Quotes About Understanding

It is as though we are understanding now what (William) Blake intuited, the senses were, in Eden, spread over the whole being. It might seem, then, that our bodies still live in Eden, but our minds refuse to know it.

You can still talk with her," Iceland said. "It will take time. Everything you need to know is inside you, the same as it's inside her. You'll figure out how to talk to each other. You'll have to figure out how to listen, to understand." "I'm listening," I said. "I will.

He is a fool that cannot conceal his wisdom." - Benjamin Franklin.

Prereading is a game changer. It changed my life. Everyone is smarter when they have seen the material before. You will be too

So many vague, as yet unanswered ponderings in my mind about social interactions became clear and moved into that happy, "situation now understood" part of the mind.

If we imagine that our words are like arrows, then we can say that those arrows always fall short of the heavenly realm to which we aim them. In short, an emerging discourse acknowledges that speaking of God is never speaking of God but only ever speaking about our understanding of God.

Unlike the modern ideal of systematization in definition, these people celebrated the fact that, as Meister Eckhart once claimed, the unnameable is omni-nameable. Evidently such conflicts were not judged to be problematic but were accepted. Indeed, such fissures help to prevent us from forming an idolatrous image of God, ensuring that none of us can legitimately claim to understand God as God really is.

The hint speaks to the heart and will only be heard by those with a sensitive and open ear. This powerless discourse of the hint can be seen at work in Jesus' parables, which can only truly be heard by those 'with ears to hear'.

For the Word, if it exists at all, does not simply dwell in the ink that marks the pages of the Bible and cannot be isolated in a dissection of the story into its constituent parts.

But for now it is simply worth noting that the multitude of descriptions detailing the nature of God, combined with the various claims that God cannot be contained by any description, presents the reader with the reality that the text affirms God as beyond all our understandings of God. In other words, the God who grasps us is never grasped (in text, thinking, or experience).

What is important about revelation is not that we seek to interpret it in the same way but rather that we all love it and are transformed by it. To fail to recognize this would be similar to an art critic saying that what is important when considering a piece of art is that we interpret it correctly rather than loving it and being challenged by it.

In the same way that the sun blinds the one who looks directly at its light, so God's incoming blinds our intellect. In this way the God who is testified to in the Judeo-Christian tradition saturates our understanding with a blinding presence.

The primary problem with idolatry is not that it falsely claims to have a connection with God but rather that it falsely claims to understand the God that it is connected to. Yet this does not mean that our definitions of God are somehow unimportant – indeed, they remain vital – it is only that we must recognize the extent to which these reflections fall short of that which they attempt to define and always reflect something of the one who makes the claims.

Parables subvert this desire to make faith simple and understandable. They do not offer the reader clarity, for they refuse to be captured in the net of a single interpretation and instead demand our eternal return to their words, our wrestling with them, and our puzzling over them.

In contrast, parables represent a mode of communicating that cannot be heard without being heeded, in which the only evidence of having "heard" its message is in the fleshly incarnation of that message.

The difference between the idea that our Christian traditions describe God and the view that they are worshipful responses to God is important to grasp, for while the former seeks to define, the latter is engaged with response. By charting the latter course, those within the emerging conversation perceive a very different way of understanding theology. It is no longer thought of as a human discourse that speaks of God but rather as the place where God speaks into human discourse.

God's Word cannot be heard without being heeded; it cannot be received without being incarnated. Indeed, it is only in being incarnated that one can say that it has been received.

Faith, then, is not a set of beliefs about the world. It is rather found in the loving embrace of the world.

The life of faith cannot be treated in the way we approach objects such as computers (which become more understandable the more we dissect and explore them). Persons of faith are not ones who act like rational detached individuals who are coldly assessing the evidence of their faith in the same way that a mathematician considers a formula.

The manager who understands what her employees want and need must seldom resort to the authority of the org chart or the paycheck. Taking a third-level approach, the smart manager doesn't scream the truth, but whispers messages that make others feel strong and successful. Only then are great change and real leadership possible.

By failing to let others be themselves before God and move at their own pace, we inevitably project onto them our own discomfort with their choice to live life differently than we do.

the extent to which we love and respect ourselves is the extent to which we will be able to love and respect others.

And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord's holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

Our wisdom . . . consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.