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.
People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.
God is always drawing us closer, blow by blow and bit by bit. And most of the time we do not even know it is happening.
Those who are not true leaders will just affirm people at their own immature level.
The Gospel is not a fire insurance policy for the next world, but a life assurance policy for this world.
There are not sacred and profane things, places, and moments. There are only sacred and desecrated things, places, and moments-and it is we alone who desecrate them by our blindness and lack of reverence. It is one sacred universe, and we are all a part of it.
I decided years ago that if I’m going to keep teaching contemplation, then the last years of my life should be contemplative.
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.
It’s the freedom of the children of God. Such people can connect with everybody. They don’t feel the need to eliminate anybody.
The gift of darkness draws you to know God’s presence beyond what thought, imagination, or sensory feeling can comprehend.
People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know that they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind.
When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through.
If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
If we don’t learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.
In terms of soul work, we dare not get rid of the pain before we have learned what it has to teach us.
Salvation is not a divine transaction that takes place because you are morally perfect, but much more is an organic unfolding, a becoming who you already are, an inborn sympathy with and capacity for the very One who created you.
Metaphor is the only possible language available to religion because it alone is honest about Mystery.
In solitude, at last, we’re able to let God define us the way we are always supposed to be defined – by relationship: the I-thou relationship, in relation to a Presence that demands nothing of us but presence itself. Not performance but presence.
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.
Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing.