Quotes About Presence

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

When you are present, you will know the Presence. It is that simple, and it is that hard.

God comes to you disguised as your life," as my friend Paula D'Arcy so wisely says.

All we can do is keep our egos out of the way, note and weep over our defensive behaviors, keep our various centers from closing down—and the Presence that is surely the Highest Power is then obvious, all-embracing, and immediately effective. The immediate embrace is from God's side.

Both Christ cosmically and Jesus personally make the unbelievable believable and the unthinkable desirable. Jesus Christ is a Sacrament of the Presence of God for the whole universe!

When you look at any other person, a flower, a honeybee, a mountain—anything—you are seeing the incarnation of God's love for you and the universe you call home.

Presence is experienced in a participative way, outside the mind.

Walter Wink, a professor of biblical interpretation, calls it the mere "theological" worldview as opposed to the incarnational worldview, which is authentic Christianity.1 When all of you is there, you will know. When all of you is present, the banquet will begin.

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.

Everything I see and know is indeed one "uni-verse," revolving around one coherent center. This Divine Presence seeks connection and communion, not separation or division—except for the sake of an even deeper future union.

Through the act of creation, God manifested the eternally outflowing Divine Presence into the physical and material world.

Words and complex rituals almost get in the way at this point. All you can really do is return such Presence with your own presence.

It has been said that 90 percent of people seem to live 90 percent of their lives on cruise control, which is to be unconscious.

What I am calling in this book an incarnational worldview is the profound recognition of the presence of the divine in literally "every thing" and "every one." It is the key to mental and spiritual health, as well as to a kind of basic contentment and happiness. An incarnational worldview is the only way we can reconcile our inner worlds with the outer one, unity with diversity, physical with spiritual, individual with corporate, and divine with human.

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.

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.

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

This realization that Someone is living in us and through us is exactly how we plug into a much larger mind and heart beyond our own.

do not find our own Center; it finds us. The body is in the soul. It is both the place of contact and the place of surrender.

Only presence can know presence. And our real presence can know Real Presence.

He sat. The white cat still contemplated him with large, moist eyes.

The ghosts actually let you see them in person?" "No," Parker said. "Only in spirit.

We must participate in this world that has birthed us. We must not sit around in rawhide rocking chairs with our heads sunk in grief, while the waters trickle past. We must join the waters.

She looked at me, like she was drinking in the fact that I was still here. And I realized I was doing the same thing. The world was collapsing, and the only thing that really mattered to me was that she was alive.