Quotes About Spirituality

The Holy One. I have never stopped believing in him. I don't understand the idea that God wants to be worshipped one way alone, and when I feel overwhelmed by the immensity and beauty of his creation, I am glad my mother taught me to bless and praise him everywhere. My

T]hat finally is the questions, that is the anguish--to abide in God's hiddenness is one thing, to abide in God's absence is altogether something else.

Fasting is meant to take you, temporarily, out of the realm of the physical and focus your attention heavenward; as one Jewish guide to fasting puts it, 'at the heart of this practice is a desire to shift our attention away from our immediate needs and to focus on more spiritual concerns.

Meanwhile, other people seem to be getting along with God just fine, very well indeed. Why not me?)

Maybe, if God is fire, we are a grove of ponderosa pines. Without the heat and burn of God's flame, our pinecones would remain closed tight around the seeds that are needed for our thriving and growth and new life.

I cannot describe God in the same way that I cannot describe a picture I am holding millimeters from my eyes—the picture is made strange and unknowable not because it is distant but because it is so close.

I am not the author of my prayers; when they come, they come from God.

friendship with God is the entire goal of the Christian life.

Phyllis and I pray these chaplets together; at three o'clock, every first Saturday. We are never in the same town. For months, we do not speak on the phone or email. We pray these chaplets for just a few minutes, maybe as many as sixty minutes, once a month on a Saturday afternoon. Intimacy with the elusive God is that kind of intimacy. It is the closeness of praying together, apart.

Sure, sometimes it is great when, in prayer, we can express to God just what we feel; but better still when, in the act of praying, our feelings change. Liturgy is not, in the end, open to our emotional whims. It repoints the person praying, taking him somewhere else.

These words of prayer are among the most basic words Dr. Gatewood knows. When he has forgotten everything else, those words are the words he will have. Those words have formed his heart, and—regardless of what he feels or remembers on any particular morning—they continue to form his heart still.

This is why Jesus is hymned not as grape juice but as wine: because He is dangerous and excessive. He is more than you need, and He is more than pleasure, and if you attend to Him, you will find so much there that you will be derailed completely.

Wine is God's special drink. The purpose of good wine is to inspire us to a livelier sense of gratitude to God. —John Calvin

When you find that God is absent, you do many things. You temporize, for a while. You buy a new prayer book, hoping that perhaps some Celtic blessings might do the trick.

And I understood that I ought not ask for a prayer language until I could ask without making it the test of my entire faith.

No, no, I'm not one of them. I'm one of you. I believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, but I also wear fishnet stockings and drink single malt Scotch.

finally I say            all right, it is improbable, all right, there is no God. And then as if I'm focusing a magnifying glass on dry leaves, God blazes up. It's the attention, maybe, to what isn't            there that makes the notion flare like a forest fire until I have to spend the afternoon dragging the hose to put it out. . . .

I become professional or hip, depending on what I am wearing. I feel different when I am wearing different clothes. I act different. I let my Talbots suits and my vintage shirts remake me in their image. I want to let Jesus do the same.

If you keep kosher, the protagonist of your meal is not you; it is God.

Sometimes I cannot say much about why I go to church other than what people who go to the gym say: I always feel better once I'm there; I feel better after; it is always good for me, not good in a take-your-vitamins way, in a chidingly moralistic way, but in a palpable way.

From deep in the tradition, from The Cloud of Unknowing , a fourteenth-century text from an unnamed English monk: "You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God." The words slap. Busyness is not much of an excuse if it only takes a minute or two to move toward God. But the monk's words console, too. For, of time and person, it seems that scraps are all I have to bring forward. That my ways of coming to God these days are all scraps.

Food is part of God's creating. A right relationship with food points us toward Him.... The table is not only a place where we can become present to God. The table is also a place where He becomes present to us.

As I watch my priest lay the communion table for the gathered believers, I remember why eating attentively is worth all the effort: The table is not only a place where we can become present to God. The table is also a place where He becomes present to us.

But if roteness is a danger, it is also the way liturgy works. When you don't have to think all the time about what words you are going to say next, you are free to fully enter into the act of praying; you are free to participate in the life of God.