Quotes about Otherness

Sin is here the kind of purity that wants the world cleansed of the other rather than the heart cleansed of the evil that drives people out by calling those who are clean "unclean" and refusing to help make clean those who are unclean. Put

There is nothing more foreign, more alien, to our nature than holiness.

God's creative love, precisely by being love, creates new space for there to be things that are genuinely other than God.

The silence to which the losers pledge themselves is the silence of obedience. Losers have nothing to say; nor have they an audience who would listen. The vanquished are effectively of one with the victors, and of one mind; they are completely incapable of opposition, and therefore without any otherness whatsoever.

If God wishes to reveal the love that he harbors for the world, this love has to be something that the world can recognize, in spite of, or in fact in, its being wholly other.

This world is not his world; this life his life.

For a Christian is one whom the world does not know.

The root meaning of the Old Testament word for holiness is the idea of being separate—different and separated from the ordinary. And when applied to God, this separateness implies that he is in a class by himself. He is like a one-of-a-kind diamond, supremely valuable. We can use the word transcendent for this kind of divine separateness. He is so uniquely separate that he transcends all other reality. He is above it and more valuable than all of it.

Religious experience involves an encounter with the holy, the mystery of the totally other that opens like a chasm before humans in unexpected ways, making impossible the denial of its presence.

Sartre felt that Hell is other people, but precisely the opposite is true. Hell is being left alone forever with no other reality than your own consciousness of yourself. It is being locked in a casket of your own internal chaos with no hope of a window, or door leading in light from outside to give you a moment's respite from yourself. Hell is the refusal of the gift of the other.

The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real.

Many of our attempts to understand Christian faith have only cheapened it. I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me. The little we do understand, that grain of sand our minds are capable of grasping, those ideas such as God is good, God feels, God loves, God knows all, are enough to keep our hearts dwelling on His majesty and otherness forever.