Quotes About Integration

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.

Matter and Spirit mirror one another and reveal the depths of one another.

Francis "without having a specific feminist program…contributed to the feminizing of Christianity."2 French historian André Vauchez, in his critical biography of Francis, adds that this integration of the feminine "constitutes a fundamental turning point in the history of Western spirituality."3

The advantage of those on the further journey is that they can still remember and respect the first language and task. They have transcended but also included all that went before. In fact, if you cannot include and integrate the wisdom of the first half of life, I doubt if you have moved to the second. Never throw out the baby with the bathwater. People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place. They are not mere iconoclasts or rebels.

Science is now giving us a very helpful language for what religion rightly intuited and imaged, albeit in mythological language. Remember, myth does not mean "not true," which is the common misunderstanding; it actually refers to things that are always true!

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

The shadow is the place we put all the suppressed and repressed parts of our lives. + Eventually, in every life, the suppressed and repressed parts of our selves will revolt. + The challenge is to acknowledge and honor the shadow but not be tyrannized by it.

Going somewhere good means having to go through and with the bad, and being unable to hold ourselves above it or apart from it.

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.

I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy. This is what I mean by the "integration of the negative." Yet I believe this is the core of Jesus's revolutionary Good News, Paul's deep experience, and the central insight that Francis and Clare lived out with such simple elegance.

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.

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.

Life moves first toward diversity and then toward union of that very diversity at ever higher levels. It is the old philosophical problem of "the one and the many

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.

We are driven, kicking and screaming, toward ever higher levels of union and ability to include (to forgive others for being "other"), it seems to me. "Everything that rises must converge," as Teilhard de Chardin put it.

Does anyone believe that the difference between the Lebesgue and Riemann integrals can have physical significance, and that whether say, an airplane would or would not fly could depend on this difference? If such were claimed, I should not care to fly in that plane.

And it occurred to me by the time I was a teenager that I had become part of the land, every bit as much a part of it as sparrow eggs or thrasher nest, garter snake or oak tree, and that the rest of my life, or anyone's life, would be a gradual learning process, a journey toward fitting into one's home, for those of us lucky enough to still recognize what is home...that which we are a part of, rather than estranged from. And rather than using the word lucky, perhaps I should use the word grace.

I didn't understand how. But the toilets had responded to me. I had become one with the plumbing...

My face felt like my normal face, as if that part of me hadn't transformed into a bird. [Fine, Sadie. Call me the Carter-headed chicken. Happy?]

Music (is) woven into the fabric of the corporeal world.

Then the Calm kept going. And I realized that my body, mind, and soul needed this time to integrate some of the enormous changes that were going on. I started to appreciate Calm. These last few weeks I feel like I'm getting my spark back.

In order not to bother or be bothered by ghosts, you just act like you're one of them. That's what I do.

Diversity is the product of the effort to be a Christian in different cultural contexts. What it means to be a Christian should not look the same from one cultural context to another-say, from pagan ancient Rome to contemporary Catholic Spain. One lives a Christian life differently depending on the cultural materials with which one has to work and the challenges to the Christian faith specific to that context.

Others, the subject of this book, are likewise privy to their unconscious streams of thought, but they must contend with unusually tumultuous and unpredictable emotions as well. The integration of these deeper, truly irrational sources with more logical processes can be a tortuous task, but, if successful, the resulting work often bears a unique stamp, a "touch of fire," for what it has been through.