Quotes About Wholeness

True spirituality is not taught, it's caught. Once our sails have been unfurled to the Spirit, henceforth our motivation for the journey toward holiness and wholeness is immense gratitude.

You know after any truly initiating experience that you are part of a much bigger whole. Life is not about you henceforward, but you are about life.

Only when we rest in God can we find the safety, the spaciousness, and the scary freedom to be who we are, all that we are, more than we are, and less than we are.

I believe contemplation shows us that nothing inside us is as bad as our hatred and denial of the bad. Hating and denying it only complicates our problems. All of life is grist for the mill. Paula D'Arcy puts it, "God comes to us disguised as our life." Everything belongs; God uses everything. There are no dead-ends. There is no wasted energy. Everything

Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside.

May the God of peace make you whole and holy, may you be kept safe in body, heart, and mind, and thus ready for the presence. God has called you and will not fail you" (1 Thessalonians 5:23).

Over time, we move beyond a dualistic view of God being "up there" while we are "down here" to a vision where God is up there, down here, in others, and within ourselves, all at the same time. "We are all en Cristo" (page 43). In taking this view, we start to see that all things are sacred, including the masks we wear, the shadows we seek to hide, the wounds we carry, and the parts of ourselves we consider profane. Every thing is sacred.

you no longer need to protect or defend the mere part. You are now connected to something inexhaustible.

I personally describe contemplation as "non-dual consciousness" and find that it is necessary to overcome the "stinking thinking" of most addicts, which tends to be "all-or-nothing thinking."3 We could say that authentic spirituality is invariably a matter of emptying the mind and filling the heart at the same time.

Everything finally belongs, and you are a part of it. This knowing and this enjoying are a good description of salvation.

Contemplation is a spiritual practice that has the potential to heal, and connect us to the source of our being.

Christ can hold together everything. In fact, Christ already does this; it is we who resist such wholeness, as if we enjoy our arguments and our divisions into parts.

What if Christ is another name for everything—in its fullness?

Walter Wink, a professor of biblical interpretation, calls it the mere "theological" worldview as opposed to the incarnational worldview, which is authentic Christianity.1 When all of you is there, you will know. When all of you is present, the banquet will begin.

But God loves things by becoming them. God loves things by uniting with them, not by excluding them.

Christ is a good and simple metaphor for absolute wholeness, complete incarnation, and the integrity of creation. Jesus is the archetypal human just like us (Hebrews 4:15), who showed us what the Full Human might look like if we could fully live into it (Ephesians 4:12–16). Frankly, Jesus came to show us how to be human much more than how to be spiritual, and the process still seems to be in its early stages.

Psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things.

The joyful acceptance of a limited world, of which I am only a small moment and limited part—this is probably the clearest indication of a man in his fullness.

all healthy spirituality will always have a truly "sexual" character to it, a desire for re-union. Religion is always, in one sense or another, about making one out of two! Cheap religion is invariably about maintaining the two and keeping things separate and apart. Think about that and see if it is not true.

The ancients rightly called this internal longing for wholeness "fate" or "destiny," the "inner voice" or the "call of the gods." It has an inevitability, authority, and finality to it, and was at the heart of almost all mythology. Almost all heroes heard an inner voice that spoke to them. In fact, their heroism was in their ability to hear that voice and to risk following it—wherever!

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody. By the second half of our lives, we are meant to see in wholes and no longer just in parts. Yet we get to the whole by falling down into the messy parts - so many times, in fact, that we long and thirst for the wholeness and fullness of all things, including ourselves. I promise you this unified field is the only and lasting meaning of up.

It takes uncommon humility to carry both the dark and the light side of things. The only true perfection available to humans is the honest acceptance of our imperfection.

The human art form is in uniting fruitful activity with a contemplative stance—not one or the other, but always both at the same time.

Wholeness and holiness will stretch us beyond our small comfort zone. How could they not? There are few in our religious culture who understand the necessity of mature internalised conscience. So wise guides are hard to find. You will have more Aarons building you golden calves than Moses leading you on any Exodus.