All Quotes By Tag: Christianity

“Joy is thankfulness, and when we are joyful, that is the best expression of thanks we can offer the Lord, Who delivers us from sorrow and sin.”

“They said I would never live. I lived. They said I would never think. I think. They said I would never walk. I walked. They said I would never dance, but I never danced anyway.”

“…the secret to joy is to keep seeking God where we doubt He is.”

“I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition…. we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.”

“The dripping blood our only drink,The bloody flesh our only food:In spite of which we like to thinkThat we are sound, substantial flesh and blood–Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.”

“On the first day of November last year, sacred to many religious calendars but especially the Celtic, I went for a walk among bare oaks and birch. Nothing much was going on. Scarlet sumac had passed and the bees were dead. The pond had slicked overnight into that shiny and deceptive glaze of delusion, first ice. It made me remember sakes and conjure a vision of myself skimming backward on one foot, the other extended; the arms become wings. Minnesota girls know that this is not a difficult maneuver if one’s limber and practices even a little after school before the boys claim the rink for hockey. I think I can still do it – one thinks many foolish things when November’s bright sun skips over the entrancing first freeze.A flock of sparrows reels through the air looking more like a flying net than seventy conscious birds, a black veil thrown on the wind. When one sparrow dodges, the whole net swerves, dips: one mind. Am I part of anything like that?Maybe not. The last few years of my life have been characterized by stripping away, one by one, loves and communities that sustain the soul. A young colleague, new to my English department, recently asked me who I hang around with at school. “Nobody,” I had to say, feeling briefly ashamed. This solitude is one of the surprises of middle age, especially if one’s youth has been rich in love and friendship and children. If you do your job right, children leave home; few communities can stand an individual’s most pitiful, amateur truth telling. So the soul must stand in her own meager feathers and learn to fly – or simply take hopeful jumps into the wind.In the Christian calendar, November 1 is the Feast of All Saints, a day honoring not only those who are known and recognized as enlightened souls, but more especially the unknowns, saints who walk beside us unrecognized down the millennia. In Buddhism, we honor the bodhisattvas – saints – who refuse enlightenment and return willingly to the wheel of karma to help other beings. Similarly, in Judaism, anonymous holy men pray the world from its well-merited destruction. We never know who is walking beside us, who is our spiritual teacher. That one – who annoys you so – pretends for a day that he’s the one, your personal Obi Wan Kenobi. The first of November is a splendid, subversive holiday.Imagine a hectic procession of revelers – the half-mad bag lady; a mumbling, scarred janitor whose ravaged face made the children turn away; the austere, unsmiling mother superior who seemed with great focus and clarity to do harm; a haunted music teacher, survivor of Auschwitz. I bring them before my mind’s eye, these old firends of my soul, awakening to dance their day. Crazy saints; but who knows what was home in the heart? This is the feast of those who tried to take the path, so clumsily that no one knew or notice, the feast, indeed, of most of us.It’s an ugly woods, I was saying to myself, padding along a trail where other walkers had broken ground before me. And then I found an extraordinary bouquet. Someone had bound an offering of dry seed pods, yew, lyme grass, red berries, and brown fern and laid it on the path: “nothing special,” as Buddhists say, meaning “everything.” Gathered to formality, each dry stalk proclaimed a slant, an attitude, infinite shades of neutral.All contemplative acts, silences, poems, honor the world this way. Brought together by the eye of love, a milkweed pod, a twig, allow us to see how things have been all along. A feast of being.”

“God’s genius is as wide as the cosmos, while by comparison our intelligence can find room on the head of a pin.”

“I believe in what you see is what you get, but I also believe in what you see is getting better.”

“I believe in what you see is what you get, but I also believe in what you see is getting better!”

“To be free is to seek faith.”

“Christ JESUS was crucified on the cross for the sins of all souls.”

“I don’t understand why did jesus give life to the dead when they had to die again?”

“Free gift of grace is the great mercy of God.”

“Humility and Dignity had a daughter, called Arrogance, who was ashamed of her name and used to hide behind Pride. But Pride was in love with Truth, therefore arrogance married Illusion and forever despised Truth. Pride and Truth had a daughter, called Happiness, while Arrogance and Illusion had a son, called Despair. When both meet, one of them cries.”

“There is only One holy Knowledge, the excellent knowledge of God.”