Quotes About God

In the Old Testament, substitutes for the divine presence were called demons or false gods. If we can grasp the fact that only the experience of God can put into perspective all other forms of pleasure or the promises of happiness that various creatures provide, then we will realize that we are looking for happiness in the grass, in the wrong places. All the help we can get from other people who experience the same psychological privation won't do a bit of good.

When we decide to submit to the Divine Therapy, the first thing that God does is to reassure us that we are respected and loved by God. The idea that we are no good, unlovable or unworthy—beliefs that, as we have seen, may be firmly entrenched from early childhood—is an insult to God. God does not make junk; we make junk.

The pathology is simply this: we have come to full reflective self-consciousness without the experience of intimacy with God. Because that crucial reassurance is missing, our fragile egos desperately seek other means of shoring up our weaknesses and defending ourselves from the pain of alienation from God and other people.

Similarly, Jesus invites us to change the direction in which we are looking for happiness and to join the new humanity that is opening to interior freedom and self-transcendence. The primary issue for the human family at its present level of evolutionary development is to become fully human. But that, as we have seen, means rediscovering our connectedness to God, which was repressed somewhere in early childhood.

the radical healing is the acceptance of the situation, because in some way God is present there.

When thinking and self-reflection begin, since the experience of God is missing, some other form of happiness has to take its place, just for the sake of survival.

At each level of human development, God offers himself to us just as we are. Thus, he is the typhonic God of primitive peoples and children, the monotheistic God of mythic membership consciousness, and the God of infinite concern for the whole human family revealed in the gospel.

Silence is God's first language; everything else is a poor translation.

St. Teresa of Avila wrote: 'All difficulties in prayer can be traced to one cause: praying as if God were absent.' This is the conviction that we bring with us from early childhood and apply to everyday life and to our lives in general. It gets stronger as we grow up, unless we are touched by the Gospel and begin the spiritual journey. This journey is a process of dismantling the monumental illusion that God is distant or absent.

Only when we can accept God as he is can we give up the desire for spiritual experiences that we can feel.

As St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) taught, whatever we say about God is more unlike God than saying nothing. If we do say something, it can only be a pointer toward the Mystery that can never be articulated in words. All that words can do is point in the direction of the Mystery.

When the presence of God emerges from our inmost being into our faculties, whether we walk down the street or drink a cup of soup, divine life is pouring into the world.

Gregory the Great (sixth century), summarizing the Christian contemplative tradition, expressed it as "resting in God." This was the classical meaning of Contemplative Prayer in the Christian tradition for the first sixteen centuries.

To live in the presence of God on a continuous basis can become a kind of fourth dimension to our three-dimensional world, forming an invisible but real background to everything that we do or that happens in our lives.

The striking discoveries of contemporary science are continually telling us new things about how material creation came to be and how it continues to evolve. Although we do not have all the answers, we are clearly going in a direction that transcends the cosmology in which the great world religions came into existence. Our vision, understanding, and our attitudes about God inevitably must change.

Einstein believed that science was directed toward discovering God's thoughts. Quantum physics itself is a kind of spirituality insofar as it is always looking farther into the unknown to see what is beyond the known. It is a search for ultimate reality.

If our value system doesn't allow us to enjoy anything without putting a price on it, we miss a great part of the beauty of life. When we bring this value system into the domain of prayer, we can never enjoy God. As soon as we start enjoying Him, we have to reflect, "Oh boy, I'm enjoying God!" And as soon as we do that, we are taking a photograph of the experience. Every reflection is like a photograph of reality. It isn't our original experience; it is a commentary on it.

What kind of God is this who permits or sends such tragedy into the lives of his friends? Job complained bitterly about his pitiful condition. But would he have learned who God is unless he had gone through the shattering experiences that brought to an end his naive conception of how God functions? The greatest fruit of the night of spirit is the disposition that is willing to accept God on his own terms. As a result, one allows God to be God without knowing who or what that is.

he experience of the transforming union is a way of being in the world that enables us to live daily life with the invincible conviction of continuous union with God. It is a new way of being in the world, a way

O God, You Who are the truth, make me one with You in love everlasting. I am often wearied by the many things I hear and read, but in You is all that I long for. Let the learned be still, let all creatures be silent before You; You alone speak to me.

What good does it do to speak learnedly about the Trinity if, lacking humility, you displease the Trinity? Indeed it is not learning that makes a man holy and just, but a virtuous life makes him pleasing to God. I would rather feel contrition than know how to define it. For what would it profit us to know the whole Bible by heart and the principles of all the philosophers if we live without grace and the love of God? Vanity of vanities and all is vanity, except to love God and serve Him alone.

Every man naturally desires knowledge; but what good is knowledge without fear of God? Indeed a humble rustic who serves God is better than a proud intellectual who neglects his soul to study the course of the stars.He who knows himself well becomes mean in his own eyes and is not happy when praised by men.

Remember that God under the Law ordained a Lamb to be offered up to Him every Morning and Evening.

He was one of those men who, even in the years of peace, would have advised his congregation that while God may well be honored by the inflexibility of the pious, he might also be honored by the flexibility of the sensible.