Weekly Quotes
Past Quotes, as featured on God on the Net home page.
"…patience always comes as the result of understanding."
"The things you think about determine the quality of your life. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts."
Learning A Living:
I warn students that at my very best, 80 percent of my theology is correct, 20 percent is wrong. The problem is, I'm not sure which is the 80 percent and which isn't.
Life must be understood backwards. But … it must be lived forward.
The church in America seems so baffled by late modernity and early postmodernity that it seems to be wishing for a skyhook … to come and end history fast…rapture, escape from history, shortcut to heaven. It's probably similar to the way fundamentalist Muslims feel as modernity encroaches on their way of life. Suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism seem to express the same kind of death wish….sometimes life is even more frightening to people than death, that the continuation of the world can be even scarier than the end of the world. I'm not sure that individuals feel that way exactly, but I do think that their religious systems, speaking through them, feel that way.
Evangelical voices on both sides of the Atlantic have increasingly drawn attention to the striking absence of a secure theological framework for the study of Scripture. (Says) Englishman David Wright: "One of our most urgent unfinished tasks is the elaboration of a satisfactory doctrine of Scripture for an era of biblical criticism…. In particular, we have to work out what it means to be faithful at one and the same time both to the doctrinal approach to Scripture as the Word of God and to the historical treatment of Scripture as the words of men."
Unitary thinking, the highest level of understanding reality, opens us up to a wider sensory realm and mystical dimension of the divine; it also heals the divisions that separate us from one another and life's highest values. P 294-5
With singular persistence Jung maintained that the answer to the predicament of every individual is spiritual. Modern people go to psychotherapists because they have lost contact with their souls. Near the end of his life he reported that among all of his patients in the second half of their lives "there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age had given to their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook."
Hiding Our Sexuality
Many of us are neo-Gnostic without realizing it, holding on to a dualistic idea about the body and soul, believing we can separate the two. We rank the body as less valuable than the soul, as something useful and good but also base, crude, in need of chastisement and discipline so that the desires of the body do not lead the soul astray. Thus many people attempt to control or manage their sexuality by boxing up their sexual self and storing it away.
We do not know one millionth of one percent about anything.
Learning to Love Your Neighbor as You Love Yourself
Jesus laid this seven-word exhortation on the world like a psychological bombshell. I remember when I first realized one implication of the statement: that in order to love my neighbor I must first of all love myself. It's important to note that when he told us how to love, Jesus realized fully that love is an inner quality that we nurture inside our own hearts, and that then flows out to those around us. If we try to love our neighbor but neglect to nurture our love for our own self, we're doomed. The first step in learning to love is making an inner connection between our hearts and the ultimate source of love.
The Spiritual person is the one who is "interested in and dedicated to the artful handling of the world, the artful shaping of one's self, and the artful forming of one's life into something beautiful for God. Pp 86-87
Creating the Ideal Childhood
In an ideal childhood, we would have been nurtured, in Alice Miller's words, "by the presence of a person who was completely aware of us, who took us seriously, who admired and followed us." Awareness is the prime prerequisite here; it is much more important than the words and actions in themselves that a parent directs toward a child. The words "Mommy loves you" or "You're a good boy" mean very little outside the look and tone of voice that accompany them. A loving gaze turns the words into nourishment; a troubled, hesitant or angry gaze can turn the same words to poison.
Distrust everyone in whom
the impulse to punish is powerful!
The universe does not suffer from a shortage of grace, and no religious institution is to see its task as rationing grace. Grace is abundant in God's universe.
"And if I cannot express this reality that is visible to my senses, how does one express what cannot be seen by the eye or heard by the ear? How does one find a word for the reality of God? Are you beginning to understand what Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, and all the rest were saying and what the Church teaches constantly when she says that God is mystery, is unintelligible to the human mind?"
"Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you'll learn to live freely and lightly."
Spirituality and religion are not the same any more than education and learning, law and justice, or commerce and stewardship are the same.
The highest destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.
