Quotes about Reality

There are no simple congruities in life or history. The cult of happiness erroneously assumes them.

One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway… We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking… The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.

Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.

Truth is not always about pragmatic problem solving and making things "work," but about reconciling contradictions. Just because something might have some dire effects does not mean it is not true or even good. Just because something pleases people does not make it true either.

If the mystery of the Trinity is the template of all reality, what we have in the Trinitarian God is the perfect balance between union and differentiation, autonomy and mutuality, identity and community.

Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is.

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.

It's true all the time everywhere or it's not true! And that one truth is always Mystery.

It is hard to hear God, but it is even harder not to hear God. The pain one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a greater and longer-lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head on.

We've turned faith into a right to certitude when, in fact, this Trinitarian mystery is whispering quite the opposite: we have to live in exquisite, terrible humility before reality.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803—1882), the great American essayist, said "nothing great is ever achieved without enthusiasm." What a deconstructed culture lacks, because of its deep cynicism and pessimism about reality, is a basic confidence and enthusiasm that is necessary to start almost anything.

most people do not see things as they are, they see things as they are!