Quotes from Forrest Church

God seeks us as eagerly as we seek God.

Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.

The goal is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for... The one thing that can't be taken from us, even by death, is the love we give away before we go.

Where's your church?" "We're standing in it." "But this is a bookstore and it's a Friday." "Yes, but you might also choose to see it as a cathedral of the human spirit-a storehouse consecrated to the full spectrum of human experience. Just about every idea we've ever had is in here somewhere. A place containing great thinking is a sacred space.

None of us is fully able to perceive the truth that shines through another person's window, nor the falsehood that we may perceive as truth. Thus, we can easily mistake another's good for evil, and our own evil for good.

I say to my congregants, "If you believe in God, the best thing you can do for yourself is to suspend your belief for a while, because undoubtedly your God is too small and you must grow beyond that God. On the other hand, if you don't believe in God, your very disbelief is a stumbling block. Kick it away and place your faith in somehting more ennobling than disbelief. Take a flier. Expand your purview. Take a leap of faith.

Death is not a curse to be outwitted no matter the cost. Death is the natural pivot on which life turns, without which life as we know it could not be. A pro-life-support position is not always a pro-life position. When we can no longer hold on with purpose, to let go is to die with dignity and grace.

Unitarian Universalists are neither a chosen people nor a people whose choices are made for them by theological authorities - ancient or otherwise. We are a people who choose.

America's egalitarian mandate reflects the liberality of the creator, and thus countermands, by divine witness, all feudal and aristocratic structures. It also parallels the Jewish concept of "repair the world", or Tikkun ha'olam, which holds that the human spirit is in partnership with God to help finish the work of creation.

We don't only invent God; we also discover God. Looking at the creation, we strive to deduce the nature of the creator. We take familiar images of power and expand them until they become big enough to encompass the divine.

About life after death, no-one knows. But about this we surely know: there is love after death... Centuries from now, the last tracings of our being will yet express themselves in little works of love that follow bead by bead in a luminous catena extending from our dear ones out into their world and then on into the next, strung by our own loving hands.

What I'm talking about here, by the way, is salvation. The latin root, salve, means 'health.' The Teutonic cognates 'health' and 'holy' share the same root. Being agnostic about the afterlife, I look for salvation here - not to be saved from life, but to be saved by life, in life, for life.