Quotes About Transcendence

We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus but our ideas about Santa Claus change, mature and become more nuanced, whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level.

A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.

Religious ideas and practices take root not because they are promoted by forceful theologians, nor because they can be shown to have a sound historical or rational basis, but because they are found in practice to give the faithful a sense of sacred transcendence.

Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, of self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.

Getting to know oneself is a lifelong process, and knowing God is a matter that takes eternity; yet it is only as we get to know ourselves as well as the God who transcends us that we can discover our unique reasons for being, our goals.

Have you ever had one of those moments when time just freezes? You know, when the world suddenly goes deathly still, and you could hear a pin drop, and the squishing sound your heart makes is so loud in your ears you feel like youre drowning in blood, and you stand there in that suspended moment and die a thousand deaths, but not really, and the moment passes and dumps you out on the other side of it, with your mouth hanging open, and an erased blackboard where your mind used to be?

I'd never understood why anyone would want to live forever. It had always seemed to me that death lent life a certain poignancy, a necessary tension.

I think something more mysterious might be happening, less articulate than any of the captioned and numeraled drawings in the 'The Spiritist's Telegraph.' Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children.

I stood with my arms stretched wide and trembling, and I felt as if the black sky was my body and I felt as if the white moon, far above me, unwrinkled and shining, was my mind.

My older sister has entire kingdoms inside of her, and some of them are only accessible at certain seasons, in certain kinds of weather. One such melting occurs in summer rain, at midnight, during the vine-green breathing time right before sleep. You have to ask the right question, throw the right rope bridge, to get there-and then bolt across the chasm between you, before your bridge collapses.

God is personal, but personal in an incomprehensible way, in so far as the conception of his personality surpasses all our views of personality.

We must be clear that whatever we say of God in such human concepts can never be more than an indication of Him; no such concept can really conceive the nature of God. God is inconceivable.

People like us are unhappy in this world and in the next, I guess if we made it to heaven, wed have to help make it thunder.

To philosophize is to learn to die – philosophizing is a soaring up to the Godhead – the knowledge of Being as Being. "Philosophy and Science", World Review Magazine (March 1950).

The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.

In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.

The task of the theologian is to explain everything through God, and to explain God as unexplainable.

The thunder of my heart must go Under the muffling of the dust-- As my grey dress has guarded it The grasses must; For it has hammered loud enough, Clamored enough, when all is said: Only its quiet part shall live When I am dead.

Stepping out, off the page, into the sensual world. And then our arrows of desire rewrite the speech...

Rather than seeing a contest between druid and Christian, I see no difference between stone chapel and stone circle. One encloses and protects the spirit; the other exposes it and joins it with the elements. In both of these places, we conjure the powers that affect and transcend us. We remind ourselves, in both places, that we need oats and milk, but we also need what we cannot see or put in our food bowls.

There are moments in friendship, Fred had said, when the thing spreads beyond the ordinary margins, when something is said that carries you beyond the little guidemarks of restraint or indifference, like watercolours merging on a page, a moment when you survey a relationship from som transcendent point and see its beauty, the beauty of persons, of friendship itself.

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

The night felt both eternal and instantaneous.

The science of our time knows how to measure galaxies and split atoms, but it is incapable of the least investigation beyond the sensible world, so much so that outside its self-imposed but unrecognized limits it remains more ignorant than the most rudimentary magic