Quotes About Humanity

Mary is all of us both receiving and handing on the gift. We liked her precisely because she was one of us—and not God!

Mercy unearned undeserved, unnecessary. If it isn't all of those it isn't Mercy. If you think people have to earn it, deserve it, or it is necessary to do it, you have lost the mystery of Mercy and forgiveness

In the many images of Mary, humans see our own feminine soul. We needed to see ourselves in her, and say with her, "God has looked upon me in my lowliness. From now on, all generations will call me blessed" (Luke 1:48).

Humans like, need, and trust our mothers to give us gifts, to nurture us, and always to forgive us, which is what we want from God.

God never intended most human beings to become philosophers or theologians, but God does want all humans to represent the very Sympathy and Empathy of God. And it's okay if it takes a while to get there.

Up to now, we have not been carrying history too well, because "there stood among us one we did not recognize," "one who came after me, because he existed before me" (John 1:26, 30). He came in mid-tone skin, from the underclass, a male body with a female soul, from an often hated religion, and living on the very cusp between East and West. No one owns him, and no one ever will.

The point is that, in some ways, many humans can identify with Mary more than they can with Jesus precisely because she was not God, but the archetype for our yes to God!

In Mary, humanity has said our eternal yes to God. A yes that cannot be undone. A corporate yes that overrides our many noes.

If we are created in the image and likeness of God, then whatever good, true, or beautiful things we can say about humanity or creation we can say of God exponentially.

We daringly believe that God's presence was poured into a single human being, so that humanity and divinity can be seen to be operating as one in him—and therefore in us! But instead of saying that God came into the world through Jesus, maybe it would be better to say that Jesus came out of an already Christ-soaked world. The second Incarnation flowed out of the first, out of God's loving union with physical creation.

And to be fully honest, I think your heart needs to be broken, and broken open, at least once to have a heart at all or to have a heart for others.

Resurrection is about the whole of creation, it is about history, it is about every human who has ever been conceived, sinned, suffered, and died, every animal that has lived and died a tortured death, every element that has changed from solid, to liquid, to ether, over great expanses of time. It is about you and it is about me. It is about everything. The "Christ journey" is indeed another name for every thing.

The True Self has already overcome the contradictions and paradoxes of life, which is symbolized by the Risen Christ who presents the full tension of death and life, earth and spirit, human and divine—and precisely as overcome. That is the standing message that the Resurrected One holds for all of history. He holds and overcomes the ultimate and major tensions of humanity.

Surely God was not just waiting for Orthodox Jews, Roman Catholics, and American evangelicals to show up, which is in the last nanosecond of known time.

Wherever there was human suffering, Jesus was concerned about it now, and about its healing now. It is rather amazing and very sad that we pushed it all off into a future reward system for those who were "worthy"—as if any of us are.

Jesus is precisely giving us his full bodily humanity more than his spiritualized divinity!

He is giving us his full Jesus-Christ self—that wonderful symbiosis of divinity and humanity. But the vehicle, the medium, and the final message here are physical, edible, chewable—yes, digestible human flesh. Much of ancient religion portrayed God eating or sacrificing humans or animals, which were offered on the altars, but Jesus turned religion and history on their heads, inviting us to imagine that God would give himself as food for us!

I must be losing patience with my fellow humans, Miss Beryl went on. Anymore I'm all for executing people who are mean to children. I used to favor just cutting off their feet. Now I want to rid the world of them completely. If this keeps up I'll be voting Republican soon.

There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.

Maybe, like children, we assume ourselves to be of central importance, and we're not. Maybe the inequities that consume us here on earth aren't really the issue.

There are no small lives, there are no small stories, there are no small people.

There is more mercy in Christ than sin in us.

Physicians, though they put their patients to much pain, will not destroy their nature, but will raise it up by degrees. Surgeons will pierce and cut but not mutilate. A mother who has a sick and self-willed child will not cast it away for this reason. And shall there be more mercy in the stream than there is in the spring? Shall we think there is more mercy in ourselves than in God, who plants the feeling of mercy in us?

the achievement of human autonomy has been paid for by the experience of human alienation.