Quotes about Church

As G. K. Chesterton once wrote, Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of. Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing "contemplation.

People are always trying to build temples and churches for God. And what is God trying to do? He is trying to build us into a temple, a living temple, a temple of the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul says (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).

It really works very well, but the trouble is that it feels so godly that much, if not most, religion is a belonging system more than a search for intimacy with God. Jesus was not into tribal religion, groupthink, and loyalty tests. Much of the institutional church is into them, however, and always has been. It works too well to call it into question. It holds us together and that feels like salvation, even if it is a very deteriorated form.

In fact, I would say what makes so much religion so innocuous, ineffective, and even unexciting is that there has seldom been a concrete "decision to turn our lives over to the care of God," even in many people who go to church, temple, or mosque. I have been in religious circles all my life and usually find willfulness run rampant in monasteries, convents, chancery offices, and among priests and prelates, ordinary laity, and at church meetings.

Scholars say that ceremonies normally confirm and celebrate the status quo and deny the shadow side of things (think of a Fourth of July parade), whereas true ritual offers an alternative universe, where the shadow is named (think of a true Eucharist). In the church, I am afraid we mostly have ceremonies.

Comfortable people tend to see the church as a quaint antique shop where they can worship old things as substitutes for eternal things.

Both Catholics and Protestants have failed our people by mystifying the very notion of mysticism. The word itself has become relegated to a "misty" and distant realm that implies it is only available to very few and something not to be trusted, much less attractive or desirable. For me, the word "mysticism" simply means experiential knowledge of spiritual things, as opposed to book knowledge, secondhand knowledge, or even church knowledge.

For all who have tried to know Jesus without Christ, many of the core church teachings offered a disembodied Christ without any truly human Jesus, which was the norm for centuries in doctrine and in art. Art is the giveaway of what people really believe at any one time.

Church" in any form should be a "laboratory for resurrection

Both the church's practice and its Platonic pronouncements create tragic gaps for any person with an operative head and a beating heart. But remember, even a little bit of God is well worth loving, and even a little bit of truth and love goes a long way.

In a certain but real sense, the church itself is the first cross that Jesus is crucified on, as we limit, mangle, and try to control the always too big message. All the churches seem to crucify Jesus again and again by their inability to receive his whole body, but they often resurrect him too. I am without doubt a microcosm of this universal church.

Of course, to be honest and consistent, one must ask if "church family" is not also a family that one has to eventually "hate" in this very same way, and with the same scandal involved as hating the natural family.