Quotes About Transformation

In the larger-than-life, spiritually transformed people I have met, I always find one common denominator: in some sense, they have all died before they died. They have followed in the self-emptying steps of Jesus, a path from death to life that Christians from all over the world celebrate during Easter week.

We clergy have gotten ourselves into the job of "sin management" instead of sin transformation. "If you are not perfect, then you are doing something wrong," we have taught people. We have blamed the victim, or have had little pity for victims, while daring to worship a victim image of God. Our mistakes are something to be pitied and healed much more than hated, denied, or perfectly avoided. I do not think you should get rid of

Yearning for a new way will not produce it. Only ending the old way can do that.

God shocks and stuns us into love. God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change.

I'll say it again: God loves things by becoming them.

As Carol Bialock writes in her poem, we cannot stop the drowning waters of our addictive culture from rising, but we must at least see our reality for what it is, seek to properly detach from it, build a coral castle, and learn to breathe under water. The New Testament called this salvation (some might call it enlightenment); the Twelve Step Program calls it recovery.

The trouble is that most Christians pushed this great liberation off into the next world, and many Twelve Steppers settled for mere sobriety from a substance instead of a real transformation of the self. We have all been the losers, as a result—waiting around for "enlightenment at gunpoint" (death) instead of enjoying God's banquet much earlier in life.

the Greek word meta-noia, which literally means to move "beyond the mind," is usually translated "repentance" and no longer points to its much deeper meaning.

Human life is about more than building boundaries, protecting identities, creating tribes, and teaching impulse control.

Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there.

Your heart needs to be broken—and broken open—at least once to discover what your heart means and to have a heart for others.

Anne Wilson Schaef

The path to Christian perfection always runs across the collapse of our own moral efforts and self-established ideals.

one consistent and clear revelation in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, it is that the God of Israel is the one who turns death into life (see Deuteronomy 32:39, Romans 4:17, 2 Corinthians 1:9). When we can trust the transformative pattern, when we can trust that God is in the suffering, our wounds become sacred wounds and the actual and ordinary life journey becomes itself the godly journey, trusting God to be in all things, especially

The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be transformed into action. Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband.

People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul.

Let us not forget Colby and the liberating effects of higher education. Though it doesn't liberate everyone, does it?

Glory follows afflictions, not as the day follows the night but as the spring follows the winter; for the winter prepares the earth for the spring, so do afflictions sanctified prepare the soul for glory.

Self-emptiness prepares us for spiritual fullness.

In the godly, holy truths are conveyed by way of a taste; gracious men have a spiritual palate as well as a spiritual eye. Grace alters the spiritual taste.

How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder?

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.… Man is something that must be overcome.

the city in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in America could be an alluring place; but it also often was, for persons without brains or money or simply good luck, a crucible in which the superficial elements of personality and civilization were quickly burned away, to reveal the animal underneath. As

System changes come directly from thinking changes.