Quotes About Faith

You see, authentic God experience always "burns" you, yet does not destroy you (Exodus 3:2–3), just as the burning bush did to Moses.

When Paul wrote, "There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything" (Colossians 3:11), was he a naïve pantheist, or did he really understand the full implication of the Gospel of Incarnation?

Authentic Christianity is not so much a belief system as a life-and-death system that shows you how to give away your life, how to give away your love, and eventually how to give away your death. Basically, how to give away—and in doing so, to connect with the world, with all other creatures, and with God.

Grace must and will edge you forward. "God has no grandchildren. God only has children," as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself.

Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world.

Great spiritual teachers learn to balance knowing with not knowing, as illustrated in this oft-quoted aphorism: It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. The true biblical notion of faith, which balances knowing with not knowing, is rather rare today, especially among many religious folks who think faith is being certain all the time--when the truth is the exact opposite. But we have little theology of darkness today.

To preach the Reign of God, dear brothers and sisters, we have to break with our dependency on a perfectible self.

Our faith became a competitive theology with various parochial theories of salvation, instead of a universal cosmology inside of which all can live with an inherent dignity.

salvation is sin turned on its head and used in our favor.

God protects us into and through death, just as the Father did with Jesus.

Jesus said, "God is not a God of the dead but of the living for to him all people are alive!" (Luke 20:39). In my opinion, his aliveness made it so much easier for people to trust their own aliveness and thus relate to God, because like knows like. Some call it morphic resonance. C. S. Lewis, in giving one of his books the truly wonderful title Till We Have Faces, made this same evolutionary point.

Stop trying. Stop forcing reality. Learn the mystery of surrender and trust, and then it will be done unto you, through you, with you, in you, and, very often, in spite of you.

He did not come to change God's mind about us. It did not need changing. Jesus came to change our minds about God—and about ourselves—and about where goodness and evil really lie.

Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it—even before we change it.

As the old joke put it: It is forbidden to smoke while you are praying! But it is wonderful and meritorious to pray while you are smoking!

Ordinary people in times of shame and doubt needed an anamchara, or a "soul friend." Soon

God, however, forgives even immature religion, and those who know God learn to do the same.

Whatever you trust to validate you and secure you is your real god, and the Gospel is saying, "Will the real God please stand up?

God's love is perfectly free. It is not coerced by any of our good actions, nor can we lose it because of our bad actions. We are stuck with it and cannot increase-or decrease-God's love for us by anything we do or don't do.

The self-same moment that we find God in ourselves, we also find ourselves inside God

The point is that, in some ways, many humans can identify with Mary more than they can with Jesus precisely because she was not God, but the archetype for our yes to God!

Just because you do not have the right word for God does not mean you are not having the right experience.

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."1

All great spirituality is somehow about letting go.