Quotes About Understanding

Listen with your eyes because here you cannot decipher what is said out of the effort of mouths.

She was not listening at the level of language but beneath it, in the deep recesses of the imagination.

And the simple act of listening is crucial to the concept of language, more crucial even than reading and writing, and language in turn is crucial to human society.

I do not speak Kiowa, and I never understood her prayers, but there was something inherently sad in the sound, some merest hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow.

There is no wisdom without love.

I feel about John ['s gospel] like I feel about my wife; I love her very much, but I wouldn't claim to understand her. (Following Jesus, p. 27.)

Metaphors are so prevalent that if one were to specifically look out for them it would spoil completely one's reading and listening, and thus detract from the author's purpose.

La verdad es como una manta que nos deja los pies fríos. Ya puede uno tirar de ella hacia sí en todos los sentidos, que nunca nos cubrirá del todo. Sacudidla, tirad de ella, mas nunca será suficiente. Desde el día en que se viene al mundo, llorando, a aquel a quien se le entrega, agonizante, no puede hacer más que cubrirse con ella la cabeza y gemir, llorar o aullar.

We have to grow into Scripture, like a young boy inheriting his older brother's clothes and flopping around in them, but he gradually builds out and grows up. Perhaps it's a measure of our maturity when parts of Scripture that we found odd or even repellent suddenly come up in a new light. Our sense is overtaken by a sense of the whole thing, wide, multicolored, and unspeakably powerful.

we have developed a corollary that is neither love nor forgiveness—namely, tolerance. The problem with this is clear: I can "tolerate" you without it costing me anything very much. I can shrug my shoulders, walk away, and leave you to do your own thing. That, admittedly, is preferable to my taking you by the throat and shaking you until you agree with me. But it is certainly not love.

We read scripture in order to be refreshed in our memory and understanding of the story within which we ourselves are actors, to be reminded where it has come from and where it is going to, and hence what our own part within it ought to be.

What Paul understands by holiness or sanctification (is) the learning in the present of the habits which anticipate the ultimate future.

The point of trying to understand the cross better is not so that we can congratulate ourselves for having solved an intellectual crossword puzzle, but so that God's power and wisdom may work in us, through us, and out into the world that still regards Jesus's crucifixion as weakness and folly.

It is possible, it seems, to affirm everything the creed says—especially Jesus's "divine" status and his bodily resurrection—but to know nothing of what the gospel writers were trying to say. Something is seriously wrong here.

When Jesus gave his disciples this prayer, he was giving them part of his own breath, his own life, his own prayer. The prayer is actually a distillation of his own sense of vocation, his own understanding of his Father's purposes. If we are truly to enter into it and make it our own, it can only be if we first understand how he set about living the Kingdom himself.

As St. Paul says, what matters isn't so much our knowledge of God as God's knowledge of us; not, as it were, the god we want but the God who wants us. God help us, we don't understand ourselves; how can we expect to understand that Self which stands beside our selves like Niagara beside a trickling tap?

To many, "The Bible is a form of verbal wallpaper, pleasant enough in the background, but he stop thinking about it after you have lived in the house for a few weeks.

When the women went to the tomb they met someone else and in the half light they thought it was Jesus himself. Answer: they would have noticed soon enough.

The aim, as in all theological and biblical exploration, is not to replace love with knowledge. Rather, it is to keep love focused upon its true object. We

believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

One of the great gains of biblical scholarship this last generation, not least because of our new understanding of first-century Judaism, is our realization that the temple was central to the Jewish worldview.

Transcending "Revelation" All this alerts us to the fact that scripture is more than simply

it is possible to allow the study of the text, and of different interpretations of the text, to become a substitute for allowing the text to bring us into the presence of the living God.

How would you describe a mature person?