Quotes About Spirituality

One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.

His was the holiest face I ever saw. My very name turned holy on his tongue. If he had bade me rise and follow to the end of time, I would have gone. If he had bade me die for him, I would have died. When I deserved it least, God gave me most. I think it was the savior's face I saw.

Remember that the lives of other people are not your business. They are their business. They are God's business because they all have God whether they use the word God or not. Even your own life is not your business. It also is God's business. Leave it to God.

When Jesus said, "Do this in remembrance of me" (1 Corinthians 11:24) he was not prescribing a periodic slug of nostalgia.

So ever and again young Godric's dreams well up to flood old Godric's prayers, or prayers and dreams reach God in such a snarl he has to comb the tangle out, and who knows which he counts more dear.

The contradiction is resolved when you realize that for Jesus peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love. -p83

Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track, you and I, of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.

The Kingdom of God is where we belong. It is home, and whether we realize it or not, I think we are all of us homesick for it. -Originally published in The Clown in the Belfry and later in Secrets in the Dark

A GLUTTON IS ONE who raids the icebox for a cure for spiritual malnutrition.

I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way.

This is what I think, in essence, prayer is. It is the breaking of silence. It is the need to be known and the need to know. Prayer is the sound made by our deepest aloneness.

It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence.

It seems to me almost before the Bible says anything else, it is saying that—how important it is to be alive and to pay attention to being alive, pay attention to each other, pay attention to God as he moves and as he speaks. Pay attention to where life or God has tried to take you.

What deadens us most to God's presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort . . . than being able from time to time to stop that chatter including the chatter of spoken prayer.

Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabits.

Have you really seen God? he said, placing his hand on the young man's shoulder and fixing him with his protuberant eyes. Believing that the sound he could hear of a thousand voices singing was no longer the wind, Averill said, I am seeing him now.

We believe in God when for one reason or another we choose to do so. We believe God when somehow we run into God in a way that by and large leaves us no choice to do otherwise.

preachers and theologians, who spend so much of their lives talking about God that, unless they are very careful, God starts to lose all reality for them and to become just a subject for metaphysical speculation.

To say that I was born again, to use that traditional phrase, is to say too much because I remained in most ways as self-centered and squeamish after the fact as I was before, and God knows remain so still. And in another way to say that I was born again is to say too little because there have been more than a few such moments since, times when from beyond time something too precious to tell has glinted in the dusk, always just out of reach, like fireflies.

They attend with Pharisaical strictness to the outward forms of religion, and at the same time neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.

They'll read and sing a sacred song, And make a prayer both loud and long, And teach the right and do the wrong, Hailing htthe brother, sister, throng, With words of heavenly union.

From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise.

I might believe in the Redeemer if his followers looked more redeemed.

In a world that was created by God's words, words are not symbols. They are things. You call a demon, you make a demon. You curse at God and you risk dying.