Quotes about Presence

Through the act of creation, God manifested the eternally outflowing Divine Presence into the physical and material world.

Words and complex rituals almost get in the way at this point. All you can really do is return such Presence with your own presence.

You see, authentic God experience always "burns" you, yet does not destroy you (Exodus 3:2—3), just as the burning bush did to Moses.

Jesus himself always went where the pain was. Wherever there was human suffering, Jesus was concerned about it now, and about its healing now.

What I am calling in this book an incarnational worldview is the profound recognition of the presence of the divine in literally "every thing" and "every one." It is the key to mental and spiritual health, as well as to a kind of basic contentment and happiness. An incarnational worldview is the only way we can reconcile our inner worlds with the outer one, unity with diversity, physical with spiritual, individual with corporate, and divine with human.

But God loves things by becoming them.

If God chooses and doles out his care, we are always insecure and unsure whether we are among the lucky recipients. But once we become aware of the generous, creative Presence that exists in all things natural, we can receive it as the inner Source of all dignity and worthiness. Dignity is not doled out to the worthy. It grounds the inherent worthiness of things in their very nature and existence.

We would have helped history and individuals so much more if we had spent our time revealing how Christ is everywhere instead of proving that Jesus was God.

Be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. —T.S. ELIOT, "East Coker" from the Four Quartets

This realization that Someone is living in us and through us is exactly how we plug into a much larger mind and heart beyond our own.

do not find our own Center; it finds us. The body is in the soul. It is both the place of contact and the place of surrender.

Only presence can know presence. And our real presence can know Real Presence.