Quotes About Spirituality

Although I never found a church where I felt completely at home again, I made a new home in the world. I renewed my membership in the priesthood of all believers, who may not have as much power as we would like, but whose consolation prize is the freedome to meet God after work, well away from all centers of religious command, wherever God shows up.

I had done everything I knew how to do to draw as near to the heart of God as I could, only to find myself out of gas on a lonely road, filled with bitterness & self-pity. To suppose that I had ended up in such a place by the grace of God required a significant leap of faith. If I could open my hands, then all that fell from them might flower on the way down. If I could let myself fall, then I too might land in a fertile place.

I believe tears are holy, because they show us that the ice of our heart is melting.

Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.

But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.

As Eckhart, one of Otto's many sources, had asserted centuries earlier, referring to the Other as God, the religious seeker must set aside any idea about God as being good, wise, [or] compassionate.

If there was one thing I understood about God, it was that he was not good, and if he was good, he was too powerless to deserve our attention.

The early Christian patriarchs may not have realized that, in attempting to suppress ecstatic practices, they were throwing out much of Jesus too.

The senses are the devil's playground, the arena into which he will try to lure men away from Faith and into the conceits of the intellect or the delusions of carnality.

My religious friends - and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox - were convinced that God had a plan for us, and since God was good, it was a good plan, which we were required to endorse even without having any idea what it was. Just sign the paperwork; in other words, don't overintellectualize.

A Goddess religion should be out in the open, not underground as it is right now. A Goddess religion would cause men to look at women differently.

If a man's been beat, and his woman's been raped, by any man, white or black or purple, you think that man's going to see God's face the way the man who wronged him tells him it is? God finds all sorts of ways to speak to those that need Him, Ben. He's a man with a sword, to those that need a rod and staff to comfort them, whether that man's called Ogu or St. James. He's the man with the keys in his hand to those that're in chains and seeking a way through the door to heaven.

Holding his icy hands, she slid for a moment into the outer fringes of the healing trance and whispered to him by his inner name. But it was as if she called at the head of a descending trail along which he had long since passed—there was no answer.

Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms.

everything else is in motion while God does not move at all. God sits still, perfectly at rest, the silver dollar at the bottom of the well, the question.

we sang in church Tata Nzolo ! Which means Father in Heaven or Father of Fish Bait depending on just how you sing it, and that pretty well summed up my quandry.

Even the bells from the churches have a conversation, all ringing at once.

I felt the breath of God go cold against my skin.

Like Daniel she enteres the lions' den, but lacking Daniel's pure and unblemished soul, Ada is spiced with the flavors of vice that make for a tasty meal. Pure and unblemished souls must taste very bland, with an aftertaste of bitterness.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

But other people fast or walk long pilgrimages to honor the spirit of what they believe makes our world whole and lovely. If we gardeners can, in the same spirit, put our heels to the shovel, kneel before a trench holding tender roots, and then wait three years for an edible incarnation of the spring equinox, who's to make the call between ridiculous and reverent?

The whole idea of the sermon was how people connect up in various ways, seen and unseen, and that Mr. Peg had tied a lot of knots in the big minnow seine that keeps us all together. Dead but still here, in other words. That's what killed me the worst.

south, moving slowly. It looked something like a huge blue-gray shower curtain being drawn along by the hand of God. You could just barely see through it, enough to make

I realized that I had come to my own terms with the desert, but my soul was thirsty.