Quotes About Spirituality

Before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves, for no one can give up what he or she does not first possess.6 Jesus puts it this way: "If you're content with simply being yourself, you will become more than yourself" (Luke 18:14 The Message). Before we can become our self we must accept our self, just as we are. Self-acceptance always precedes genuine self-surrender and self-transformation.

Thomas Merton warns, "There is no greater disaster in the spiritual life than to be immersed in unreality, for life is maintained and nourished in us by our vital relation with reality."1 The truly spiritual life is not an escape from reality but a total commitment to it.

God's intended home is our heart, and it is meeting God in the depths of our soul that transforms us from the inside out.

Real knowing of ourselves can only occur after we are convinced that we are deeply loved precisely as we are. The fact that God loves and knows us as sinners makes it possible for us to know and love our self as sinner. It all starts with knowing God's love.

The more we identify with our psychologically and socially constructed self, the more deeply we hide from God, ourselves and others.

Prayer is not simply what we do. It is a way of being. More specifically, it is resting in the reality of our being-in-God. This is our fundamental identity. It is the hidden but deepest truth of our existence.

God meets us in our individuality because God wants to fulfill that individuality. God wants us to follow and serve in and through that individuality. God doesn't seek to annihilate our uniqueness as we follow Christ. Rather, Christ-following leads us to our truest self.

We seek bridges from our isolation through people, possessions and accomplishment. But none of these are ever quite capable of satisfying the restlessness of the human heart. To be human is to have been designed for intimate relationship with the Divine.

while love plays a distinctive place in Christianity, the experience of love is obviously not restricted to Christians. The ability to love others is the pinnacle of fulfillment and health for all persons. Receiving the gift of love reminds us all of what it is to be fully human. What follows, therefore, should be of interest not just to Christians but also to those pursuing other spiritual paths, as well as those not consciously on a spiritual journey of any sort.

silence is God's first language; everything else is a poor translation.

The spiritual life of one person should never be a carbon copy of that of another. Peter and John had quite different personalities and quite different transformational journeys as they followed Jesus. Mary and Martha, two sisters whom Jesus loved deeply, each expressed their love for him uniquely. And he received both, not discouraging Martha from busying herself in service, simply encouraging her to not fret in doing so (Luke 10:38-42).

there are many false ways of achieving uniqueness. These all result from attempts to create a self rather than receive the gift of my self-in-Christ.

We should never be tempted to think that growth in Christlikeness reduces our uniqueness. While some Christian visions of the spiritual life imply that as we become more like Christ we look more and more like each other, such a cultic expectation of loss of individuality has nothing in common with genuine Christian spirituality. Paradoxically, as we become more and more like Christ we become more uniquely our own true self.

The mystery of the Christian gospel is that our deepest, truest self is not what we think of as our own separate self but the self that is one with Christ. This is the reason that the self that embarks on the journey of Christ-following is not the self that arrives.

Unless we spend as much time looking at God as we spend looking at our self, our knowing of our self will simply draw us further and further into an abyss of self-fixation.

The prayer conversation always begins with God. It does not begin with us. Prayer is our response to a divine invitation to encounter. The prayer conversation has already begun because God has already reached out, seeking our attention and response. Until we learn to attend to the God who is already present and communicating, our prayers will never be more than the product of our minds and wills.

Our challenge is to unmask the Divine in the natural and name the presence of God in our lives.

Often they become uncomfortable with an emphasis on divine love; they feel an urgent need to balance this by highlighting God's hatred of sin. Unfortunately, while they may give intellectual assent to God's love, they often experience very little of it.

Similarly, people who are afraid to look deeply at themselves will of course be equally afraid to look deeply at God. For such persons, ideas about God provide a substitute for direct experience of God.

Some Christians speak of a personal encounter with Jesus as if this were a one-time matter—something that happens at conversion. This is a tragic confusion of an introduction and a relationship. A first encounter is just that—a first encounter. What God longs for us to experience is intimate knowing that comes by means of an ongoing relationship.

What God wants is simply our presence, even if it feels like a waste of potentially productive time. That is what friends do together—they waste time with each other. Simply being together is enough without expecting to "get something" from the interaction. It should be no different with God.

Transformational knowing of God comes from meeting God in our depths, not in the abstraction of dusty theological propositions.

The way of the true self is always the way of humility. Pride and arrogance move us toward our false self, but humility and love allow us to live the truth of our being.

After several years of hellfire sermons, I did what any reasonable ten-year-old child would do under the circumstances—I accepted Christ into my heart and began seeking to live a life that would please God.