All Quotes By Tag: Spirituality

“The world has enough gods, more than seven billion of them, to diminish all its miseries and perturbations. Then why is it not good and safe a planet yet to live on! Because those Gods are sleeping and in their dream they are worshipping imaginary shadows of their inner divinity. They need to wake up first, in order to reign over the world and then transform it with their ceaseless streams of radiant divinity.”

“Have you heard the songs they sing here in Kilanga?” he asked. “They’re very worshipful. It’s a grand way to begin a church service, singing a Congolese hymn to the rainfall on the seed yams. It’s quite easy to move from there to the parable of the mustard seed. Many parts of the Bible make good sense here, if only you change a few words.” He laughed. “And a lot of whole chapters, sure, you just have to throw away.”“Well, it’s every bit God’s word, isn’t it?” Leah said.“God’s word, brought to you by a crew of romantic idealists in a harsh desert culture eons ago, followed by a chain of translators two thousand years long.”Leah stared at him.“Darling, did you think God wrote it all down in the English of King James himself?”“No, I guess not.”“Think of all the duties that were perfectly obvious to Paul or Matthew in that old Arabian desert that are pure nonsense to us now. All that foot washing, for example. Was it really for God’s glory, or just to keep the sand out of the house?”Leah sat narrow-eyed in her chair, for once stumped for the correct answer.“Oh, and the camel. Was it a camel that could pass through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man? Or a coarse piece of yarn? The Hebrew words are the same, but which one did they mean? If it’s a camel, the rich man might as well not even try. But if it’s the yarn, he might well succeed with a lot of effort, you see?” He leaned forward toward Leah with his hands on his knees. “Och, I shouldn’t be messing about with your thinking this way, with your father out in the garden. But I’ll tell you a secret. “When I want to take God at his word exactly, I take a peep out the window at His Creation. Because that, darling, He makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.”

“Godliness matters, not God.”

“What does a spiritual person look like? An illiterate farmer can be much closer to God than a learned scholar of theology. One day, many people will say, “God I did this for you and I did that for you and I learnt this about you and I learnt that about you; so I deserve to be near you!” But God will say to these people, “I do not know you.” Then a humble farmer whom nobody ever heard of, will come and he will say, “God, remember me? I found you in the fields every day, and we sang together!” And God will say to that man, “Come, sit on my lap, we belong together.”

“Let me talk about love,In such a way,In so many ways,That eventually you will become one like me.”

“Since I forgot to beg my alms yesterday,I am hungry and weak today.And since I am hungry and weak today,I didn’t beg my alms for tomorrow.What tomorrow will bring to me,I do not know, I do not care.Yet within this uncertainty,I am contented and gratified,That You chose me to be like this.Overfilling my heart with love for You,And my soul thirsty dry for Your love,That I die everynight crying for Your love,And I born everyday for to love You again.”

“Though I never told your name to anyone and forever I have cherished you within my soul alone, but since you always were dancing in my eyes, the whole world has seen you through my sight, and knew it that you are my beloved for whom my love is all meant for.Though I never confessed my love to anyone and forever I have loved you within my heart alone, but since you are always resonating in my songs, the whole world has heard you through my words, and knew it that you are my beloved for whom my life is all meant for.Though I never admitted my ecstasies to anyone and forever I have treasured you within my thoughts alone, but since you are always reflecting in my joys, the whole world has understood you through my delights, and knew it that you are my beloved for whom even my death is all meant for.”

“Delay means God is planning.”

“The Lord is in you and only in you. Without the human mind to construct an over-exaggerated idea of the Lord, there is no actual Lord of humanity except for humanity itself.”

“Romantic Soul Seeketh Love but a Loving heart finds God”

“Accountability is the key to obedience for achieving Glory & Grace”

“But when high-profile politicians speak God in the most perfunctory manner possible, it’s no wonder supporters and opponents alike avoid speaking God altogether.”

“God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man.”

“The operative word in these lines from D.H. Lawrence, who wasn’t a conventionally religious person, is “soul.” It’s a word that has become almost embarrassing for many contemporary people unless it is completely stripped of its religious meaning. Perhaps that’s just what it needs sometimes: to be stripped of its “religious” meaning, in the sense that faith itself sometimes needs to be stripped of its social and historical encrustations and returned to its first, churchless incarnation in the human heart. That’s what the twentieth century was, a kind of windstorm-scouring of all we thought was knowledge, and truth, and ours – until it became too strong for us, or we too weak for it, and “the self replaced the soul as the first of survival” (Fanny Howe). Anxiety comes from the self as ultimate concern, from the fact that the self cannot bear this ultimate concern: it buckles and wavers under the strain, and eventually, inevitability, it breaks.”

“Yes, but … the waking and the sleeping, the sludge of e-mails and appointments, the low-temperature life that is, for the most part, life: even if there are moments of intensity that seem to release us from this, surely any spiritual maturity demands an acknowledgment that there is not going to be some miraculous, transfiguring intrusion into reality. The sky will not darken and the dead will not speak; no voice from heaven is going to boom you back to a pre-reflective faith, nor will you feel, unless in death, a purifying fire that scalds all of consciousness like fog from the raw face of God. Is faith, then – assuming it isn’t merely a form of resignation or denial – some sort of reconciliation with the implacable fact of matter, or is it a deep, ultimate resistance to it? Both. Neither. To have faith is to acknowledge the absolute materiality of existence while acknowledging at the same time the compulsion toward transfiguring order that seems not outside of things but within them, and within you – not an idea imposed upon the world, but a vital, answering instinct. Heading home from work, irritated by my busyness and the sense of wasted days, shouldering through the strangers who merge and flow together on Michigan Avenue, merge and flow in the mirrored facades, I flash past the rapt and undecided face of my grandmother, lit and lost at once. In a board meeting, bored to oblivion, I hear a pen scrape like a fingernail on a cell wall, watch the glasses sweat as if even water wanted out, when suddenly, at the center of the long table, light makes of a bell-shaped pitcher a bell that rings in no place on this earth. Moments, only, and I am aware even within them, and thus am outside of them, yet something in the very act of such attention has troubled the tyranny of the ordinary, as if the world at which I gazed, gazed at me, as if the lost face and the living crowd, the soundless bell and the mind in which it rings, all hankered toward – expressed some undeniable hope for – one end.”