Quotes About Transformation

One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own contradictions, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting.

The pressed clay or "dust" of Adam has then become the immortal diamond that is Christ.

If we do not recognize that we ourselves are the problem, we will continue to make God the scapegoat—which is exactly what we did by the killing of the God-Man on the cross. The crucifixion of Jesus—whom we see as the Son of God—was a devastating prophecy that humans would sooner kill God than change themselves. Yet the God-Man suffers our rejection willingly so something bigger can happen.

you no longer need to protect or defend the mere part. You are now connected to something inexhaustible.

Have you ever experienced the embarrassed and red-faced look of shame and self-recognition on the face of anyone who has been loved gratuitously after they have clearly done wrong? This is the way that God seduces us all into the economy of grace—by loving us in spite of ourselves in the very places where we cannot or will not or dare not love ourselves.

favorite metaphors. I love the image of fire, not for its seeming destructiveness, but as a natural symbol for transformation—literally, the changing of forms. Farmers, forestry workers, and Native peoples know that fire is a renewing force, even as it also can be destructive. We in the West tend to see it as merely destructive (which is probably why we did not understand the metaphors of hell or purgatory).

Church" in any form should be a "laboratory for resurrection

you must first "go into the tomb" with Jesus (Romans 6:4)

I think humans prefer magical religion, which keeps all the responsibility on God performing or not performing, whereas mature and transformational religion asks us to participate, cooperate, and change. The divine dance is always a partnered two-step.

cacradicalgrace.org

In Paul's story we find the archetypal spiritual pattern, wherein people move from what they thought they always knew to what they now fully recognize. The pattern reveals itself earlier in the Torah when Jacob "wakes from his sleep" on the rock at Bethel and says, in effect, "I found it, but it was here all the time! This is the very gate of heaven" (Genesis 28:16–17).

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.

Let me sum it up this way: We do not think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking. Without action and lifestyle decisions, without concrete practices, words are dangerous and largely illusory.

Any time you surrender a negative, accusatory, compulsive, or self-serving thought, word, or behavior, the Buddhists describe this as "dying"! Power, self-image, and control do not give up without a fight, and this is first of all true inside of our minds, where the illusions begin.

Both Christianity and Buddhism are saying that the pattern of transformation, the pattern that connects, the life that Reality offers us is not death avoided, but always death transformed. In other words, the only trustworthy pattern of spiritual transformation is death and resurrection.

The loss and renewal pattern is so constant and ubiquitous that it should hardly be called a secret at all.

No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." I

God does not change, but our readiness for such a God takes a long time to change.

All of us, without exception, are living inside of a cosmic identity, already in place, that is driving and guiding us forward. We are all en Cristo, willingly or unwillingly, happily or unhappily, consciously or unconsciously.

Your false self is your role, title, and personal image that is largely a creation of your own mind and attachments. It will and must die in exact correlation to how much you want the Real.

That is the rub of any conversion experience: We only realize how much we needed it when we are on the other side! That is why we need the tenacity of faith and hope to carry us across to most transformational experiences. When we can let others actually influence us and change us, our heart space is open.

in fact, that's largely what it means to be loving. You can hold for them what they cannot yet hold. You can transform for them what they cannot yet transform. You do that by not returning their negativity and fear in kind, as most people will do.

The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find "the pearl of great price" that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell.

Death is not a changing of worlds as most imagine, as much as the walls of this world infinitely expanding.