Quotes About Spirituality

Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it. So welcome to your own priesthood, practiced at the altar of your own life. The good news is that you have everything you need to begin.

Matter matters to God. The most ordinary things are drenched in divine possibility. Pronouncing blessings upon them is the least we can do.

Because they were not old enough to serve on committees or wrangle over the order of worship, the children often had a better grasp of what church was all about than the rest of us did.

I have found things while I was lost that I might never have discovered if I had stayed on the path. I have decided to stop fighting the prospect of getting lost and engage it as a spiritual practice instead.

NOT EVERYONE is able to walk, but most people can, which makes walking one of the most easily available spiritual practices of all. All it takes is the decision to walk with some awareness, both of who you are and what you are doing. Where you are going is not as important, however counterintuitive that may seem.

I did not live on the earth but in it, in communion with all that gave me life.

More to the point, there are times when dancing on tables is the most authentic prayer in reach, even if it pocks the table and clears the room.

As enjoyable as it could be to spend a couple of hours on Sunday morning with people who were at their best, it was also possible to see the strain in some of the smiles, the effort it took to present the most positive, most faithful version of the self.

On day three, I decided that a power outage would make a great spiritual practice.

All these years later, the way many of us are doing church is broken and we know it, even if we do not know what to do about it.

Finally I asked my friend Judy, who spent many years as a student of Sufism and who embodies fana —the self-annihilating love of God—as well as anyone I know. When I asked her to define spirituality for me, she thought for a moment and said, 'Spirituality is the active pursuit of the God you didn't make up.' I loved that. I also did not know what it meant.

When you live in God, your day begins when you lose yourself long enough for God to find you, and when God finds you, to lose yourself

The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor. That self-canceling feature of my religion is one of the things I like best about it. Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.

The soul does not grow by addition but by subtraction," wrote the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart.

As much as I admire the brilliance of the Jewish Talmud—especially the way it hallows sacred debate across the centuries—I cannot have it. It belongs to those in whose lifeblood it was written. As much as my soul leans toward the whirling of the Sufis who bring heaven to earth with their ethereal spinning, I cannot have that either. It belongs to those who have devoted their lives to the love of Allah.

We wanted More. We wanted a deeper sense of purpose. We wanted a stronger sense of God's presence.

AS IMPORTANT AS IT IS to mark the places where we meet God, I worry about what happens when we build a house for God.

Is Christian faith primarily about being Christian or becoming truly human?

Because we cannot stand the God-shaped hole inside of us, we try stuffing it full of all sorts of thing, but only God may fill.

Come tell us what is saving your life now

I have lived through parts of life that no one in her right mind would ever willingly have chosen, finding enough overlooked treasure in them to outweigh my projected wages in the life I had planned. These are just a few of the reasons that I have decided to stop fighting the prospect of getting lost and engage it as a spiritual practice instead.

Week after week, I was permitted to stand up in special clothes and talk while everyone else sat quietly and listened. Week after week, they heard the gospel filtered through my sensibilities. On Sunday mornings they sang the hymns I had chosen, and on Wednesday evenings they engaged the topics I had picked.

Greenspan calls this "spiritual bypassing"—using religion to dodge the dark emotions instead of letting it lead us to embrace those dark angels as the best, most demanding spiritual teachers we may ever know.

All in all, the moon is a truer mirror for my soul than the sun that looks the same way every day.