Quotes about Growth

The offended ones feel the need to offend back those who they think have offended them, creating defensiveness on the part of the presumed offenders, which often becomes a new offensive—ad infinitum. There seems to be no way out of this self-defeating and violent Ping-Pong game—except growing up spiritually.

Three steps forward, two steps back.

To preach the Reign of God, dear brothers and sisters, we have to break with our dependency on a perfectible self.

you learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that you eventually learn what the balance feels like. The skater pushing both right and left eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with.

Shadow work is humiliating work, but properly so. If you do not eat such humiliations with regularity and make friends with … all those who reveal to you and convict you of your own denied faults…, you will certainly remain in the first half of life forever.

Going somewhere good means having to go through and with the bad, and being unable to hold ourselves above it or apart from it.

In this negative frame, the quickest ticket to heaven, enlightenment, or salvation is "unworthiness" itself, or at least a willingness to face our own smallness and incapacity.

If you realize that there is a further journey, you might do the warm-up act quite differently, which would better prepare you for what follows.

for Action and Contemplation puts it this way: "The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better." I

Without an evolutionary worldview, Christianity does not really understand, much less foster, growth or change. Nor does it know how to respect and support where history is heading.

You surrender your need to control your partner, and finally the relationship blossoms. Yet each time it is a choice—and each time it is a kind of dying.

Of course, clergy cannot talk about a further journey if they have not gone on it themselves.