Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Humanity can be pretty stinky.
Science is not metaphorical. Science is scientific.
To get God on your side is a great way to feel powerful.
Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.
God does some of God's best work with people who are seriously lost.
I think we d like life to be like a train..but it turns out to be a sailboat.
I love being alone. I learned that from my father, I think, who loved his own company.
I don't have time for a job that doesn't leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.
The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.
Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.
The only real difference between Anxiety and Excitement was my willingness to let go of Fear.
Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.
Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me.
I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.
I can't help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.
It's difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.
I didn't want to be a priest. I wanted to do the work that priests do, and that required becoming a priest.
To be fully human is perhaps why I'm Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.
I became so attentive to the souls of other people that I was not as attentive as I might have been to my own.
There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray. So, in many ways, that's what led to my downward spin.
I'm a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like "Christian."
When I say I trust Jesus, that is what I mean: I trust that the way of life leads through perishability, not around it.
Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.
You can create an intimate community of about 20 or 25 people, and beyond that you're into a different kind of relationship.
In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life
Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.
The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.
If God is about putting God ahead of myself then I've just quit being religious, because that's what got me into such deep trouble.
Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.
I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place.
I don't miss the ministry, because I'm completely engaged in it. In terms of parish ministry, I miss the intimacy with a group of people.
As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.
The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there.
Our waiting is not nothing. It is something -- a very big something -- because people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for.
The tradition piece is so embedded in me I don't know that I can see it any more, but the community piece is one I've been in danger of losing.
To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where.
Prayer is happening, and it is not necessarily something that I am doing. God is happening, and I am lucky enough to know that I am in The Midst.
Day by day we are given not what we want but what we need. Sometimes it is a feast and sometimes...swept crumbs, but by faith we believe it is enough.
I've got a hold of something that won't move. It's a willingness to keep walking into the next day, open to whatever may turn out to be true that day.
I began to get notes from people saying they were sorry to hear I'd left ministry. And for a while, I halfway believed they were right, that I'd left.
I'll do my best to always put God and neighbor ahead of ego, but I want to find myself, and if finding myself means losing my ego self, I'll go there.
For a long time I listened to other people to decide whether I was still Christian or not, and I would sort of vet myself by the traditional formulae.
The abundance of our lives is not determined by how long we live, but how well we live. Christ makes abundant life possible if we choose to live it now.
I decided I got to say whether I was Christian or not, and so I've relaxed enormously since then. I'm the one who gets to say that, and not someone else.
Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are.
We're children of God through our blood kinship with Christ. We're also sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, with a hereditary craving for forbidden fruit salad.
I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a toxic message.
I miss the hot spots. I miss the hospital calls. I miss the nursing homes. I miss the really intimate human contact with other people, which I did nothing to earn.
Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.
When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, 'Here, I guess, since this is where I am.'