Quotes About Divine

Without the mediation of Christ, we will be tempted to overplay the distance and the distinction between God and humanity.

Christianity's true and unique story line has always been incarnation. If creation is "very good" (Genesis 1:31) at its very inception, how could such a divine agenda ever be undone by any human failure to fully cooperate? "Very good" sets us on a trajectory toward resurrection, it seems to me. God does not lose or fail. That is what it means to be God.

The whole of creation—not just Jesus—is the beloved community, the partner in the divine dance. Everything is the "child of God." No exceptions. When you think of it, what else could anything be? All creatures must in some way carry the divine DNA of their Creator.

Everything I see and know is indeed one "uni-verse," revolving around one coherent center. This Divine Presence seeks connection and communion, not separation or division—except for the sake of an even deeper future union.

Through the act of creation, God manifested the eternally outflowing Divine Presence into the physical and material world.

You see, authentic God experience always "burns" you, yet does not destroy you (Exodus 3:2–3), just as the burning bush did to Moses.

If Christ represents the resurrected state, then Jesus represents the crucified/resurrecting path of getting there. If Christ is the source and goal, then Jesus is the path from that source toward the goal of divine unity with all things.

What I am calling in this book an incarnational worldview is the profound recognition of the presence of the divine in literally "every thing" and "every one." It is the key to mental and spiritual health, as well as to a kind of basic contentment and happiness. An incarnational worldview is the only way we can reconcile our inner worlds with the outer one, unity with diversity, physical with spiritual, individual with corporate, and divine with human.

The Holy Spirit is that aspect of God that works largely from within and "secretly," at "the deepest levels of our desiring," as so many of the mystics have said.

Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it—even before we change it.

God's love is perfectly free. It is not coerced by any of our good actions, nor can we lose it because of our bad actions. We are stuck with it and cannot increase-or decrease-God's love for us by anything we do or don't do.

If Christ and Jesus are the archetypes of what God is doing, Mary is the archetype of how to receive what God is doing and hand it on to others.

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

All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring. God, like nature, abhors all vacuums, and rushes to fill them.

Like the Christ Mystery itself, the deep feminine often works underground and in the shadows, and—from that position—creates a much more intoxicating message. While church and culture have often denied the Divine Feminine roles, offices, and formal authority, the feminine has continued to exercise incredible power at the cosmic and personal levels.

Holiness has to do with who we are in God, where we abide as a "self" with an utterly reconstituted sense of our own personhood.

But grace is not a late arrival, an occasional add-on for a handful of humans, and God's grace and life did not just appear a few thousand years ago, when Jesus came and a few lucky humans found him in the Bible. God's grace cannot be a random problem solver doled out to the few and the virtuous - or it is hardly grace at all!

Asking for something from God does not mean talking God into it; it means an awakening of the gift within ourselves.

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.

Whenever God is conceived in the soul, it is always an allowing, never an accomplishment.

God shocks and stuns us into love. God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change.

This realization that Someone is living in us and through us is exactly how we plug into a much larger mind and heart beyond our own.

Endless theorizing, the taking of sides, and opinions about which we could be right or wrong, trumped and toppled the universally available gift of the Divine Indwelling, the real "incarnation" which still has the power to change the world.

For some few, the split is seemingly overcome in the person of Jesus; but for more and more people, union with the divine is first experienced through the Christ: in nature, in moments of pure love, silence, inner or outer music, with animals, a sense of awe, or some kind of "Brother Sun and Sister Moon" experience. Why? Because creation itself is the first incarnation of Christ, the primary and foundational "Bible" that revealed the path to God. The