Quotes About Spirituality

The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world.

I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God.

As he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature.

God is. Because God is, I live, I love, I am. Does that mean that God exists? I do not know what that question means. I experience God; I cannot explain God. I trust my experience.

So the first step that those of us who wish to explore the meaning of resurrection must take is to recognize that the founding moment of the Christian story is not about either an empty tomb or the resuscitation of a deceased body. Its original proclamation asserted that in some manner God had raised Jesus into being part of who God is. Jesus was raised by God into God.

I identify myself quite self-consciously with a man named Melchizedek, who was described in the book of Psalms as "a priest forever" (Ps. 110:4).

Peter Gomes, Harvey Cox, Diana Eck and Dorothy Austin.

So I am driven to find a different way to read the Bible that allows me simultaneously to be both a person of faith and a person thankful for and dedicated to the century in which I am privileged to live.

God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God.

The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.

death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness.

I prepare for death by living.

We walk into the mystery of God; we do not define that mystery.

When a human life is open to all that humanity can be, humanity and divinity flow together as one. It was and is a radical insight, and one the consciousness of the mystic is destined to understand.

The task of religion is not to turn us into proper believers; it is to deepen the personal within us, to embrace the power of life, to expand our consciousness, in order that we might see things that eyes do not normally see.

Hallowed be thy name" means that the ultimate, the mystical, the ineffable can never be captured in human words. Perhaps we need to learn from the Jews that if one speaks the name of God, one is pretending that one is able to know and to define God, which is the beginning of human idolatry. That is when we begin to create God in our own image, while pretending it is the other way around. Perhaps

Healing, for Jung, comes with the embrace of our shadow, the acceptance of our evil. Evil too is part of God, Jung suggested, because it too is a part of Being.

Word of God" or to treat the words of the Bible as if they were words spoken by the mouth of God is to me not just irresponsible, it is also to be illiterate.

Jonah's "sin," as noted above, was that he dared to limit God's definition of what is holy to his own definition of what is holy. He assumed that God had no ability to love beyond the boundaries of Jonah's love.

Prayer is rather the activity that enables each of us to be givers to and receivers from one another of the deepest meaning of life—a meaning I call God.

With no change in the tone of her voice, Lydia began to pray in tongues. And at that instant I felt--actually felt--a wave of warmth pass from her hands into my head and then swiftly down through my chest and arms. The sensation was of heat, but without the effect of heat: I didn't feel flushed or hot. It was like coming close to some immense source of heat, a blast furnace or a sun, that had no burning quality whatever.

Another use of tongues suggested in the Bible is to let us pray even when with our own minds we have no idea what to ask for in a given situation (see Romans 8:26-27).

your humanity is the spiritual path itself.

In Islam, all living things have souls. We are made pure by the fire of the lord compassion.