Quotes about Meaning

We're engaged more than ever by the possibilities of soul and spirit, and by the nagging suspicion that all of this may not be a grand accident after all; but God, an increasing number of people are asking—what does God have to do with that?

Which takes us back to this creation poem, which grounds all creativity in the questions that are asked of all of us: What kind of world are we making? Which always leads to the pressing personal question: What kind of life am I creating?

I saw that there's no word for spiritual in the Hebrew scriptures (also called the Old Testament). So basic, and yet so revolutionary. There's no word for spiritual, because to call something spiritual would be to imply that other things aren't. In the Bible, everything is spiritual. All of life.

What this particular religious system that I was working in did was ever so subtly divide the world up into two spheres Ãƒ¢Ã¢'¬Ã‚¦ the spiritual, and then the rest of life. As if spiritual is a dimension of life that some people have, and some don't. As if spiritual means less real than the stuff of everyday life like money and bodies and kids and houses and jobs. As if spiritual is about another time and another place when you die and leave this place.

So if that's it, if that's the point of it all, if that's the ticket, the center, the one unavoidable reality, the heart of the Christian faith, why is it that no one used the phrase until the last hundred years or so?

But maybe all of these questions are missing the point. Let's set aside all of the saying and doing and being and cutting holes in roofs and assume it's more simple than that. As some would say, "Just believe.

Why would anybody become a Christian?" That's a question lots of people have—educated, reasonable, modern people who find becoming a Christian an "explosive," not to mention an inconceivable, thing to do.

If a sermon can be resolved in the time it took to deliver it, then it missed something central to what a sermon even is, which is connected with what the Eucharist is.

The actual word "hell" is used roughly twelve times in the New Testament, almost exclusively by Jesus himself. The Greek word that gets translated as "hell" in English is the word "Gehenna." Ge means "valley," and henna means "Hinnom." Gehenna, the Valley of Hinnom, was an actual valley on the south and west side of the city of Jerusalem. Gehenna, in Jesus's day, was the city dump.

A voice said, Look me in the stars And tell me truly, men of earth, If all the soul-and-body scars Were not too much to pay for birth.

In three words I can sum up everything I've

What is truth but to live for an idea?