Quotes from David G. Benner

Guilt is not enough to motivate surrender.

Often looking back at who we have been helps us discern who we are called to be.

Surrender to anything other than love would be idiocy. Alarm bells should go off when we hear of people surrendering to abusive relationships. Surrender involves too much vulnerability to be a responsible action in relation to anything other than unconditional love. Ultimately, of course, this means that absolute surrender can only be offered to Perfect Love. Only God deserves absolute surrender, because only God can offer absolutely dependable love.

While other people's excessive attachments and personal falsity often seem glaringly apparent, it is never easy to know the lies of our own life.

Listen to the invitation of Jesus to join him in the reign of love that is life in the kingdom of God.

God's intended home is our heart, and it is meeting God in the depths of our soul that transforms us from the inside out.

The things that bother us most about others—our pet peeves—also point toward falsity in our own self. The speck that bothers me in the life of someone else is almost always the log in my own eye (Matthew 7:3).

The human capacity for self-deception is astounding. This is taught by Scripture (Jeremiah 17:9) and confirmed by psychology. Some people are highly skilled in deceiving others. However, their duplicity pales in comparison with the endlessly creative ways in which each and every one of us deceives our self.

The penetration of our delusions is enormously challenging. It requires a relentless commitment to truth and a deep sense of freedom from fear of rejection. Nothing facilitates this like the knowledge of being deeply loved.

The English word surrender carries the implication of putting one's full weight on someone or something. It involves letting go—a release of effort, tension and fear. And it involves trust. One cannot let go of self-dependence and transfer dependence to someone else without trust. Floating is a good illustration of this, because you cannot float until you let go.

The Father's love reflects the Father's character, not the children's behavior.

Far from being incompatible with obedience, surrender provides the motive for obedience. We should obey God because he has won our hearts in love. If he has not, our focus should not be so much on obedience as on knowing his love. For once we get that solidly in place, obedience begins to take care of itself.

Real knowing of ourselves can only occur after we are convinced that we are deeply loved precisely as we are. The fact that God loves and knows us as sinners makes it possible for us to know and love our self as sinner. It all starts with knowing God's love.

Sin is more basic than what we do. Sin is who we are. In this regard we could say that sin is fundamentally a matter of ontology (being), not simply morality. To be a human is to be a sinner. It is to be broken, damaged goods that carry within our deepest self a fundamental, fatal flaw—a flaw that masks our original creation goodness and infects our very being.

The deepest ache of the soul is the spiritual longing for connection and belonging. No one was created for isolation. "Nothing in creation is ever totally at home in itself," says John O'Donohue. "No thing is ultimately at one with itself."2

The more we identify with our psychologically and socially constructed self, the more deeply we hide from God, ourselves and others.

It is surprising how we fight against Love's accepting what we do not want to accept in ourselves—our defective, wounded, malicious self. But what a transformation when we can accept this poor self and allow love in!

The personal costs of counseling also remind us why it is so necessary for a counselor to experience continuous renewal through Scripture, prayer, and the sacraments. Only when one's own spiritual batteries are being continuously recharged can one hope to have something to give to others. And only in one's own personal walk with the Lord can one find the strength to bear not only one's own burdens but also those of others.

This disconnection of being and doing represents a misalignment of our souls that clouds our presence to ourselves and others.

Grace is totally alien to human psychology. We want to get our house in order and then let God love and accept us. The psychology of works-righteousness and self-certification is foundational to the human psyche and totally at odds with grace.

While the first revelation of our calling is in the givens of our being, it is important to note that God's will for us does not always grow naturally out of our wishes.

It is surrender to love that I really resist. I am willing to accept measured doses of love as long as it doesn't upset the basic framework of my world. That framework is built on the assumption that people get what they deserve. That's what I really want.

Prayer is not simply what we do. It is a way of being. More specifically, it is resting in the reality of our being-in-God. This is our fundamental identity. It is the hidden but deepest truth of our existence.

Spare me perfection. Give me instead the wholeness that comes from embracing the full reality of who I am, just as I am. Paradoxically, it is this whole self that is most perfect. As it turns out, wholeness, not perfection, is the route to the actualization of our deepest humanity.