Quotes About Spirituality

We must be honest and humble about this: Many people of other faiths, like Sufi masters, Jewish prophets, many philosophers, and Hindu mystics, have lived in light of the Divine encounter better than many Christians. And why would a God worthy of the name God not care about all of the children?

Like any true spiritual master, Jesus exposed the root causes of evil (almost always some form of idolatry), and did not waste time punishing the mere symptoms, as moralistic people usually do.

Christians shrunk our image of both Jesus and Christ, and our "Savior" became a mere Johnny-come-lately "answer" to the problem of sin, a problem that we had largely created ourselves.

Without an inner life, our outer prayer will soon become superficial, ego-centered, and even counterproductive on the spiritual path.

I worry about "true believers" who cannot carry any doubt or anxiety at all, as Thomas the Apostle and Mother Teresa learned to do.

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and

Yet historically, the teaching of original sin started us off on the wrong foot—with a no instead of a yes, with a mistrust instead of a trust.

First-half-of-life religion is almost always about various types of purity codes or "thou shalt nots" to keep us up, clear, clean, and together, like good Boy and Girl Scouts. A certain kind of "purity" and self-discipline is also "behovely," at least for a while in the first half of life, as the Jewish Torah brilliantly presents.

God's greatest ally is reality itself. God's greatest revelation is what is (see Romans 1:20)—not what we want it to be, and not even what it should be—not abstract theories but concrete encounters.

You are supposed to struggle with spiritual texts, but when you make the Bible into a quick answer book, you largely remain at your present level of awareness. There are groups who would describe the Bible as an answer book for all of life's problems. The Bible is actually a conflict book. It is filled with seeming contradictions or paradoxes and, if you read it honestly and humbly, it should actually create problems for you!

The self that begins the journey is not the self that arrives at the Gospel. The self that begins is the self that we think ourselves to be, the superior self we want to be. This is the self that dies along the way— until 'no one' is left. This is the true self that all Great Religion talks about, the self bigger than death yet born of death, a different self than the private I, a self transformed by God and transformed in God.

I do not want to belong to a religion that cannot kneel.

God can help you get what you want, which is still a self-centered desire, instead of God's much better role—which is to help you know what you really desire (Luke 11:13; Matthew 7:11).

If you can see silence as the ground of all words and the birth of all words, then you will find that when you speak, your words will be more well-chosen and calm. Francis

God has worked anonymously since the very beginning—it has always been an inside and secret sort of job. The Spirit seems to work best underground. When aboveground, humans start fighting about it.

God can never be experienced apart from your best interests being involved.

There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life.

we have faith in Christ so we can have the faith of Christ.

Good religion keeps God free for people and keeps people free for God. You cannot improve on that.

We cannot attain the presence of God because we're already totally in the presence of God. What's absent is awareness

Traveling the road of healthy religion and true contemplation will lead to calmly held boundaries, which need neither to be defended constantly nor abdicated in the name of "friendship." This road is a "narrow road that few travel upon" these days (Matt. 7:14). It is what many of us like to call "the Third Way": the tertium quid that emerges only when you hold the tension of opposites.

So now we move toward the goal, the very purpose of human life, "another intensity…a deeper communion," as Eliot calls it, that which the container is meant to hold, support, and foster.

You cannot know anything spiritually by saying it is a not-that : you can only know it by meeting it in its precise and irreplaceable thisness and honoring it there.

I would almost describe spirituality as a concern for one's being, one's inner motivation and attitude, one's real inner Source, as opposed to any primary concern for one's "doing." Doing will always take care of itself when your being is right. It is our preoccupation with external forms and successes that makes us superficial, judgmental, split off and often just downright wrong—without knowing it.   god