Quotes About Faith

organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries.

A lot of us pray as if prayer is really twisting the arm of God or convincing God to do something. We think by saying more words we'll talk God into it. We think, "If I say it one more time, God will agree with me." That very attitude is an alienating attitude. It keeps us in the role of doing it "right" or often enough to convince an unready or unwilling God. Wrong, wrong, wrong! 19 minutes ago

If your prayer is not enticing you outside your comfort zones, if your Christ is not an occasional "threat," you probably need to do some growing up and learning to love.

Amazing that we made Jesus into the consummate answer giver because that is not what he usually does. He more often leads us right onto the horns of our own human-made dilemmas, where we are forced to meet God and be honest with ourselves. He creates problems for us more than resolves them, problems that very often cannot be resolved by all-or-nothing thinking but only by love and forgiveness.

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.

Without some deconstruction, everything becomes idolatrous. The prophets were religious deconstructionists.

With the exception of Leviticus and Numbers, written by the priestly classes, most of the Bible is written by or about people who are occupied, enslaved, poor or disenfranchised in some way!

Once you see that your skin and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it. It preserves religion from any arrogance and denial.

You normally have to let go of the old and go through a stage of unknowing or confusion, before you can move to another level of awareness or new capacity.

It is important to know that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but in fact, certitude and the demand for certitude!

Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don't have faith, according to Jesus. You do not trust that God is good and on your side. You're trying to do it all yourself, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.

It's true all the time everywhere or it's not true! And that one truth is always Mystery.

It is hard to hear God, but it is even harder not to hear God. The pain one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a greater and longer-lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head on.

your soul is who you are in God and who God is in you. You can never really lose your soul; you can only fail to realize it, which is indeed the greatest of losses: to have it but not have it (Matthew 16:26).

We've turned faith into a right to certitude when, in fact, this Trinitarian mystery is whispering quite the opposite: we have to live in exquisite, terrible humility before reality.

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.

People are always trying to build temples and churches for God. And what is God trying to do? He is trying to build us into a temple, a living temple, a temple of the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul says (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).

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.

In the first half of life, we fight the devil and have the illusion and inflation of "winning" now and then; in the second half of life, we always lose because we are invariably fighting God.

Our temptation now and always is not to trust in God but to trust in our faith tradition of trusting in God.

As Jaroslav Pelikan so wisely put it years ago, "Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives Tradition such a bad name

God can most easily be lost by being thought found.

Each generation has to appropriate its deepest beliefs for itself. We used to say it this way: "God has no grandchildren." Each generation must itself be realigned with God and discover the mystery for itself.