Quotes from David G. Benner

God meets us in our individuality because God wants to fulfill that individuality. God wants us to follow and serve in and through that individuality. God doesn't seek to annihilate our uniqueness as we follow Christ. Rather, Christ-following leads us to our truest self.

Far from being a sign of weakness, only surrender to something or someone bigger than us is sufficiently strong to free us from the prison of our egocentricity. Only surrender is powerful enough to overcome our isolation and alienation.

Some view it as too close to submission; others associate it with codependence or an abdication of personal power. Consequently, the notion of surrendering to anything or anyone has become suspect.

We seek bridges from our isolation through people, possessions and accomplishment. But none of these are ever quite capable of satisfying the restlessness of the human heart. To be human is to have been designed for intimate relationship with the Divine.

Our call, like Jesus' call, is to live out our life in truth and in dependence on the loving will of the Father.

God sometimes calls people to a cause not born of their own abilities or most superficial desires. But his call is always absolutely congruent with our destiny, our truest self, our identity and the shape of our being.

while love plays a distinctive place in Christianity, the experience of love is obviously not restricted to Christians. The ability to love others is the pinnacle of fulfillment and health for all persons. Receiving the gift of love reminds us all of what it is to be fully human. What follows, therefore, should be of interest not just to Christians but also to those pursuing other spiritual paths, as well as those not consciously on a spiritual journey of any sort.

silence is God's first language; everything else is a poor translation.

The spiritual life of one person should never be a carbon copy of that of another. Peter and John had quite different personalities and quite different transformational journeys as they followed Jesus. Mary and Martha, two sisters whom Jesus loved deeply, each expressed their love for him uniquely. And he received both, not discouraging Martha from busying herself in service, simply encouraging her to not fret in doing so (Luke 10:38-42).

there are many false ways of achieving uniqueness. These all result from attempts to create a self rather than receive the gift of my self-in-Christ.

We should never be tempted to think that growth in Christlikeness reduces our uniqueness. While some Christian visions of the spiritual life imply that as we become more like Christ we look more and more like each other, such a cultic expectation of loss of individuality has nothing in common with genuine Christian spirituality. Paradoxically, as we become more and more like Christ we become more uniquely our own true self.

The relative constancy of the love of family and friends makes the absolute faithfulness of divine love at least conceivable. Hints of unconditional love from humans make the possibility of absolutely unconditional divine love imaginable.

The mystery of the Christian gospel is that our deepest, truest self is not what we think of as our own separate self but the self that is one with Christ. This is the reason that the self that embarks on the journey of Christ-following is not the self that arrives.

Unless we spend as much time looking at God as we spend looking at our self, our knowing of our self will simply draw us further and further into an abyss of self-fixation.

Love always involves not just saying yes to someone but also saying no to self. The life of love is a life of death to the kingdom of self.

Thomas Merton puts it this way: "Life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire."2

if love connects us to life, it offers us a life that we can no longer control. No longer can I choose whom I will love and whom I will ignore.

Surrender involves relaxing, and you must feel safe before you can relax. How could anyone ever expect to feel safe enough to relax in the presence of a God who is preoccupied with their shortcomings

The prayer conversation always begins with God. It does not begin with us. Prayer is our response to a divine invitation to encounter. The prayer conversation has already begun because God has already reached out, seeking our attention and response. Until we learn to attend to the God who is already present and communicating, our prayers will never be more than the product of our minds and wills.

Kingdom of Self The Kingdom of God • Ruled by self-interest • Ruled by love • Grasping • Releasing • Achievement • Gift • Effort • Consent • Independence • Interdependence • Holding • Releasing • Willful • Willing • Clenched fists and closed heart • Open hands and heart • Hard and brittle • Soft and malleable • Determination • Transformation

Our challenge is to unmask the Divine in the natural and name the presence of God in our lives.

Focusing on God while failing to know ourselves deeply may produce an external form of piety, but it will always leave a gap between appearance and reality. This is dangerous to the soul of anyone—and in spiritual leaders it can also be disastrous for those they lead.

Often they become uncomfortable with an emphasis on divine love; they feel an urgent need to balance this by highlighting God's hatred of sin. Unfortunately, while they may give intellectual assent to God's love, they often experience very little of it.

Knowing God's love demands that we receive God's love—experientially, not simply as a theory. Personal knowledge is never simply a matter of the head. Because it is rooted in experience, it is grounded in deep places in our being. The things we know from experience we know beyond belief. Such knowing is not incompatible with belief, but it is not dependent on it.