Quotes About Grace

God does not decide to love, therefore, and God's love can never be determined by the worthiness or unworthiness of the object. But God is Love itself.4 God cannot not love, because love is the nature of God's very being.

Grace is just the natural loving flow of things when we allow it, instead of resisting it. Sin is any cutting or limiting of that circuit.

Perfection, rather, is the ability to incorporate imperfection! There's no other way to live: You either incorporate imperfection, or you fall into denial. That's how the Spirit moves in or out of our lives. —from Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

But once we become practiced at a contemplative worldview, a "thisness" way of seeing, there is nothing trivial anymore and all is grace.

God oft-times doesn't give a lot of answers but just keeps telling us who we are. God just keeps inviting us into that place where love is alive and where God is in love.

Listen to his dangerous and inclusionary thinking: "My Father's sun shines on the good and the bad, his rain falls on the just and the unjust" (Matthew 5:45). Or "Don't pull out the weeds or you might pull out the wheat along with it. Let the weeds and the wheat both grow together until the harvest" (Matthew 13:29–30). If I had presented such fuzzy thinking in my moral theology class, I would have gotten an F!

Know that things are okay as they are. This moment is as perfect as it can be. The saints called this the "sacrament of the present moment.

The healthy do not need a doctor, but sick people do. I have not come to coddle the comfortable, but to set trapped people free for a new life." Luke 5:31–32

Loving God, allow me to be a sheep at least once in a while, and never let me forget that most of my life I have been a goat."       Tuesday

The incarnation has become resurrection in you.

Jesus' story of the two sons, one who said all the right words, but never acted on these words, and the other who said the wrong words, but in fact "went to work in the vineyard." Jesus said that the person who finally acts and engages "does the Father's will," even if he is a tax collector or she a prostitute and does not have the right "belief system" (Matthew 21:28–32).

But which should come first, grace or responsibility? The answer is that both come first. All we can do is get out of the way and then the soul takes its natural course.

We have been graced for a truly sweet surrender, if we can radically accept being radically accepted—for nothing! "Or grace would not be grace at all"! (Romans 11:6).

Before Jesus, it was all about earning and meriting and performing, and Paul knew that would eat us all alive—as it has.

Salvation is not sin perfectly avoided, as the ego would prefer; but in fact, salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor.

There is no straight line to Goodness, to Love, or to God. And thank God, Grace is always retroactive.

God resists our evil and conquers it with good, or how could God ask the same of us?! Think about that. God shocks and stuns us into love. God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change. Only love effects true inner transformation, not duress, guilt, shunning, or social pressure. Love is not love unless it is totally free. Grace is not grace unless it is totally free. You would think Christian people would know that by now, but it is still a secret of the soul.

You will know salvation through the mystery of forgiveness" (Luke 2:77).

Say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys as a penance" still perpetuated a de facto notion of a juridical exchange instead of any deep experience of healing forgiveness or unearned grace. You cannot deal with spiritual things in a courtroom manner. It does not achieve its purpose; it does not work at a deep level. We forgot our own unique job description as people of the Gospel and imitated courts of law instead.

the old ego will always prefer an economy of merit and sacrifice to any economy of grace and unearned love, where we have no control.

We have been shown how to fight hate without becoming hate ourselves. We have been given a Companion and a Friend and not just a good idea. We have been given joy in the midst of failure, and not just a way of winning or being right.

Clearly, you are participating in a Love that's being given to you. You are not creating this. You are not generating this. It is being generated through you and in you and for you. You are participating in something larger than yourself and you are just allowing it and trusting it for the pure gift that it is.

we have faith in Christ so we can have the faith of Christ.

The universe story and the human story are a play of forces rational and nonrational, conscious and unconscious; of fate and fortune, nature and nurture. Forces of good and evil play out their tragedies and their graces—leading us to catastrophes, backtracking, mutations, transgressions, regroupings, enmities, failures, mistakes, and impossible dilemmas.