Quotes about Spirituality

We have moved to a level where we have made happiness and contentment largely impossible. We have created a pseudo-happiness, largely based in having instead of being. We are so overstimulated that the ordinary no longer delights us. We cannot rest or abide in our naked being in God, as Jesus offers us.

Love is the one eternal thing and takes away your foundational fear of death. This is very good stuff.

We must keep eating and drinking the Mystery, until one day it dawns on us, in an undefended moment, "My God, I really am what I eat! I also am the Body of Christ.

To pray is to build your own house. To pray is to discover that Someone else is within your house. To pray is to recognize that it is not your house at all.

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.

We have been graced for a truly sweet surrender, if we can radically accept being radically accepted—for nothing! "Or grace would not be grace at all"! (Romans 11:6).

If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God.

there is an early stage "holiness" that looks like the real thing, but it isn't.

Our small, scarcity-based worldview is the real aberration here, and I believe it has largely contributed to the rise of atheism and the "practical atheism" that is the actual operative religion of most Western countries today. The God we've been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to trust or to love back.

My starting point is that we're already there. We cannot attain the presence of God because we're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is

God seems to have chosen to manifest the invisible in what we call the "visible," so that all things visible are the revelation of God's endlessly diffusive spiritual energy. Once a person recognizes that, it is hard to ever be lonely in this world again.

Surely God does not exist so that we can think correctly about Him — or Her. Amazingly and wonderfully, like all good parents, God desires instead the flourishing of what God created and what God loves — us ourselves. Ironically, we flourish more by learning from our mistakes and changing than by a straight course that teaches us nothing.