Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The greatest enemy of ordinary daily goodness and joy is not imperfection, but the demand for some supposed perfection or order.
People wanted to me to describe more about what I call "the container," and then describe what the second half of life feels like.
All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.
In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you.
Today we need whatever methods or help we can receive to allow the Christian message to take us to a deeper level of transformation.
The journey to happiness involves finding the courage to go down into ourselves and take responsibility for what's there: all of it.
I think it's important to remember that by the second half of our lives, we are meant to see in wholes, and no longer just in parts.
Our job as conscious humans is to bring the beauty and goodness of everything to full consciousness, to full delight, to full awareness.
every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.
If you try to assert wisdom before people have themselves walked it, be prepared for much resistance, denial, push-back, and verbal debate.
The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.
God created us for love, for union, for forgiveness and compassion and, yet, that has not been our storyline. That has not been our history.
The important thing is the willingness to give back the gift that is you, not the perfection of the gift itself. Can you feel the difference?
We are just a little tiny flicker of a much larger flame that is Life itself, Consciousness itself, Being itself, Love itself, God’s very self.
Until we learn to love others as ourselves, it's difficult to blame broken people who desperately try to affirm themselves when no one else will.
Life is not, nor ever has been, a straight line forward ... Life is characterized much more by exception and disorder than by total or perfect order.
The big truth for men is that often we have to leave home in the first half of life before we can return home at a later stage and find our soul there.
If our love of God does not directly influence, and even change, how we engage in the issues of our time on this earth, I wonder what good religion is.
I've had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world.
Prayer is sitting in the silence until it silences us, choosing gratitude until we are grateful, and praising God until we ourselves are an act of praise.
Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you.
After 32 years as a priest , I think its fair to say that most institutional churches are very limited in addressing higher levels of spiritual consciousness.
Men and women are most alike at their most mature and soulful levels. Men and women are most different only at their most immature and merely physical levels.
I think most human beings are dualistic thinkers. It gets them through the day. It gives them a sense of superiority and security - that's what the ego wants.
The path of descent is the path of transformation. Darkness, failure, relapse, death, and woundedness are our primary teachers, rather than ideas or doctrines.
The cross is the standing statement of what we do to one another and to ourselves. The resurrection is the standing statement of what God does to us in return.
The Eucharist becomes a microcosmic moment of belief and power in which we say we believe in the real presence of God in Jesus, in this bread, and in this wine.
If God is Trinity and Jesus is the face of God, then it is a benevolent universe. God is not someone to be afraid of, but is the Ground of Being and on our side.
Faith is not a means to something further. It is not something we do in order to get to heaven. Faith is its own end. To have faith is already to have come alive.
When 'happiness' eludes us - as, eventually, it always will - we have the invitation to examine our programmed responses and to exercise our power to choose again.
As you look back on a year almost ended, recall the ways in which God has been inviting you to return, again and again, to Love which is the same as returning to God
To the degree you have experienced intimacy with God, you won’t be afraid of death because you’re experiencing the first tastes and promises of heaven in this world.
Pope Francis insists that mercy is at the very top of the Christian hierarchy of great truths, and everything falls apart whenever mercy is displaced by anything else.
The two Virtues of Equanimity and Compassion become more available to the person whose ego-shell has been smashed-either by great suffering or by great love-or by both.
A person who can laugh and go with life does not demand to be in control, which is why the most controlling people may be sarcastic but lack an authentic sense of humor.
It's important to note that Jesus and Christ are two different faith affirmations. Hardly any Christians have been taught that - they think "Christ" is Jesus's last name.
The Gospel gives human suffering deep, personal, and cosmic meaning, by connecting our pain to the pain of others and, finally, by connecting us to the very "pain of God".
The real spiritual journey is work. You can make a naïve assertion that you trust in Jesus, but until it is tested a good, oh, 200 times, I doubt very much that it's true.
Your heart has to be prepared ahead of time through faith and prayer and grace and mercy and love and forgiveness so you can keep your heart open in hell, when hell happens.
The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime.
Would you respect a God you could comprehend? And yet very often thats what we want - a God who reflects our culture, our biases, our economic, political, and military systems.
Christianity is seen by more and more people as a negative message: anti gay, anti immigrant, anti abortion (as the only life issue), anti gay marriage, anti the Democratic party.
Religion was made to order to "save the world," to use a phrase Christians use so much, but we really haven't been doing a good job of it for centuries. It's heartbreaking really.
I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.
Yes, the natural world is the first and primary Bible. We have not honored it, so how could we, or would we, know how to honor and properly use the second Bible, when it was written.
One time, a Protestant minister said, "We made Jesus blonde haired and blue eyed and very cute. We made Jesus somehow a much more feminine figure." And there's probably truth to that.
People inside of belonging systems are very threatened by those who are not within that group. They are threatened by anyone who has found their citizenship in places they cannot control.
It's not correct to say Jesus is God. Now, don't run and report me to the bishop, all right? It's not correct to say that - Jesus is the union of the human and the divine. That's different.
Remember finally, that the ashes that were on your forehead are created from the burnt palms of last Palm Sunday. New beginnings invariably come from old false things that are allowed to die.
Contemplation is an alternative consciousness that refuses to identify with or feed what are only passing shows. It is the absolute opposite of addiction, consumerism or any egoic consciousness.