Quotes About Faith

Asking for something from God does not mean talking God into it; it means an awakening of the gift within ourselves.

Be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. —T.S. ELIOT, "East Coker" from the Four Quartets

In the larger-than-life, spiritually transformed people I have met, I always find one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died. They have followed in the self-emptying steps of Jesus, a path from death to life that Christians from all over the world celebrate during Easter week.

Christians learn to submit to trials because Jesus told us that we must carry the cross with him. Buddhists do it because the Buddha very directly said that life is suffering, but the real goal is to choose skillful and necessary suffering over what is usually just resented and projected suffering. In that the Buddha was a spiritual genius, and we Christians could learn a lot from him and his mature followers.

Whenever God is conceived in the soul, it is always an allowing, never an accomplishment.

our fear of death is actually our fear of God. If we resolve one, we normally resolve the other. To totally resolve the God issue would be to totally resolve the death issue. And we have the full wherewithal to do just that! That wherewithal we call Trinity, which is saying that God is an outpouring in one direction. God is only for and never against.

God will always give you exactly what you truly want and desire. Desire deeply, desire yourself, desire God, desire everything good, true and beautiful.

True religion is always a deep intuition that we are already participating in something very good, in spite of our best efforts to deny it or avoid it.

Surely God was not just waiting for Orthodox Jews, Roman Catholics, and American evangelicals to show up, which is in the last nanosecond of known time.

In the practical order, we find our Original Goodness when we can discover and own these three attitudes or virtues deeply planted within us: A trust in inner coherence itself. "It all means something!" (Faith) A trust that this coherence is positive and going somewhere good. (Hope) A trust that this coherence includes me and even defines me. (Love)

God shocks and stuns us into love. God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change.

Grace is always a punishment for us.

Thérèse, almost counter to reason, says: "Whoever is willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to herself, that person is a pleasant place of shelter for Jesus.

the state of mind of the "shipwrecked"3 is perhaps a necessary beginning point for any salvation from such drowning.

To those who cling to Anselm's understanding, I would say, as J. B. Phillips wrote many years ago, "Your God is too small.

Thus the most common one-liner in the Bible is "Do not be afraid"; in fact, someone counted and found that it occurs 365 times!

Most get little reassurance from others, or even have full confidence that they are totally right. Setting out is always a leap of faith, a risk in the deepest sense of the term, and yet an adventure too.

Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there.

Unfortunately, the notion of faith that emerged in the West was much more a rational assent to the truth of certain mental beliefs, rather than a calm and hopeful trust that God is inherent in all things, and that this whole thing is going somewhere good.

Jesus is precisely giving us his full bodily humanity more than his spiritualized divinity!

Christ is God, and Jesus is the Christ's historical manifestation in time.

The path to Christian perfection always runs across the collapse of our own moral efforts and self-established ideals.

We were largely taught what to believe instead of how to believe.

We are not just humans having a God experience. The Eucharist tells us that, in some mysterious way, we are God having a human experience!