Quotes About Transcendence

See me, feel meTouch me, heal me.

there's something else, something quite beautiful.

Heaven is only my next moment here. from "Nethering," Pleiades (vol. 34, no. 2, Summer 2014)

It's beautiful to transcend generations and to just be inside an artistic work, together, enjoying what only a great artistic work can provide.

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

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

I need Sunday morning centered on what is transrational, the fundamental Christian mysteries of incarnation and resurrection, the very heartbeat of Christian faith. Not irrational or unworthy of discussion and debate, but that which, when the intellectual dust has cleared, is ultimately beyond what our minds can grasp. I need a God bigger than my arguments.

We can't get our minds around God. I don't think the Christian faith is fundamentally rational, by which I mean it cannot be captured fully by our rational faculties—and in fact, more often than not, confounds them. A God who can be comfortably captured in our minds, with little else for us to find out apart from an occasional adjustment, is no God at all. Expecting faith in God to be rational is often more the problem than the solution.

No human has ever died.

The flux tube's rain of energy penetrates the tormented lower atmosphere. It is embraced by the Ly-cilph. Their minds consume the power, using it to metamorphose once again. The nodes brought them sentience, the supergiant's surplus energy brings them transcendence. They leave the chrysalis of the flesh behind, shooting up the stream of particles at lightspeed, spacefree and eternal.

Have you ever been writing something when you just forgot where you were, and what time it was, and you kept diving down deeper into your words? No, it's more like diving down through your words--past them, and way further down into someplace out. In fact, it doesn't matter whether you're naked or not, since the next thing is, you leave your body totally behind and just go off into your mind. A whole other part of your mind.

if you restrict earthly things, you set up your thoughts free for the spiritual.

I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.

There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.

The most indisputable beauty may be the one that people cannot ever touch. That God exists up there somehow, in the peaks and remote lakes and the sharp wind. Who knows why that picture stirs joy. It speaks directly to our impermanence and our smallness.

You lose yourself and just about vanish and the painting asserts and fills and flows over the dam and down into the streambed of everything you have ever experienced and thought, and carries you both on a current that takes you into a country that neither of you have ever seen. Where you have never been.

Why don't we have a word for the utterance between laughing and crying?

I flipped through the Duino Elegies

Mystery is not an argument for the existence of God; mystery is an experience of the existence of God.

language of the Bible is meant always to point us to a truth beyond the text, a meaning that transcends the particular and imperfectly understood context of the original writers, and our own prejudices and parochialisms that we bring to the text. Literalism is not part of the solution to this

It is not difficult to imagine that music, like Dante's Beatrice, is one of the ways in which grace operates through beauty—that music, like Beatrice, is a mediator.

From the brightness of His presence coals of fire blazed forth.

Even after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.

Thick clouds veil Him so He does not see us as He traverses the vault of heaven.í