Quotes About Spirituality

Growth in love is not an accomplishment but the receipt of a gift.

Genuine self-knowledge begins by looking at God and noticing how God is looking at us.

Paradoxically, we come to know God best not by looking at God exclusively, but by looking at God and then looking at ourselves—then looking at God, and then again looking at ourselves. This is also the way we best come to know our selves. Both God and self are mostly fully known in relationship to each other.

If God has come in the flesh, and if God keeps coming to us in our fleshly existence, then all of life is shot through with meaning. Earth is crammed with heaven, and heaven (when we finally get there) will be crammed with earth. Nothing wasted. Nothing lost. Nothing secular. Nothing absurd.... All are grist for the mill of a downto-earth spirituality.

Paradoxically, as we become more and more like Christ we become more uniquely our own true self.

We do not pray so that we can get God's attention. We pray so that God will get our attention.

I accept Augustine's maxim of solvitor ambulando - things are solved by walking.' Sometimes when I walk, I think of God, and sometimes I explicitly direct worded thoughts to God. But my walking prayer is in no way limited to these times when I specifically speak to God. The whole experience is prayer when I walk with openness before God.

Richard Rohr reminds us that "we cannot attain the presence of God. We're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is awareness.

Spiritual friends help us most when they make clear that their job is to point the way, not to lead the way. And the Way to which they should point is Jesus.

The only thing we should seek in prayer is God. When we focus on how we are doing or what we are getting out of prayer, we have taken our eyes off God and put them back on our self.

In its most basic terms Christian spirituality is a relationship with God. Perhaps the most remarkable thing to notice about this Christian God is that is it he who has sought us out, not we him. In fact, anything that we experience as desire for him is simply the result of his Spirit's calling us to himself. Spirituality is the response of spirit to Spirit.

Teresa of Avila says that the important thing in prayer is not to think much but to love much. The head is not a bad place to start our prayer journey. But if prayer stays there too long and does not begin to sink to the heart, it will inevitably become arid and frustrating.

Identity is never simply a creation. It is always a discovery. True identity is always a gift of God.

Created from love, of love and for love, our existence makes no sense apart from Divine love.

Today I could like anybody, said Rek, smiling. The sky is clear, the wind is fresh, and life tastes very fine. What will you do now? I think I will become a monk and devote my entire life to prayer and good works. No, said Rek. I mean, what will you do today? Ah! Today I'll get drunk and go whoring, said Bowman.

I feel that way about heaven; it's far more important that Heaven should exist than that I should ever see it.

Yeshua ben Yusef

Why worship God when you can worship yourself? says the "celebrity.

I don't feel anything either way. No feeling about it comes to me - it's not something I have a choice about. Isn't a feeling like that supposed to happen? I can't make a feeling like that up, can I? Maybe God just chooses certain people, and the rest of us - we can't feel Him.

Everybody knows what God is,' said his mother. 'You feel what God is, don't you?

Is the work of sun worshippers to honor those who think they can see the sun? Or to worship the sun?

If we can't be ballplayers together, maybe I can start bein' a Buddhist.

It's incredible to me how blithely even intelligent people sometimes toss around terms like "transcendence" and "crucifixion." The words move us on paper. They feel noble upon the tongue. But when they cease to be sounds and begin to caress the flesh and bones, when they leave the page and get physical, there is little that even the best of us woudn't do to escape them.

There were a couple of occasions in India when I was twenty that felt to me like going out with a thimble in your hand, hoping to catch a drop of rain, and having the ocean land on your head. These experiences convinced me that there is an absolute love that pervades everything.