Quotes About Spirituality

We used to sing the hymn "Take Time to Be Holy." But perhaps we should be singing, "Take time to be human." Or finally, "Take time." Sabbath is taking time … time to be holy … time to be human.

Cultus as a totality belongs to the monumental creations of the human spirit. To get a proper perspective of it, we must rank it with architecture, art, poetry, and music—all of which once served religion. It is one of the great languages with which mankind speaks to the Almighty, speaking to Him for no other reason than that it must. The Almighty or "God" did not earn these names of Almighty or God only by striking fear into man and forcing him to win His good will by favors.

Most Christians seem to have two kinds of lives, their so-called real life and their so-called religious one. Not (C. S.) Lewis. The barrier so many of us find between the visible and the invisible world was just not there for him. It had become natural for Lewis to live ordinary life in a supernatural way.

I think different religions are different doors to the same house. Sometimes I think the house exists, and sometimes I don't. It's the great mystery.

The true test of your Calvinism comes just here: How low is self and how high is God in your heart? Almost every moment of your life offers a test.

It is much easier to see the redemptive role of pain and suffering in God's plan if you are not actually undergoing pain and suffering. It was only by struggling with such feelings, however, that growth occurred. Each victory over discouragement gave an increase in spiritual courage; every success, however fleeting, in finding the hand of God behind all things, made it easier to recapture the sense of his purpose in a new day of seemingly senseless

Solo puedo describir la experiencia de conversión como una sensación de «dejarse llevar», de renunciar a todo esfuerzo o incluso a mi deseo de tomar las riendas de mi propia vida. Aunque suene demasiado simple, esa decisión ha condicionado a partir de entonces cada uno de los momentos de mi vida. Solo puedo llamarlo una conversión.

Faith is inseparable from love; out of these two twins hope is born.

There are movements of the soul, deeper than words can describe and yet more powerful than any reason, that can give a man to know beyond question or arguing or doubt that digitus Dei est hic (the finger of God is here),

Death to them was not an end, but a beginning, a passage into eternal life.

I had, in fact, long ago decided what I expected to hear from the Spirit, and when I did not hear precisely that, I had felt betrayed. Whatever else the Spirit might have been telling me at that hour, I could not hear. I was so intent on hearing only one message, the message I wanted to hear, that I was not really listening at all.

Only man can freely choose not to serve his Creator.

I am speaking only of a conversation with God, the spontaneous outpouring of a soul that has come to realize—however fleetingly—that it is standing at the knee of a loving and providing Father.

I realized then, and I felt it more deeply each day, that true freedom meant nothing else than letting God operate within my soul without interference, giving preference to God's will as manifested in the promptings, inspirations, and other means he chose to communicate, rather than in acting on my own initiatives.

it was easy to float freely and euphorically into the future, ready to accept whatever God might have prepared for me there. But the future was now the present, and as is always the case, it was a lot more unmanageable and full of bustle than it had seemed in the abstract. Accordingly, my new spirit of interior resolve to search out and understand and accept God's will in every detail of every situation was quickly put to a rude test by the rough and ready realities of life.

Somehow, by the trials and tribulations of this life, our souls must be purified of this dross of self if we are to become ultimately acceptable to God.

En los campos fui capaz de servir humildemente a los hombres que Dios ponía en mi camino cada día. Si las obras del espíritu en nosotros las acabamos conociendo lentamente, ¿cómo no vamos a empezar a detectar aún más lentamente las obras de ese espíritu en los demás? Mientras realizaba mi labor diaria, daba gracias a Dios una y otra vez por la terrible etapa de purificación que atravesé en Lubianka para poder servir a aquellos hombres.

It is in the body that we exist and work out our salvation. It is in the body that we see and take delight in the beauties of God's created universe, and in the body that we ourselves bear the marks of Christ's passion.

somehow I knew that I could do it. I knew that I must abandon myself entirely to the will of the Father and live from now on in this spirit of self-abandonment to God. And I did it. I can only describe the experience as a sense of "letting go," giving over totally my last effort or even any will to guide the reins of my own life. It is all too simply said, yet that one decision has affected every subsequent moment of my life. I have to call it a conversion.

I learned there the lesson which would keep me going in the years to come: religion, prayer, and love of God do not change reality, but they give it a new meaning.

Between God and the individual soul, however, there are no insignificant moments; this is the mystery of divine providence.

No matter how close to God the soul felt, how blessed it was by an awareness of his presence on occasion, the realities of life were always at hand, always demanding recognition, always demanding acceptance. I had continuously to learn to accept God's will—not as I wished it to be, not as it might have been, but as it actually was at the moment. And it was through the struggle to do this that spiritual growth and a greater appreciation of his will took place.

Rabbi Zusya said that on the Day of Judgment, God would ask him not why he had not been Moses, but why he had not been Zusya.

Valentin Rasputin