Quotes about Spirituality

Just because you do not have the right word for God does not mean you are not having the right experience.

I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy. This is what I mean by the "integration of the negative." Yet I believe this is the core of Jesus's revolutionary Good News, Paul's deep experience, and the central insight that Francis and Clare lived out with such simple elegance.

Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it—even before we change it. This is perhaps our major stumbling stone

If Christ and Jesus are the archetypes of what God is doing, Mary is the archetype of how to receive what God is doing and hand it on to others.

Good art seems absolutely essential to healthy religion.

You are not your gender, your nationality, your ethnicity, your skin color, or your social class. Why, oh why, do Christians allow these temporary costumes, or what Thomas Merton called the "false self," to pass for the substantial self, which is always "hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3)? It seems that we really do not know our own Gospel. You are a child of God, and always will be, even when you don't believe it.

all healthy spirituality will always have a truly "sexual" character to it, a desire for re-union. Religion is always, in one sense or another, about making one out of two! Cheap religion is invariably about maintaining the two and keeping things separate and apart. Think about that and see if it is not true.

This mystery has been called the conspiracy ("co-breathing") of God, and is still one of the most profound ways to understand what is happening between God and the soul. True spirituality is always a deep "co-operating" (Romans 8:28) between two. True spirituality is a kind of synergy in which both parties give and both parties receive to create one shared truth and joy.

Theologically and objectively speaking, we are already in union with God. But it is very hard for people to believe or experience this when they have no positive sense of identity

That as long as we keep God imprisoned in a retributive frame instead of a restorative frame, we really have no substantial good news;

All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring. God, like nature, abhors all vacuums, and rushes to fill them.

Of course, clergy cannot talk about a further journey if they have not gone on it themselves.