Quotes about Reality

Prayer calls me to abandon the present as my only lens on life and commit to look at life from the perspective of reality.

death is literally all around us. We cannot run and we cannot hide and we have no ability to defeat it. Death lives at our address, and there is no escaping.

Not only does sin blind, but as sinners, we participate in our own blindness. We all swindle ourselves into thinking that we are better than we are, that what we're doing is okay when, in fact, it's not okay in the eyes of God. The spiritual reality is that we're like naked homeless people, but we see ourselves as affluent and well-dressed.

Suffering, sadness, and death are not yet no more. It is hard to live in the middle, but that is exactly where we live. We live in a world that is still sadly and terribly broken.

It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.

That's how the world is, and there is nothing an insignificant nobody like you, or even a significant somebody like me, can do about it.

Faith consists in being vitally concerned with that ultimate reality to which I give the symbolical name of God. Whoever reflects earnestly on the meaning of life is on the verge of an act of faith.

Only if God IS ultimate reality, can he be our unconditional concern; only then can he be the object of surrender, obedience, and assent. Faith in anything which has only preliminary reality is idolatrous.

Neither the Ten Commandments nor the great commandment is revelatory if separated from the divine covenant with Israel or from the presence of the Kingdom of God in the Christ. These commandments were meant and should be taken as interpretations of a new reality, not as orders directed against the old reality. They are descriptions and not laws. ~ vol. 1, p.125

Nothing truly real is forgotten eternally, because everything real comes from eternity and goes to eternity.

WHEN THERE IS NO REPENTANCE It is, unfortunately, man's nature to redefine laws — commandments if you will — in order to accommodate his preferred lifestyle. In other words, rather than adjusting his errant deeds to conform to the reality of God's laws, he will move or erase the boundaries of law so as to include that which he doesn't wish to change about his life. If he can't or won't rein in his evil inclination, he will ignore that which

As the Trappist monk Thomas Merton says: 'God is far too real to be met anywhere other than in reality.