Quotes About Spirituality

Allow this poem to carry you beyond yourself, transcending your mortal flesh as you wed yourself with the potentially infinite.

Poetry was invented as an mnemonic device to enable people to remember their prayers.

I believe that man must learn to live without those consolations called religious, which his own intelligence must by now have told him belong to the childhood of the race.

Dead drunk and cold-sober, he wandered out into the garden in the cool of the evening, awaiting the coming of the Lord.

When we open the Bible and read it, we are eavesdropping on an ancient spiritual journey.

Church is too often the most risky place to be spiritually honest.

There is no higher "law" to be obeyed than the law of love. That, at the end of the day, is what it means to follow Jesus.

When the dust clears and in the quiet of your own heart, what kind of God do you believe in, really? And why?

The spiritual disconnection many feel today stems precisely from expecting (or being told to expect) the Bible to be holy, perfect, and clear, when in fact after reading it they find it to be morally suspect, out of touch, confusing, and just plain weird.

Still, shifting my thinking on the Bible did not mean I was losing my faith in God. In fact, I had the growing sense that God was inviting me down this path, encouraging it even.

Trust your experiences, your God moments. They don't work as intellectual arguments for God, but that's exactly the point: intellectual arguments aren't enough, and wanting them to be so sooner or later leads to disappointment. God speaks to us through our whole humanity, not just through part of it. God moments can't be proven to anyone else, but that doesn't make them second best. They are proof—of another kind.

The Bible, just as it is, still works. Don't try to explain it. Just accept it. That won't make you a mindless zombie. It just means you are accepting your own human limitations and acknowledging by faith that something bigger than ourselves is happening, someone bigger is behind it, and we have the privilege to be a part of it.

If God were a helicopter parent, our sacred book would be full of clear, consistent, unambiguous information to take in. In other words, it wouldn't look anything like it does. But if the Bible's main purpose is to form us, to grow us to maturity, to teach us the sacred responsibility of communing with the Spirit by walking the path of wisdom, it would leave plenty of room for pondering, debating, thinking, and the freedom to fail. And that is what it does.

When we open the Bible and read it, we are eavesdropping on an ancient spiritual journey. That journey was recorded over a thousand-year span of time, by different writers, with different personalities, at different times, under different circumstances, and for different reasons. In

We have practically been conditioned to expect God to be our helicopter parent. And if for some reason we don't run to God to solve every little problem, from finding our car keys to deciding on color schemes for the nursery, we are told there is something deeply wrong with us spiritually. Phooey.

God doesn't change, but God—being God—is never fully captured by our perceptions. As people continue to live and breathe and experience life, how they see God changes too.

Our experiences of God matter—those sacred moments that defy the very rational capabilities we are so keen to rely on.

Our level of insight does not determine our level of trust. In fact, seeking insight rather than trust can get in the way of our walk with God.

When we think of "strong" faith as something that should be free of uncertainty or crises, I believe we have gotten wrong an important part of who God is and how the Christian life really works.

Being "in" with God is about much more than the thoughts we keep in our heads, the belief systems we hold on to, the doctrines we recite, or the statements of faith we adhere to, no matter how fervently and genuinely we do so, and how important they may be.

Walking the path of faith means trusting God enough to let our uh-oh moments expose how we create God to fit in our thinking.

I didn't know how to "do" faith without making sure my thoughts about God were lined up, and so, once those thoughts failed to be compelling, my faith sank.

In other words, I believe that faith in the Creator is necessarily transrational (not antirational) and mystical. I try to remember that as I work through intellectual challenges—and I mean work through, not avoid.

Christianity is a setup for letting go of certainty. The two pillars of the Christian faith express the mystery of faith: incarnation and resurrection. Of course, there's more to the Christian faith, but two elements make Christianity what it is, and both dodge our powers of thought and speech.