Perhaps it has never struck you how consistently the great religious teachers and founders leave home, go on pilgrimage to far-off places, do a major turnabout, choose downward mobility; and how often it is their parents, the established religion at that time, spiritual authorities, and often even civil authorities who fight against them.

We do not want to embark on a further journey if it feels like going down, especially after we have put so much sound and fury into going up. This is surely the first and primary reason why many people never get to the fullness of their own lives. The supposed achievements of the first half of life have to fall apart and show themselves to be wanting in some way, or we will not move further. Why would we?

Do not be shocked, but I suspect some priests' and ministers' moral failures are actually very helpful to their own "salvation" and necessary for their growing up.

I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

Jesus was killed in a collision of cross-purposes, conflicting interests, and half-truths, caught between the demands of an empire and the religious establishment of his day.

You fight things only when you are directly called and equipped to do so. We all become a well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. You lose all your inner freedom.

Going somewhere good means having to go through and with the bad, and being unable to hold ourselves above it or apart from it.