Quotes about Spirituality

our fear of death is actually our fear of God. If we resolve one, we normally resolve the other. To totally resolve the God issue would be to totally resolve the death issue. And we have the full wherewithal to do just that! That wherewithal we call Trinity, which is saying that God is an outpouring in one direction. God is only for and never against.

God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. Desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true and beautiful.

True religion is always a deep intuition that we are already participating in something very good, in spite of our best efforts to deny it or avoid it.

Surely God was not just waiting for Orthodox Jews, Roman Catholics, and American evangelicals to show up, which is in the last nanosecond of known time.

Thérèse, almost counter to reason, says: "Whoever is willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to herself, that person is a pleasant place of shelter for Jesus.

My point is this: When I know that the world around me is both the hiding place and the revelation of God, I can no longer make a significant distinction between the natural and the supernatural, between the holy and the profane.

To those who cling to Anselm's understanding, I would say, as J. B. Phillips wrote many years ago, "Your God is too small.

One of the major problems in the spiritual life is our attachment to our own self-image—either positively or negatively created. We have to begin with some kind of identity, but the trouble is that we confuse this idea of ourselves with who we actually are in God. Ideas about things are not the things in themselves. We all have to start by forming a self-image, but the problem is our attachment to it, our need to promote it and protect it and have others like it. What a trap!

The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result—waiting around for "enlightenment at gunpoint" (death) instead of enjoying God's banquet much earlier in life.

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.

the Greek word meta-noia, which literally means to move "beyond the mind," is usually translated "repentance" and no longer points to its much deeper meaning.

To keep the mind space open, you need some form of meditative practice—something much more than saying prayers. In fact, if recitation of prayers does not lead to a change in consciousness, it is actually counterproductive.