Quotes About Eternity

What was God up to in those first moments of creation? Was God totally invisible before the universe began? Or is there even such a thing as "before"? Why did God create at all? What was God's purpose in creating? Is the universe itself eternal? Or is the universe a creation in time as we know it—like Jesus himself?

Anything is a sacrament if it serves as a shortcut to the Infinite, but it will always be hidden in something that is very finite.

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

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

It is all one continuum of Incarnation. Who we are in God is who we all are. Everything else is changing and passing away.

Christ forever keeps Jesus firmly inside the Trinity, not a mere later add-on or a somewhat arbitrary incarnation. Trinitarianism keeps God as Relationship Itself from the very beginning, and not a mere monarch.

The resolution of earthly embodiment and divinization is what I call incarnational mysticism. As has been said many times, there are finally only two subjects in all of literature and poetry: love and death. Only that which is limited and even dies grows in value and appreciation; it is the spiritual version of supply and demand. If we lived forever, they say, we would never take life seriously or learn to love what is. I think that is probably true.

If the universe is "Christened" from the very beginning, then of course it can never die forever. Resurrection is just incarnation taken to its logical conclusion. If God inhabits matter, then we can naturally believe in the "resurrection" of the body. Most simply said, nothing truly good can die!

Everything visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God. What else could it really be? "Christ" is a word for the Primordial Template ("Logos") through whom "all things came into being, and not one thing had its being except through him" (John 1:3).

All who hold any kind of unexplainable hope believe in resurrection, whether they are formal Christians or not, and even if they don't believe Jesus was physically raised from the dead.

If matter is inhabited by God, then matter is somehow eternal, and when the creed says we believe in the "resurrection of the body," it means our bodies too and not just Jesus's body! As in him, so also in all of us. As in all of us, so also in him.

Incarnation did not just happen two thousand years ago. It has been working throughout the entire arc of time, and will continue. This is expressed in the common phrase the "Second Coming of Christ," which was unfortunately read as a threat ("Wait till your Dad gets home!"), whereas it should more accurately be spoken of as the "Forever Coming of Christ," which is anything but a threat. In fact, it is the ongoing promise of eternal resurrection.

God protects us into and through death, just as the Father did with Jesus.

The biblical symbol of the Universal and Eternal Christ standing at both ends of cosmic time was intended to assure us that the clear and full trajectory of the world we know is an unfolding of consciousness with "all creation groaning in this one great act of giving birth" (Romans 8:22).

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.

Life is all about practicing for heaven. We practice by choosing union freely—ahead of time—and now. Heaven is the state of union both here and later. As now, so will it be then. No one is in heaven unless he or she wants to be, and all are in heaven as soon as they live in union. Everyone is in heaven when he or she has plenty of room for communion and no need for exclusion.

If you go to heaven alone, wrapped in your private worthiness, it is by definition not heaven. If your notion of heaven is based on exclusion of anybody else, then it is by definition not heaven. The more you exclude, the more hellish and lonely your existence always is. How could anyone enjoy the "perfect happiness" of any heaven if she knew her loved ones were not there, or were being tortured for all eternity? It would be impossible.

Threats of hell are unfortunately more memorable to people than promises of heaven.

Resurrection is about the whole of creation, it is about history, it is about every human who has ever been conceived, sinned, suffered, and died, every animal that has lived and died a tortured death, every element that has changed from solid, to liquid, to ether, over great expanses of time. It is about you and it is about me. It is about everything. The "Christ journey" is indeed another name for every thing.

Surely God was not just waiting for Orthodox Jews, Roman Catholics, and American evangelicals to show up, which is in the last nanosecond of known time.

Christ is God, and Jesus is the Christ's historical manifestation in time.

Because if you were God, it stood to reason your real enemy would be boredom. Sully

Tell me we're dead and I'll love you even more.

Jesus, take me to your blessed home above and wrap me in the bosom of thy love...