Quotes about Transformation

Ken Wilber described the later stages of life well when he said that the classic spiritual journey always begins elitist and ends egalitarian. Always!

he just tells him to "descend" from his power position, "go away and get rid of all your possessions." Money is only the metaphor here; the real possession he has to get rid of is his ego.

Falling upward is a "secret" of the soul, known not by thinking about it or proving it but only by risking it—at least once.

15:9). Big Truth is intended to deeply change the seer himself or herself, or it is not Big Truth—or truth at all. Some form of contemplative practice is the key to this larger seeing and this larger knowing.

Resurrection is about the whole of creation, it is about history, it is about every human who has ever been conceived, sinned, suffered, and died, every animal that has lived and died a tortured death, every element that has changed from solid, to liquid, to ether, over great expanses of time. It is about you and it is about me. It is about everything. The "Christ journey" is indeed another name for every thing.

We are driven, kicking and screaming, toward ever higher levels of union and ability to include (to forgive others for being "other"), it seems to me. "Everything that rises must converge," as Teilhard de Chardin put it.

God has to work on the soul in secret and in darkness because if we fully knew what was happening and what Mystery-Transformation-God-Grace will eventually ask of us we would either try to take charge or stop the whole process. No one oversees his or her own demise willingly even when it is the false self that is dying.

In the larger-than-life, spiritually transformed people I have met, I always find one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died. They have followed in the self-emptying steps of Jesus, a path from death to life that Christians from all over the world celebrate during Easter week.

We clergy have gotten ourselves into the job of "sin management" instead of sin transformation. "If you are not perfect, then you are doing something wrong," we have taught people. We have blamed the victim, or have had little pity for victims, while daring to worship a victim image of God. Our mistakes are something to be pitied and healed much more than hated, denied, or perfectly avoided. I do not think you should get rid of

Yearning for a new way will not produce it. Only ending the old way can do that.

God takes away the shame we have by giving us back to ourselves—by giving us God! You don't get any better than that. Human love does the same thing. When someone else loves you, they give you not just themselves, but for some reason they give you back your own self, but now a truer and better self. This dance between the Lover and the beloved is the psychology of the whole Bible, which we will see poetically described in the wonderful single book, the Song of Songs.

God shocks and stuns us into love. God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change.