Quotes about Holiness

Everything is the "child of God." No exceptions. When you think of it, what else could anything be? All creatures must in some way carry the divine DNA of their Creator.

Such a down-and-then-up perspective does not fit into our Western philosophy of progress, nor into our desire for upward mobility, nor into our religious notions of perfection or holiness.

When you look at any other person, a flower, a honeybee, a mountain—anything—you are seeing the incarnation of God's love for you and the universe you call home.

We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That just might be the central message of how spiritual growth happens, yet nothing in us wants to believe it. If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness so that only the humble and the earnest will find it.

Perfect spirituality is just to imitate God.

It is impossible to make individuals feel sacred inside of a profane, empty, or accidental universe.

Psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things.

This needed work is indeed "spiritual warfare," as the desert monks called it, since it takes conscious and sustained struggle to be aware of the shadow self—which only takes ever more subtle disguises the "holier" you get.

Holiness has to do with who we are in God, where we abide as a "self" with an utterly reconstituted sense of our own personhood.

The incarnational worldview grounds Christian holiness in objective and ontological reality instead of just moral behavior.

Wholeness and holiness will stretch us beyond our small comfort zone. How could they not? There are few in our religious culture who understand the necessity of mature internalised conscience. So wise guides are hard to find. You will have more Aarons building you golden calves than Moses leading you on any Exodus.

In the godly, holy truths are conveyed by way of a taste; gracious men have a spiritual palate as well as a spiritual eye. Grace alters the spiritual taste.