Quotes About Understanding

Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.

Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others.

A mystic doesn't say "I believe." They say "I know." A true mystic will ironically speak with that self-confidence but at the same time with a kind of humility. So when you see that combination of calm self-confidence, certitude, and humility all at the same time you have the basis for mysticism in general.

Remember, mystery isn't something that you cannot understand—it is something that you can endlessly understand! There is no point at which you can say, "I've got it." Always and forever, mystery gets you!

Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text.

Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is.

We can save ourselves a lot of distress and accusation by knowing when, where, to whom, and how to talk about spiritually mature things.

Francis's starting place was human suffering instead of human sinfulness

God can most easily be lost by being thought found.

It seems that human beings cannot see what they are not readied to see. We cannot hear what we have not been prepared to hear. The "obvious" seems to have little correlation with our acceptance of it. We all have an amazing capacity for missing the point.

St. Irenaeus (125–203), The Scandal of the Incarnation, and St. Athanasius (297–373), On the Incarnation, are two early classics that set a bar of good theology that we have since seldom matched or even understood. The mystery of incarnation is the unique trump card that Christianity adds to the deck of world religions.

All theologies are blasphemous in so far as they attempt to reduce God to something that can be known through the understanding by which we know other things.

Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody.

To have a spiritual life is to recognize early on that there is always a similarity and coherence between the seer and the seen, the seekers and what they are capable of finding. You will seek only what you have partially already discovered and seen within yourself as desirable. Spiritual cognition is invariably re-cognition.

Mystery is not something that you cannot understand, but it is something that is endlessly understandable! It is multilayered and pregnant with meaning and never totally admits to closure or resolution.

We do not really know what it means to be human unless we know God. And, in turn, we do not really know God except through our own broken and rejoicing humanity.

In the Sermon on the Mount it's quite clear that these are the three great barriers we have to overcome to understand Jesus and the Reign of God. But in Christianity we have always been concerned with ecclesiological questions, sacramental questions, sacerdotal questions, and, needless to say, sexual questions – questions that Jesus practically never bothered with.

To take the Scriptures seriously is not to take them literally. Literalism is invariably the lowest and least level of meaning. Most

As the Dalai Lama says, "My religion is kindness; my only religion is kindness.

light is not so much what you directly see as that by which you see everything else.

Higher stages always empathetically include the lower, or they are not higher stages!

Until you meet a benevolent God and a benevolent universe, until you realize that the foundation of all is love, you will not be at home in this world.

Even with all the best intentions in the world, given our different temperaments, backgrounds, and the way we process our data and information, we are going to step on one another's toes. Two people with absolutely good will can deeply hurt one another. Good people hurt one another because we all come at reality in different ways. That's why, for Jesus, the only way to achieve union is through forgiveness, not through making sin impossible.

Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt, and "unknowing," and in such living, ironically resolves that very mystery to some degree.