Quotes About Faith

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."1

Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it—even before we change it. This is perhaps our major stumbling stone

If Christ and Jesus are the archetypes of what God is doing, Mary is the archetype of how to receive what God is doing and hand it on to others.

The Holy Spirit is always entirely for us, more than we are for ourselves, it seems. She speaks in our favor against the negative voices that judge and condemn us. This gives us all such hope—now we do not have to do life all by ourselves, or even do life perfectly "right.

You are not your gender, your nationality, your ethnicity, your skin color, or your social class. Why, oh why, do Christians allow these temporary costumes, or what Thomas Merton called the "false self," to pass for the substantial self, which is always "hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3)? It seems that we really do not know our own Gospel. You are a child of God, and always will be, even when you don't believe it.

Without an evolutionary worldview, Christianity does not really understand, much less foster, growth or change. Nor does it know how to respect and support where history is heading.

Theologically and objectively speaking, we are already in union with God. But it is very hard for people to believe or experience this when they have no positive sense of identity

Two thousand years after Jesus lived here, Christians still have a hard time accepting his upside-down world, in which we are expected to work for justice on behalf of others but not to demand or expect it for ourselves (Matthew 5:6,10-12). This is one of the hardest challenges of Jesus' message. It demands an expanded heart and mind.

That as long as we keep God imprisoned in a retributive frame instead of a restorative frame, we really have no substantial good news;

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

When you first discharge your loyal soldier, it will feel like a loss of faith or loss of self. But it is only the death of the false self, and is often the very birth of the soul.

Far too many people just keep doing repair work on the container itself and never "throw their nets into the deep" (John 21:6)

The juniors are made to think that the container is all there is and all they should expect; or worse, that they are mature and home free because they believe a few right things or perform some right rituals.

Life is all about practicing for heaven. We practice by choosing union freely—ahead of time—and now. Heaven is the state of union both here and later. As now, so will it be then. No one is in heaven unless he or she wants to be, and all are in heaven as soon as they live in union. Everyone is in heaven when he or she has plenty of room for communion and no need for exclusion.

ALL SAYING MUST BE BALANCED BY UNSAYING, and knowing must be humbled by unknowing. Without this balance, religion invariably becomes arrogant, exclusionary, and even violent.

God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything, even and maybe especially in the deep fathoming of our fallings and failures. Sin is to stay on the surface of even holy things, like Bible, sacrament, or church.

Jesus touched and healed anybody who desired it and asked for it, and there were no other prerequisites for his healings.

As Simone Weil said in various ways, it is much easier to make non-Christians into Christians than it is to make Christians into Christians. Cradle Christians are almost totally preconditioned to the carrot-on-the-stick model.

If something comes toward you with grace and can pass through you toward others with grace, you can trust it as the voice of God.

Threats of hell are unfortunately more memorable to people than promises of heaven.

He does not know the outcome ahead of time, or his confidence would be in himself and God to pull it off, which would then largely be a matter of the willpower of belief. Faith is so much more than strong willpower

Falling upward is a "secret" of the soul, known not by thinking about it or proving it but only by risking it—at least once.

the little boy couldn't feel and admit the pain until he was sufficiently sure that love was there.

We would have helped history and individuals so much more if we had spent our time revealing how Christ is everywhere instead of proving that Jesus was God.