Maturity is the ability to joyfully live in an imperfect world.
When you haven’t found inner meaning, you will always substitute outer performance. It’s the only way to fill that void, that sense of significance – that I am significant. So almost the degree of outer performance can, in many cases, mirror the lack of inner alignment.
The great and merciful surprise is that we come to God, not by doing it right, but by doing it wrong.
Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them – all the way through!
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.
Our job as conscious humans is to bring the beauty and goodness of everything to full consciousness, to full delight, to full awareness.
Worship of Jesus is rather harmless and risk-free; actually following Jesus changes everything.
The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo – even when it’s not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future.
Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.
The true mystic is always both humble and compassionate, for she knows that she does not know.
Most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change. In fact, God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change.
Every viewpoint is a view from a point.
We all become well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. Most frontal attacks on evil just produce another kind of evil in yourself, along with a very inflated self-image to boot.
Men must learn how to grieve, or they are inevitably angry or controlling, and they don’t even know why.
When we can see the image of God where we don’t want to see the image of God, then we see with eyes not our own.
Famine, poverty, abuse, you can’t keep that all blocked out. If you let those things teach you, influence you, change you, those are the events that transition you without you even knowing it to become more compassionate.
It is at the bottom where we find grace; for like water, grace seeks the lowest place and there it pools up.
Religions should be understood as only the fingers that point to the moon, not the moon itself.
The phrase, ‘You must die before you die,’ is found in most of the world religions. If you don’t learn how to die early, you spend the rest of your life avoiding failure. When you can free your True Self, the whole spiritual life opens up.
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.