Quotes About Growth

Juniors" on the first part of the journey invariably think that true elders are naive, simplistic, "out of it," or just superfluous. They cannot understand what they have not yet experienced. They are totally involved in their first task, and cannot see beyond it.

Grace must and will edge you forward. "God has no grandchildren. God only has children," as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself.

Three steps forward, two steps back.

To preach the Reign of God, dear brothers and sisters, we have to break with our dependency on a perfectible self.

you learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that you eventually learn what the balance feels like. The skater pushing both right and left eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with.

Shadow work is humiliating work, but properly so. If you do not eat such humiliations with regularity and make friends with … all those who reveal to you and convict you of your own denied faults…, you will certainly remain in the first half of life forever.

Going somewhere good means having to go through and with the bad, and being unable to hold ourselves above it or apart from it.

God, however, forgives even immature religion, and those who know God learn to do the same.

If you realize that there is a further journey, you might do the warm-up act quite differently, which would better prepare you for what follows.

The end is already planted in us at the beginning, and it gnaws away at us until we get there freely and consciously.

for Action and Contemplation puts it this way: "The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better." I

Without an evolutionary worldview, Christianity does not really understand, much less foster, growth or change. Nor does it know how to respect and support where history is heading.

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young. —JAMES HOLLIS

You surrender your need to control your partner, and finally the relationship blossoms. Yet each time it is a choice—and each time it is a kind of dying.

Of course, clergy cannot talk about a further journey if they have not gone on it themselves.

This needed work is indeed "spiritual warfare," as the desert monks called it, since it takes conscious and sustained struggle to be aware of the shadow self—which only takes ever more subtle disguises the "holier" you get.

Far too many people just keep doing repair work on the container itself and never "throw their nets into the deep" (John 21:6)

So God, life, and destiny have to loosen the loyal soldier's grasp on your soul, which up to now has felt like the only "you" that you know and the only authority that there is. Our loyal solider normally begins to be discharged somewhere between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-five, if it happens at all; before that it is usually mere rebellion or iconoclasm.

The juniors are made to think that the container is all there is and all they should expect; or worse, that they are mature and home free because they believe a few right things or perform some right rituals.

but I do believe that the only way out of deep sadness is to go with it and through it.

It takes uncommon humility to carry both the dark and the light side of things. The only true perfection available to humans is the honest acceptance of our imperfection.

Once you wake up, as Jesus and Pope Francis have, you know that cleaning up is a constant process that comes on different timetables for different people, around many different issues, and for very different motivations. This is why love and growth demand discernment, not enforcement.

And to be fully honest, I think your heart needs to be broken, and broken open, at least once to have a heart at all or to have a heart for others.

Ken Wilber described the later stages of life well when he said that the classic spiritual journey always begins elitist and ends egalitarian. Always!