Quotes about Growth

If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate.

God brings us—through failure—from unconsciousness to ever-deeper consciousness and conscience.

The bottom line of the Gospel is that most of us have to hit some kind of bottom before we even start the real spiritual journey.

It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message of male initiation rites is LIFE — IS — HARD.

We do not handle suffering. Suffering handles us.

We do not think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

Frankly, Jesus came to show us how to be human much more than how to be spiritual, and the process still seems to be in its early stages.

People who have been initiated broke through in what felt like breaking down.

St. Bonaventure (1221—1274) taught that to work up to loving God, start by loving the very humblest and simplest things, and then move up from there.

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

If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest will find it! A "perfect" person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection.

In this book I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That might just be the central message of how spiritual growth happens; yet nothing in us wants to believe it. I actually think it is the only workable meaning of any remaining notion of "original sin.