Quotes About Spirituality

Worshiping the creation is never a pathway to life; it leads you in the opposite direction.

The prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. (James 5:15–16)

your body hungers to be filled, but your soul hungers even more.

Biblical literacy and theological expertise are not, therefore, the end of the Word but a God-ordained means to an end, and the end is a radically transformed life because the worship at the center of that life has been reclaimed.

Forgiveness is a vertical commitment that is followed by a horizontal transaction.

Health of the body is an expression of bliss of the mind and the transformations that it guides. The truly healthy person experiences bliss in mind, bliss through the senses, and bliss in the body.

The best gift of the desert is God's presence.

God" must be an experience before "God" can be a word. Unless God is an experience, whatever words we might use for the Divine will be without content, like road signs pointing nowhere, like lightbulbs without electricity. Buddha would warn Christians, and I believe Rahner would second the warning: if you want to use words for God, make sure that these words are preceded by, or at least coming out of, an experience that is your own.

We act not to gain the fruits of our actions but because this is how the Christ-Spirit or our Buddha-nature acts, though we rejoice when our actions do bear fruit. The well-worn dictum applies: "We are not called to be successful, but to be faithful" to what we are, though we also know that if ever there is to be success, it will come out of such fidelity.

Though every image or symbol limps, Christians can and must say what Buddhists might agree with – that if we're going to talk about God, God is neither a noun nor an adjective. God is a verb! With the word "God" we're trying to get at an activity that is going on everywhere rather than a Being that exists somewhere. God is much more an environment than a thing.

I've realized that prayer can become the occasion for a good bit of unintentional dishonesty with myself, or maybe an escape from my own messy reality.

Salvation understood as a revelation of our being in Christ or of our Buddha-nature is not just a wonderful revealing of what we are; it can also be a jolting kick in the pants, a transforming corrective to what we thought we were.

And therein lies my problem – how to hold together all the words about God that I have learned as a good Christian and then as a professional theologian with my growing awareness, especially over the last three decades of my life, of God as Mystery. Come to think of it, this problem of "words" may not only be bubbling under the other problems I've dealt with in the preceding two chapters: it may be one of the major causes of those problems.

Jesus was such a powerful, "saving" Teacher because he was what he taught.

Father Hugo M. Enomiya-Lassalle, a German Jesuit who spent most of his life in Japan and became a Zen teacher, said somewhere that the precondition for addressing God as a "you" is the realization that we shouldn't.

All religion is in daily need of reformation because all religion, in both blatant and subtle ways, seeks to make itself and its creeds, codes, and cults more important than the revelation and experience it is meant to serve and pass on.

words must respect the Mystery and never idolatrously take its place.

we let go in order to let God.

I can imagine that some of my Buddhist friends, having read the above description of my struggles with a God-as-You, might scratch their heads and ask: "What's the problem? For us, no God, therefore no person, therefore no problem." I admire their immunity and freedom from such difficulties. But I am, or I want to be, a Christian.

Loving others, therefore, is not a question so much of "doing God's will" but, rather, of "living God's life.

To put it bluntly but also imploringly: we Christians need more silence in our services and liturgies. Just how this might be realized, just how we

If Mystery is the goal and content of all religious experience, then Silence is a necessary means of letting Mystery speak.

Salvation, therefore, is not a transaction that takes place outside us, but rather an empowering awareness that explodes within and then pervades our entire being.

Christian prayer is generally too worshipful and therefore dualistic. And it is too wordy.