Quotes about Love

If Jesus meant for his followers to rule the world, then why did he teach them to wash feet? As difficult as it is to accept, I believe that his death on the cross reveals the God who suffers for love instead of punishing the unloving, the God who lays down his life for his friends.

I and everything I love have come forth from the furnace of the stars by a process so full of unfathomable, life-giving grace that my earlier worrying strikes me as cheap.

How many times since then have I rejected Love because it did not present itself the way I expected, in a form acceptable to me?

So of course when it came time to decide what to do with my life, I decided to go to seminary. What else do you do when you are in love with God?

Finally I asked my friend Judy, who spent many years as a student of Sufism and who embodies fana —the self-annihilating love of God—as well as anyone I know. When I asked her to define spirituality for me, she thought for a moment and said, 'Spirituality is the active pursuit of the God you didn't make up.' I loved that. I also did not know what it meant.

The problem is that people we cannot stand are loved just as much as we are, by a God with an upsetting sense of community.

The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor. That self-canceling feature of my religion is one of the things I like best about it. Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

Come tell us what is saving your life now.

However you define the problematic present-day stranger—the religious stranger, the cultural stranger, the transgendered stranger, the homeless stranger—scripture's wildly impractical solution is to love the stranger as the self.

The problem was that I could not teach other people's religions without loving them as I loved my own, or at least giving it my best shot.

To be in your children's memories tomorrow, you have to be in their lives today.