Quotes About Redemption

sixth chapter of Luke: "Forgive, and ye shall be forgiven.

forgiveness meant that God is for giving

Sometimes - oh, just once in a blue moon-I resist being receptive to God's generosity, because I'm busy with a project and trying to manipulate Him or Her into helping me with it, or with getting my toys fixed or any major discomfort to pass. But God is not a banker or a bean counter. God gives us even more, which is so subversive. God just gives, to us, to you and me. I mean, look at us! Yikes. God keeps giving, forgiving, and inviting us back.

In the rabbinical tradition, there is great insight in the notion that when we see suffering, we remember that this is only the sixth day. We're not done here. The good news is that God isn't, either. God is searching with us for a cure for cancer. God rejoiced at the cure for smallpox.

no matter how much we screwed up--and we all did, big-time--we always cared, showed up, and stayed close. We gave everything we could...This beauty was not lost--it cannot be. All that we gave remains.

Years after her death, I started thinking mean things about myself, and that holding on to her shirt was pure neurotic clinging. That it was ridiculous. Part of me understood that my hold on it had to do with the excruciating mess and weirdness of my family: how only a handful of people in your lifetime help redeem this mess, so that when one of them dies, hope dies. You never fully recover. You can't.

Mercy is radical kindness. Mercy means offering or being offered aid in desperate straits. Mercy is not deserved. It involves absolving the unabsolvable, forgiving the unforgivable. Mercy brings us to the miracle of apology, given and accepted, to unashamed humility when we have erred or forgotten. Charge it to our heads and not our hearts, as the elders in black churches have long said.

Topsy-turvy is often a symptom for the presence of God--the last become first, the hungry are fed, the obnoxious are welcomed.

Write to save yourself,' Athos said, 'and someday you'll write because you've been saved.

Write to save yourself ... and someday you'll write because you've been saved. You will feel terrible shame for this. Let your humility grow larger than your shame.

Write to save yourself,' Athos said, 'and someday you'll write because you've been saved.'" - from Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

It is the spirit which heals the transgressor, and that is in essence what matters.

but can it forgive everything? Should it? Which

The people to be saved stretched without end into the future.

If a man could only learn that you are not punished for the sin, but by it.

That was my nature - going from temptation after temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.

The evil of one murder is infinite, and my guilt is like my beauty - eternal. I cannot be forgiven, for there is no one to forgive me for all I've done.

For what can the damned really have to say to the damned?

Phil was mumbling that Reuben might become a writer after all and writers had a way of redeeming everything that ever happens to them.

You killed them, Reuben. You killed them in their sins! You terminated their destiny on this earth. You snatched from them any chance for repentance, for redemption. You took that from them. You took it all, Reuben. You snuffed out forever the years of reparation they might have lived! You took life itself from them and you took it from their descendants, and yes, even from their victims, you took what their amends might have been.

It struck me, sharp and hard, that I had been given so many chances to save my soul that my entire life had been constructed around these chances! That was my nature - going from temptation to temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.

Love me. You have destroyed everything! But if you love me, it can all be restored in a new form. Love me.

Your life will be filled with good things, for the demons are slain; and you will inherit Eden

The second thing I believe is that all of us would be human again if we could.