Quotes About Love

Our small, scarcity-based worldview is the real aberration here, and I believe it has largely contributed to the rise of atheism and the "practical atheism" that is the actual operative religion of most Western countries today. The God we've been presenting people with is just too small and too stingy for a big-hearted person to trust or to love back.

Surely God does not exist so that we can think correctly about Him — or Her. Amazingly and wonderfully, like all good parents, God desires instead the flourishing of what God created and what God loves — us ourselves. Ironically, we flourish more by learning from our mistakes and changing than by a straight course that teaches us nothing.

There is no straight line to Goodness, to Love, or to God. And thank God, Grace is always retroactive.

love, not death, is the eternal thing.

God resists our evil and conquers it with good, or how could God ask the same of us?! Think about that. God shocks and stuns us into love. God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change. Only love effects true inner transformation, not duress, guilt, shunning, or social pressure. Love is not love unless it is totally free. Grace is not grace unless it is totally free. You would think Christian people would know that by now, but it is still a secret of the soul.

You will know salvation through the mystery of forgiveness" (Luke 2:77).

Only love effects true inner transformation, not duress, guilt, shunning, or social pressure.

Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity but to change the mind of humanity about God. It is "simple and beautiful;" as Einstein said great truth would always have to be.

In short, good leaders must have a certain capacity for non-polarity thinking and full-access knowing (prayer), a tolerance for ambiguity ( faith), an ability to hold creative tensions (hope), and an ability to care (love) beyond their own personal advantage.

the old ego will always prefer an economy of merit and sacrifice to any economy of grace and unearned love, where we have no control.

We have been shown how to fight hate without becoming hate ourselves. We have been given a Companion and a Friend and not just a good idea. We have been given joy in the midst of failure, and not just a way of winning or being right.

This resistance to change is so common, in fact, that it is almost what we expect from religious people, who tend to love the past more than the future or the present.

Clearly, you are participating in a Love that's being given to you. You are not creating this. You are not generating this. It is being generated through you and in you and for you. You are participating in something larger than yourself and you are just allowing it and trusting it for the pure gift that it is.

Love is a paradox. It often involves making a clear decision, but at its heart, it is not a matter of mind or willpower but a flow of energy willingly allowed and exchanged, without requiring payment in return.

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

I further believe that a free and loving God would create things that continue to recreate themselves, exactly as all parents desire for their children.

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.

Christians are meant to be the visible compassion of God on earth more than "those who are going to heaven.

What we all desire and need from one another, of course, is that life energy called eros! It always draws, creates, and connects things.

Following Jesus is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world. To allow what God for some reason allows—and uses. And to suffer ever so slightly what God suffers eternally. Often, this has little to do with believing the right things about God—beyond the fact that God is love itself.

God is the ultimate nonviolent one, so we dare not accept any theory of salvation that is based on violence, exclusion, social pressure, or moral coercion. When we do, these are legitimated as a proper way of life. God saves by loving and including, not by excluding or punishing.

We cannot jump over this world, or its woundedness, and still try to love God. We must love God through, in, with, and even because of this world. This is the message Christianity was supposed to initiate, proclaim, and encourage, and what Jesus

Have you ever experienced the embarrassed and red-faced look of shame and self-recognition on the face of anyone who has been loved gratuitously after they have clearly done wrong? This is the way that God seduces us all into the economy of grace—by loving us in spite of ourselves in the very places where we cannot or will not or dare not love ourselves.

Human sympathy is the best and easiest way to open the heart space and to make us live inside our own bodies. God never intended most human beings to become philosophers or theologians, but God does want all humans to represent the very Sympathy and Empathy of God. And it's okay if it takes a while to get there. Our central message again bears repeating: God loves things by becoming them. We love God by continuing the same pattern.