Quotes About Spirituality

is often considered to be something children use in play and then discard when they become adults and put away childish things. We are therefore not surprised to learn that children use their imagination to enter stories, to experience them, and even to meet God there, but few adults think of using their imagination to meet God. However, following the lead of children could enrich the spiritual walk for adults.

To live and grow, faith needs religion. Children—and adolescents or adults with a newborn faith—must learn God's name and the stories of God's people.

The children with whom I worship are also fascinated with symbols of our faith.

Maria Montessori, a European educator of an earlier generation, designed a setting for children that was "between the classroom and the church." It was a place where children came to meet God and to know the deep realities of faith—a place, not for instruction, but for experiencing the religious life.[4] My observations suggest that few churches provide such a place for children.

We often try to compete with the rapid paced entertainment of television, seldom giving children a quiet moment in which to meet God, and many children lose touch with the God for whom their hearts hunger.

religion, but not faith, can be taught. Faith must be inspired within a faith community.

When we give children opportunity to meet God, we are not attempting to force something unnatural on them. Children are born with the potential for spiritual experience, and God is the one who stimulates the activation of that potential.

Teaching children is important for adults as well as children. As we tell children the stories of the faith, talk with them about God, and answer their questions, we refocus on God.

It is idle to ask those who never listen whether and how God answers prayer. Caroline Stephen, 1891

Death hath no dominion.

In the beginning there was Dust, and in the end there will be Dust, and in the middle there is Dust, Dust, Dust!

they climbed their ladders to wheedle and prune the trees into holiness

I've been thinking a lot about rules lately. About karma, I guess, even though most people just viciously abuse that word. They don't give one spangly fuck about the wheel of becoming and unbecoming.

Why grace? Because some days, it's the only thing we have in common. Because it's the one thing I'm certain is real. Because it's the reason I'm here. Because it's the oxygen of religious life, or so says a musician friend of mine, who tells me, "Without it, religion will surely suffocate you." Because so many of us are gasping for air and grasping for God, but fleeing from a kind of religious experience that has little to do with anything sacred or gracious.

Maybe that's why Jesus was so fond of parables: Nothing describes the indescribable like a good yarn.

Some theologians argue that one kind of grace is better than another, and that some people think they're experiencing "divine" grace when it's actually just "common." To me, that's like bickering about what color God's eyes are. (They're hazel, in case you were wondering.)

While it's true that you may lose your religion during the course of a lifetime, you never lose your salvation. Once you let Jesus in your kitchen, he just keeps on making peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and he never leaves.

Trying to explain or define grace is like catching the wind in a cardboard box or describing the color green.

Outside, it feels like there is less standing between the Creator and us. There is a lingering visceral connection we can hear and see and smell, reminders of the bond between Creator and creation, like the mountain sage crushed up in the pocket of the sweatshirt I was wearing on a short, muddy hike the other day. "In

Humans have historically used the arts in integrative ways, particularly within the contexts of enactment, ceremony, performance, and ritual.

What would Jesus do with this gift of writing, this God-given love of writing? What would He write?

Never is a man more ready to accept the Lord than when he faces his own mortality.

Have mercy, and forgive us, Father. We've saved our sacred images, but sacrificed Your image within our souls.

For what is a god but what we go to again and again?