Quotes About Mystery

And we must—absolutely must—maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery. If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations and never God.

It's true all the time everywhere or it's not true! And that one truth is always Mystery.

We've turned faith into a right to certitude when, in fact, this Trinitarian mystery is whispering quite the opposite: we have to live in exquisite, terrible humility before reality.

Each generation has to appropriate its deepest beliefs for itself. We used to say it this way: "God has no grandchildren." Each generation must itself be realigned with God and discover the mystery for itself.

Perhaps the primary example of our lack of attention to the Christ Mystery can be seen in the way we continue to pollute and ravage planet earth, the very thing we all stand on and live from. Science now appears to love and respect physicality more than most religion does!

My deepest me is God!" St. Catherine of Genoa shouted as she ran through the streets of town, just as Colossians had already shouted to both Jews and pagans, "The mystery is Christ within you—your hope of Glory!" (1:27).

In response to their question "When will the Kingdom come?" he tells them that Ultimate Reality is "not here and not there," taking us away from our typical attachment to time. "For the Ultimate Reality is 'within you'!" (Luke 17:21).

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, FINDING MEANING IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE

The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.

St. Irenaeus (125–203), The Scandal of the Incarnation, and St. Athanasius (297–373), On the Incarnation, are two early classics that set a bar of good theology that we have since seldom matched or even understood. The mystery of incarnation is the unique trump card that Christianity adds to the deck of world religions.

We must keep eating and drinking the Mystery, until one day it dawns on us, in an undefended moment, "My God, I really am what I eat! I also am the Body of Christ.

All theologies are blasphemous in so far as they attempt to reduce God to something that can be known through the understanding by which we know other things.

Mystery is not something that you cannot understand, but it is something that is endlessly understandable! It is multilayered and pregnant with meaning and never totally admits to closure or resolution.

Enlightenment is not about knowing as much as it is about unknowing; it is not so much learning as unlearning. It is about surrendering and letting go rather than achieving and possessing. It's more about entering the mystery than arriving at a mental certitude.

You will know salvation through the mystery of forgiveness" (Luke 2:77).

A true believer is eating what he or she is afraid to see and afraid to accept: The universe is the Body of God, both in its essence and in its suffering.

Wisdom happily lives with mystery, doubt, and "unknowing," and in such living, ironically resolves that very mystery to some degree.

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 as a Trinity of persons, available at cacradicalgrace.org.

I wondered if God might have an easier time using animals to communicate who God is, since they do not seem as willful and devious as we are.

JULIAN OF NORWICH AND THE FIRST

St. John of the Cross taught that God has to work in the soul in secret and in darkness, because if we fully knew what was happening, and what Mystery/transformation/God/grace will eventually ask of us, we would either try to take charge or stop the whole process.8 No one oversees his or her own demise willingly, even when it is the false self that is dying.

Anything is a sacrament if it serves as a shortcut to the Infinite, but it will always be hidden in something that is very finite.

Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit, "Invoked or not invoked, God is still present."*3