Quotes about Relationships

As I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son in Galilee, but through the mongrel collection that comprises my local church and every other such gathering in God's name. (p. 68, Church: Why Bother?)

Ungrace does its work quietly and lethally, like a poisonous, undetectable gas. A father dies unforgiven. A mother who once carried a child in her own body does not speak to that child for half its life. The toxin steals on, from generation to generation.

Christianity is not a purely intellectual, internal faith. It can only be lived in community.

The presence of another caring person doubles the amount of pain a person can endure

Ungrace causes cracks to fissure open between mother and daughter, father and son, brother and sister, between scientists, and prisoners, and tribes, and races. Left alone, cracks widen, and for the resulting chasms of ungrace there is only one remedy: the frail rope-bridge of forgiveness.

Think of all the squabbles Adam and Eve must have had in the course of their nine hundred years," wrote Martin Luther. "Eve would say, 'You ate the apple,' and Adam would retort, 'You gave it to me.

At the end of her story she said simply, "As I look back, this is what matters. I have loved and been loved, and all the rest is just background music.

I'm simply amazed at how God worked in response to my prayers. I see a softening in my niece's husband, an agnostic. I see transformation in the members of my small group, and spiritual awakenings in my neighbors. I see growth in my own marriage.

God's arms are always extended; we are the ones who turn away.

It makes all the difference in the world whether I view my neighbor as a potential convert or as someone whom God already loves.

As Dorothy Day put it, "I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.

A healthy family builds up the weakest members while not tearing down the strong.