Quotes About Spirituality

In sum, passing over to Buddhist spiritual practice has taught me, and can teach my church, that all our words, whether in Christian theology or Christian liturgy, must arise from and lead back to Silence. Only then do they have something to say.

The kind of experiences that have stimulated my awareness of being part of the energy field of InterBeing have also made me aware that this energy is not blind, and its field is not inanimate. The energy, as it were, is up to something. There is something personal about it, even though I can't call it a person.

So contemplation – regular practices of spirituality – is necessary both to have a product to deliver and to have the energy to deliver it.

Buddhism has some mystical methods that we Christians might take a good look at and make good use of in repairing or remodeling our own. For me Buddhism has been a rich, indeed an indispensable, aid in renewing and expanding the repertoire of my Christian practice.

For me death is just moving from one school into another. But there's going to be a difference, because in that new school I shall have wings so I wont need to walk up and down the stairs!

If I am hungry, that is a material problem; if someone else is hungry, that is a spiritual problem.

It has been said with some truth that religion is, basically, humankind's attempt to communicate with the weather.

On the folk religion level, the problem of death often has less to do with what happens to the person who has died than with the pain and meaninglessness that death brings for the living. How can the living deal with the devastation caused by the death of a loved one?

Father Polda had walked up from his little chapel in Steg, as was his nightly custom, to sit and talk with the men and their families, for it was mostly under the sun and the stars that he preached, or sought the God that he served.

To the aesthete it is an art form, an athletic ballet. To the spiritually inclined it is a religion.

D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?

Where do we come from?" "What are we?""Where are we going?

One's religion is one's own possession and he has a right to it.

When Tung Kuo Tzu asked Chuang Tzu where the Tao was, he replied that it was in the ant, the grass, the clay tile, even in excrement: "There is nowhere where it is not . . . There is not a single thing without Tao.

Allah is essentially all things. He permeates through all beings created and originated . . . He who knows himself understands that his existence is not his own existence, but his existence is the existence of Allah . . . For He will not have anything to be other than He. Indeed, the other is He, and there is no otherness.

But many atheists have been uncomfortable with the purely negative. Many have had a profoundly spiritual or religious awe and humility towards nature and the Universe. As Carl Sagan wrote in Pale Blue Dot: "A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

They felt the need to go beyond Atheism, which simply denies the existence of a personal creator God and takes no positive positions about how we should live our lives or how we should feel about the Universe/Nature.

The pantheist "God" is the community of all beings. It is not a He, or a She, or an It. It is a "We," and a we in the broadest and most inclusive sense, embracing everything from rocks and algae, through butterflies and humans, to suns and planets.

From that day on I clearly understood that the kingdom of God can never mix with politics

Just because you have a church building doesn't necessarily mean Jesus is with you. He is not welcome in many churches today.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would become religious overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.

Contentment does not come from achievement. It comes from a relationship with the Lord.

What is the mass of a feeling? What is its wavelength, its position on the electromagnetic spectrum?

Apart from God, life is empty and unsatisfying. D