All Quotes By Tag: Faith

“I know. You are about to say that Satan lifts up the evil lords to thwart God’s power (that’s the standard argument, I believe) but you can’t have it both ways. If there is an all-powerful God who created everything, then He must have created Lucifer to become Satan. If He has a Divine Plan, then Satan is part of that plan—evil, hatred, misery, disease, squalor, death—these must all be part of the plan. Mordred and Malestair and their ilk are part of God’s plan. The other option is that Satan was a mistake. But if God made a mistake—especially one of that magnitude, one Hell of a mistake—how can you believe that He is all-knowing and all-powerful? It calls into question the supposedly ‘inevitable’ outcome of the cosmic battle between good and evil.”

“So you truly believe in nothing?” she asked.“No,” he coughed. “I don’t believe in anything—which isn’t the same as believing in nothing. Belief in nothing, it seems to me, takes quite as much faith as belief in something. I am utterly incapable of that kind of commitment.”

“I think you’re wrong. Most of us don’t choose to believe. We believe because we have to. Heaven represents hope. In this harsh, short, and brutal existence, people have to have something to which to cling. Instead of living lives of abject despair, heads hung in defeat, and watering the soil with our tears, we live lives of hope, heads upraised to the sun, cheerful through impossible hardships—lending our hands to our neighbors. Even if, as you seem to argue, God is simply an idea in the human mind and Heaven is only a fiction, isn’t a life strengthened by faith better than one focused on the inescapable despair of mortality?”

“The holly grove, carved a century ago by the druids, was designed to amplify emotion to a cathartic crescendo. You see, druidism (as did most early religions) realized the essential truth that faith is an emotional, rather than a logical, response to the world. They designed their places of worship around this fact. Love, fear, guilt, rapture, these are religious words. Believers feel their belief. Skeptics contemplate their doubt.”

“The way to Heaven is ascending; we must be content to travel uphill, though it be hard and tiresome, and contrary to the natural bias of our flesh.”

“…[M]ost of us have figured out that we have to do what’s in front of us and keep doing it. We clean up beaches after oil spills. We rebuild whole towns after hurricanes and tornadoes. We return calls and library books. We get people water. Some of us even pray. Every time we choose the good action or response, the decent, the valuable, it builds, incrementally, to renewal, resurrection, the place of newness, freedom, justice. The equation is: life, death, resurrection, hope. The horror is real, and so you make casseroles for your neighbor, organize an overseas clothing drive, and do your laundry. You can also offer to do other people’s laundry if they have recently had any random babies or surgeries.We live stitch by stitch, when we’re lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we’d pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. That’s not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears.”

“Christianity is not something you do, so much as something that is done to you.”

“The circle? what of it? I belive!”

“As a child of God, please recognize that God is the strength of your life. Not your husband, children, job, friends, loved ones, or well-wishers. God should be the strength of your life, the source of your joy.”

“But it’s really faith that monsters live on, isn’t it? I am led irresistibly to this conclusion: food maybe life, but the source of power is faith, not food. And who is more capable of a total act of faith than a child?”

“Without hope, life is not possible. Without faith, miracles are impossible.”

“Strength through Faith. Empower your supporters and gain strength in them. Pray for safety, strength, and blessings for all who help you succeed. – Strong by Kailin Gow”

“The limitations of literalness and an excessive reliance upon reciprocity as a principle for constructing an ultimate environment can result either in an overcontrolling, stilted perfectionism or “works righteousness” or in their opposite, an abasing sense of badness embraced because of mistreatment, neglect or the apparent disfavor of significant others.”

“We live liturgically, telling our sacred Story in worship and song. We fast and we feast. We marry and give our children in marriage, and though in exile, we work for the peace of the city. We welcome our newborns and bury our dead. We read the Bible and we tell our children about the saints. And we also tell them in the orchard and by the fireside about Odysseus, Achilles, and Aeneas, of Dante and Don Quixote, and Frodo and Gandalf and all the tales that bear what it means to be men and women of the West. We work, we pray, we confess our sins, we show mercy, we welcome the stranger, and we keep the commandments. When we suffer, especially for Christ’s sake, we give thanks, because that is what Christians do. Who knows what God, in turn, will do with our faithfulness? It is not for us to say. Our command is, in the words of the Christian poet W.H. Auden, to “stagger onward rejoicing”

“For other men — men who are part of something, who follow a chief they believe in, or ways they were reared in from birth — they can keep their eyes from seeing what they have not been taught to see, and do not want to see. But too late was I brought to my father’s house. I tried to be part of it, but I never could.”