Quotes About Acceptance

The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It's not the gathering of the saved.

Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is.

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

If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest will find it! A "perfect" person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection.

Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now.

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

All Mature Spirituality Is About Letting Go

Once we can accept that God is in all situations, and can and will use even bad situations for good, then everything becomes an occasion for good and an occasion for God, and is thus at the heart of religion. The Center is everywhere.

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling or changing or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it is not working. It attaches to past and present, and fears the future.

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!

You rest in God, not in outcomes.

It is the things that you cannot do anything about and the things that you cannot do anything with that do something with you.

His Kingship, precisely because it is so broad, so total, is doomed to be rejected by anybody who is still into tribalism, or small belonging systems. We don't really like the big Kingdom if it gets in the way of our smaller kingdoms, and it always does.

What is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age. —CARL JUNG No wise person ever wanted to be younger. —NATIVE AMERICAN APHORISM

God tries to first create a joyous yes inside of you, far more than any kind of no . . . Just saying no is resentful dieting, whereas finding your deeper yes, and eating from that table, is always a spiritual banquet.

Forgiveness is to let go of our hope for a different or better past." It is what it is, and such acceptance leads to great freedom, as long as there is also accountability and healing in the process.

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.

Do not get rid of your hurts until you have learned all that they have to teach you.

Death is largely a threat to those who have not yet lived their life. Odysseus has lived the journeys of both halves of life, and is ready to freely and finally let go.

The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.

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 spiritual life is always about letting go of unnecessary baggage so that we're prepared for death's final letting go.

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).

Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody.