Quotes from Lawrence Kushner

The only thing truly within our power, may be whether or not we will behave in each moment with arrogance or reverence.

Religion is a more or less organized way of remembering that every ministry points to a higher reality.

Hold up your hands before your eyes. You are looking at the hands of God.

Our tolerance for forms of religious expression we disagree with is a precise barometer of our own spiritual security.

The amount of communal participation in prayer is in inverse ratio to the combined vertical and horizontal distance between the leader of the prayers and the first occupied row of seats.

The boundary between now and not yet will softly blur. And the clean line between your discrete body and all creation will someday be no more.

The story is not about someone else. It is not even about you. It is you. The one who "lives" in the dream is the one who dreams. Just as the dream softly pulses beneath everyday waking-noticeable only when the din and clatter of daytime is stilled by sleep-so the one who remembers a dream brings a new facet to waking.

Is it not at least occasionally the case that we set out on a clear and simple mission and return with something undreamed of? Whether or not we accomplish our original intention becomes unimportant.

Genesis' saying that we are made in the likeness of God does not mean that God looks a little like us, with a face and a body, arms and legs, but that at the time of the creation of the first man and woman, human beings did not know or care about a tangible likeness, about the fact that they had bodies. The awareness of them is an invention of the human self, idolatrously preoccupied with wanting something to look at in the mirror.

Consequently, they who cleave with all their mental powers to God … [they have lost their] existence like a drop which has fallen into the great sea and has come to its root and therefore is one with the waters of the sea and it is not possible to recognize it as a separate thing at all.

Again and again we trade infinite wonder for a handful of statue; we barter the limitless Nothing for the short-term bird in the hand. And when the deal is done, we have become what we serve: things rather than children of light.

Religion is a more or less organized way of remembering that every ministry points to a higher reality.

The one who pays attention to the dreams, draws on them, and lives them out is blessed, even as the one who dreams is also dreamt. We each take our turn at living out the dream. Like some ageless wave, Scripture flows through us.

how he once slipped through the "scriptural text" of his daily life into the primordial light of consciousness itself.

So that's what it's all about! You put your whole self in, you take your whole self out; you put your whole self in and you shake it all about. The idea is that by doing whatever you're doing with all of you, you can then take all of you out. The trick is how to do both.

By reading holy literature as if it were a dream, we gain access to a primary mode of our collective unconscious.

personal confusion, search, and self-interrogation are more important than any answers could ever be.

You must protect people who have no social clout because the health of a congregation is measured by its ability to tolerate dweebs.

A kind of journal of forgotten, reworked, and remembered holy moments, too awesome to be simply described in everyday conscious language. It is all that remains of the most penetrating incursion of waking into the earth-mother-Jewish-people darkness of what is not the spirit, but only sleep. But the memory is still there, set in our bodies by our parents or our choice. We may ignore the dream or we may appropriate it for ourselves, and so make it our own. It is our choice alone.

And this, then, is the job of the searchers and the dreamers: to reach deeper and deeper into the dream. Peeling away one layer after another. Until we realize that the voice speaking our dreams comes from within us and from without at the same time.11 Until we see at last that the story is true. Not necessarily because it happened in a particular place at a particular time, but because it is within us. It always was. It issues from us. It is ours. The whole ancient hierarchy of meanings.

But we must not think that just because we have words for all the parts of a tree, a tree really has all those parts. The leaf does not know, for instance, when it stops being a leaf and becomes a twig. And the trunk is not aware that it has stopped being a trunk and has become the roots. Indeed, the roots do not know when they stop being roots and become soil, nor the soil the moisture, nor the moisture the atmosphere, nor the atmosphere the sunlight." (pp 54-55)

finding a book is no guarantee that you will understand what it means unless there is also someone there who read it to you when you were very young and who may, indeed, have it memorized." (p 154)

One should be so absorbed in prayer that one is no longer aware of one's own self. There is nothing for such a person but the flow of Life; all one's thoughts are with God. One who still knows how intensely one is praying has not yet overcome the bonds of self

But everyone dreams anyway. And we-from Joseph to Daniel to Freud-have had dreams, read them, interpreted them, hidden from them, and even, on occasion, faithfully chanted them from a handwritten parchment scroll. They are an intimate part of our