Quotes from Charles Upton

If we have forgotten our total dependency upon God, then there is nothing left for us but to try to depend upon other people's attention to us, because without such attention we don't even feel like human beings. Instead of paying attention to God, we become beggars for the attention of others, constantly trying to make them pity us or look up to us. But this is not true human relatedness, only mutual idolatry.

If we know for certain that God sees all we do and all we are, we will not be tempted ask others to validate us by displaying our virtues, nor will we tempt others to judge us by displaying our sins. Only God can validate us; only God can judge.

the word shari'ah literally means 'a path that leads to water.' Even the dire warnings that appear in the Qur'an are essentially nothing but the protective words of a Friend who doesn't want to see us lose our way and come to grief.

Simon and Garfunkel sang, back in the 1960's, in these days "the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls.")

God is never absent so He need not be "summoned", nor do we possess the power to summon Him; the thing in need of summoning, and of redemption from ghaflah ("heedlessness") is the subtle spiritual attention of the Sufi to His Grace and His Presence.

For I have seen the women moving, this year Storing away the clothes that will never be worn again, putting the death-sanctified sheets away Gathering up their lives too, in patterns I cannot enter

The specific medicine for the shock of despair is the deeper shock of meaning.

Poetry is the language of the gods.