Quotes about Spirituality

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.

We are all spiritually powerless, however, and not just those physically addicted to a substance, which is why I address this book to everyone. Alcoholics just have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways, and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments, especially our addiction to our way of thinking.

There is no straight line to Goodness, to Love, or to God. And thank God, Grace is always retroactive.

Thomas Merton, say it, as he so often does: "A door opens in the center of our being, and we seem to fall through it into immense depths, which although they are infinite—are still accessible to us. All eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact.

If people are to develop any deep spirituality today, and especially if men are to develop spiritually, they need to be liberated from self-serving worldviews.

I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic.