Quotes About God

I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy. This is what I mean by the "integration of the negative." Yet I believe this is the core of Jesus's revolutionary Good News, Paul's deep experience, and the central insight that Francis and Clare lived out with such simple elegance.

Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it—even before we change it. This is perhaps our major stumbling stone

If Christ and Jesus are the archetypes of what God is doing, Mary is the archetype of how to receive what God is doing and hand it on to others.

In Mary, humanity has said our eternal yes to God. A yes that cannot be undone. A corporate yes that overrides our many noes.

You are not your gender, your nationality, your ethnicity, your skin color, or your social class. Why, oh why, do Christians allow these temporary costumes, or what Thomas Merton called the "false self," to pass for the substantial self, which is always "hidden with Christ in God" (Colossians 3:3)? It seems that we really do not know our own Gospel. You are a child of God, and always will be, even when you don't believe it.

If we are created in the image and likeness of God, then whatever good, true, or beautiful things we can say about humanity or creation we can say of God exponentially.

This mystery has been called the conspiracy ("co-breathing") of God, and is still one of the most profound ways to understand what is happening between God and the soul. True spirituality is always a deep "co-operating" (Romans 8:28) between two. True spirituality is a kind of synergy in which both parties give and both parties receive to create one shared truth and joy.

Theologically and objectively speaking, we are already in union with God. But it is very hard for people to believe or experience this when they have no positive sense of identity

That as long as we keep God imprisoned in a retributive frame instead of a restorative frame, we really have no substantial good news;

All the emptying out is only for the sake of a Great Outpouring. God, like nature, abhors all vacuums, and rushes to fill them.

God seems to have created things that continue to create and recreate themselves from the inside out. It is no longer God's one-time creation or evolution; rather, God's form of creation precisely is evolution. Finally God is allowed to be fully incarnate, which was supposed to be Christianity's big trump card from the beginning! It has taken us a long time to get here, and dualistic thinkers still cannot jump the hurdle.

We daringly believe that God's presence was poured into a single human being, so that humanity and divinity can be seen to be operating as one in him—and therefore in us! But instead of saying that God came into the world through Jesus, maybe it would be better to say that Jesus came out of an already Christ-soaked world. The second Incarnation flowed out of the first, out of God's loving union with physical creation.

We are created with an inner drive and necessity that sends all of us looking for our True Self, whether we know it or not. This journey is a spiral and never a straight line. We are created with an inner restlessness and call that urges us on to the risks and promises of a second half to our life. There is a God-size hole in all of us, waiting to be filled. God creates the very dissatisfaction that only grace and finally divine love can satisfy.

God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything, even and maybe especially in the deep fathoming of our fallings and failures. Sin is to stay on the surface of even holy things, like Bible, sacrament, or church.

Holiness has to do with who we are in God, where we abide as a "self" with an utterly reconstituted sense of our own personhood.

In his critique of his fathers and uncles, Jung recognized that many humans had become reflections of the punitive God they worshipped. A forgiving God allows us to recognize the good in the supposed bad, and the bad in the supposed perfect or ideal.

If something comes toward you with grace and can pass through you toward others with grace, you can trust it as the voice of God.

But grace is not a late arrival, an occasional add-on for a handful of humans, and God's grace and life did not just appear a few thousand years ago, when Jesus came and a few lucky humans found him in the Bible. God's grace cannot be a random problem solver doled out to the few and the virtuous - or it is hardly grace at all!

He does not know the outcome ahead of time, or his confidence would be in himself and God to pull it off, which would then largely be a matter of the willpower of belief. Faith is so much more than strong willpower

God was consistent in working through one man to reveal himself everywhere, as well as through the other parts of His creation, so that nothing was left devoid of his Divinity and his self-knowledge…so that 'the whole universe was filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters fill the sea.

If God chooses and doles out his care, we are always insecure and unsure whether we are among the lucky recipients. But once we become aware of the generous, creative Presence that exists in all things natural, we can receive it as the inner Source of all dignity and worthiness. Dignity is not doled out to the worthy. It grounds the inherent worthiness of things in their very nature and existence.

Resurrection is contagious, and free for the taking. It is everywhere visible and available for those who have learned how to see, how to rejoice, and how to neither hoard nor limit God's ubiquitous gift.

depiction of God in The Trinity seriously, we have to say, "In the beginning was the Relationship." This icon yields more fruits the more you gaze on it. Every part of it was obviously meditated on with great care: the gaze between the Three; the deep respect between them as they all share from a common bowl. And note the hand of the Spirit pointing toward the open and fourth place at the table! Is the Holy Spirit inviting, offering, and clearing space? If so, for what?

The motivation for all morality and religion is the imitation of God, who is love. When religion bases itself in fear, duty, honor, a need for law and order, a need for a superior self-image, or group cohesiveness, it is corrupt. It looks good and will have many defenders, but it is actually at the heart of the problem. The real God is no longer needed or even wanted, and such religion usually becomes the actual enemy of God. The crucifixion of Jesus speaks to this.