Quotes About Spirituality

I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it.

I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me.

I asked him why he was a priest, and he said if you have to work for anyone, an absentee boss is best.

I think we are worlds compressed into human form.

I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and I'm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion? She says he can. Then he should.

I am not tempted by God but I love his trappings.

Their throats were bare for God.

If there's such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.

I would never pull down a church! I adore churches. It is what happens inside them that I detest.

What art does is coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous

The mystics and the churchmen talk about throwing off his body and its desires, being no longer a slave to the flesh. They don't say that through the flesh we are set free. That our desire for another will lift us out of ourselves more cleanly than anything divine.

I sat at the back, listening to the music or mumbling through the sevice. I'm never tempted by God, but I like his trappings.

I broke his Bible box into bits and lit a fire and laid his body beside it and felt where the bones were broken in his back and chest and legs and licked the blood from his mouth and tried to give him my breath and I would have given him one of my legs and one of my arms and one of my kidneys and half of my liver and four pints of my blood and all easy for I had already given him my heart.

In the Torah, the Hebrew 'to know', often used in a sexual context, is not about facts but about connections. Knowledge, not as accumulation but as charge and discharge.

And God? Truly? In his own right, without our voices speaking for him? Obsessed I think, but not passionate.

With only our imaginations . . . we can't remember what it is about women that can turn a man through passion into something holy.

I am busy with the Lord in Wigan

If there is such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.

answered Shelley; the becoming of the soul, not its going, should be our concern. The mystery of life is on earth, not elsewhere.

I sat at the back, listening to the music or mumbling through the service. I'm never tempted by God, but I like his trappings.

It hasn't been too fashionable to talk about the soul. We live in a material world. Religion is discredited as superstition or, worse, fundamentalism. Spirituality, even when detached from religion, looks a bit hippy, wooly, vague; a comfort-zone for those who can't quite manage life as a biological and chemical accident with miraculous consequences.

I have somewhere read of a wise bishop who in a visit to his diocese found an old woman whose only prayer consisted in the single interjection Oh!- Good mother said he to her, continue to pray in this manner; your prayer is better than ours. This better prayer is mine also.

J'aperçois Dieu partout dans ses oeuvres ; je le sens en moi, je le vois tout autour de moi ; mais sitôt que je veux le contempler en lui-même, sitôt que je veux chercher où il est, ce qu'il est, quelle est sa substance, il m'échappe et mon esprit troublé n'aperçoit plus rien.

Kept talking about how she's studying every holy book she can get her hands on, aiming to understand God's word. I quoted St. Augustine to her. 'If you understand it, it isn't God.' Gave her a cup of chamomile tea.