Quotes About Faith

As my father, Saint Francis, put it, "If you have once faced the great death, the second death can do you no harm.

We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That just might be the central message of how spiritual growth happens, yet nothing in us wants to believe it. 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 the earnest will find it.

All that a spiritual teacher really does is "second the motions" of the Holy Spirit.

but we are the Body of Christ. "Christ" is not Jesus

You are who you are in the eyes of God, nothing more and nothing less," he often said.12

If the universe is "Christened" from the very beginning, then of course it can never die forever. Resurrection is just incarnation taken to its logical conclusion. If God inhabits matter, then we can naturally believe in the "resurrection" of the body. Most simply said, nothing truly good can die!

Christianity is much more about living and doing than thinking.

Jesus himself says, "Do not believe those who say 'Lord, Lord' " (Matthew 7:21, Luke 6:46, italics added). He says it is those who "do it right" that matter, not those who "say it right." Yet verbal orthodoxy has been Christianity's preoccupation, at times even allowing us to burn people at the stake for not "saying it right.

Because far too many religious folks do not seriously pursue this "reverence humming within them," they do not recognize

All who hold any kind of unexplainable hope believe in resurrection, whether they are formal Christians or not, and even if they don't believe Jesus was physically raised from the dead.

To hold the full mystery of life is always to endure its other half, which is the equal mystery of death and doubt. To know anything fully is always to hold that part of it which is still mysterious and unknowable.

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

The God we've been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to trust or to love back.

Perfect spirituality is just to imitate God.

Trust the process.

Perhaps that's why faith is so rare and religion so widespread: because religion is very often a means to maintain our familiar image of God, even when it's pathological and destructive. We feel better with what we know, even when it does us in.

Faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart."5

It is not God who is violent. We are. It is not that God demands suffering of humans. We do. God does not need or want suffering—neither in Jesus nor in us.

experience as "mercy, within mercy, within mercy."6 There's always a lot of anxiety and insecurity in letting go of your current images of yourselves and your images of God.

When people get together in solidarity and unity, not out of power but out of powerlessness, then Christ is in their midst.

The Biblical revelation is about awakening, not accomplishing. You cannot get there, you can only be there, but the foundational Being-in-God, for some reason, is too hard to believe, and too good to be true for most people. Only the humble will usually believe it and receive it, because it affirms more about God than it does about us. Proud people are not attracted to such explanations.

it is very surprising to me that so many Christians who read the Scriptures do not see this. Yet maybe they cannot answer a second call because they have not yet completed the first task. Unless you build your first house well, you will never leave it. To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.

Have you ever noticed that the expression "the light of the world" is used to describe the Christ (John 8:12), but that Jesus also applies the same phrase to us? (Matthew 5:14, "You are the light of the world.")

The would-be maturing believer is not challenged to any adult faith or service to the world, much less mystical union. Everyone ends up in a muddled middle, where "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity," as William Butler Yeats put it.