"There is a terrible hunger for love. We all experience that in our lives – the pain, the loneliness. We must have the courage to recognize it. The poor you may have in your own family. Find them. Love them."
To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
"Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself."
"Love takes up where knowledge leaves off."
God = Love
Einstein reduced the nature of the entire universe to one simple equation that we all know by heart if not by scientific understanding: E = MC2. The Judeo-Christian tradition reduced the entire spiritual reality of human existence to another even more succinct equation: God = Love. This ultimate truth stands as the foundation of Jesus' teachings and in actual practice is such a radical notion that our thinking minds simply cannot grasp it. Why is this? Because love is not a concept. It is not an idea. It is not a belief. It is the positive life force and integrating power that creates and holds all reality together.
Another text adopted by the Second Vatican Council, "Light to the Gentiles" (Lumen Gentium), embraces the view that salvation is possible for people outside the church: "Those, who through no fault of their own, do not know Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience – those too may achieve eternal salvation."
The Christian life is not about pleasing God the finger-shaker and judge. It is not about believing now or being good now for the sake of heaven later. It is about entering a relationship in the present that begins to change everything now. Spirituality is about this process: the opening of the heart to the God who is already here.
The fruit of this process is compassion. As mentioned earlier, compassion is not simply a means for the self's transformation but also the end goal of such transformation. God's will for us – the goal of the working of the Spirit within us – is to become more compassionate beings.
Faith is a gift of spirit that allows the soul to remain attached to its own unfolding. When faith is soulful, it is always planted in the soil of wonder and questioning. It isn't a defensive and anxious holding on to certain objects of belief, because doubt, as its shadow, can be brought into a faith that is fully mature.
In the middle of our life journey I found myself in a dark wood. I had wandered from the straight path. It isn't easy to talk about it: it was such a thick, wild, and rough forest that when I think of it my fear returns….I can't offer any good explanation for how I entered it. I was so sleepy at that point that I strayed from the right path.
"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: The only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve."
Almost a century ago, William James distinguished between secondhand religions and firsthand religious experience. Secondhand religion is what we learn from others; it includes everything we learn from tradition. Firsthand religious experience is our own experience of the sacred.
"Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility."
"Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts."
"For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories."
"One thing only that I know, and that is that I know nothing."
"Man cannot begin to learn what he thinks he already knows."
"The last of human freedoms-the ability to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances."
"Know Thyself"
"Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.
"To perceive is to suffer.
The Dangers of Literalism
Many who use the symbols of religion do not know what they are doing. They read poetry as prose, take similes with deadly literalness, make a dogma from a metaphor.
"Meister Eckhart says, "It is not by your actions that you will be saved" (or awakened; call it by any word you want), "but your being. It is not by what you do, but by what you are that you will be judged."
Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings.
The Primacy of Relationship:
The essence of leadership is relationship: Influencing people to achieve things together that can't be achieved alone.
Knowing Yourself
When there is no past, there is the bliss of the present moment. Can you put aside all thoughts, quiet your mind, and look to see the truth of this present moment – and thereby directly know yourself?
Open to Ecstacy?
As I've written at length in Sex and Spirit, our ingrained fears about feeling good and surrendering to pleasure directly block not only sexual but spiritual awakening. Many of us are seriously armored against ever being overwhelmed by passion and ecstasy – we expect terrible things to happen to us if we lose ego control.
Hiding
A typical response to living in an unwelcoming or unsafe place is to withdraw, to distance oneself emotionally or physically from the other.
… If feelings are not to degenerate into indulgent, aggressive or unhealthy emotionalism, they need to be informed by critical intelligence.
New Ageism is marked by the normality of the bizarre; hence its restless search for the extremes of experience. New Agers are often little more than thrill consumers, looking for new "peak experiences" through religious ecstasies, sexual experimentation, athletic highs, travel adventures, etc.
Becoming Unselfish
The simple and ultimate resolution to the selfish-selfless polarity is found in contemplating Jesus' challenge to love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves. He didn't say, "Love your neighbor more than you love yourself," because he surely recognized that this is impossible. When there is no love in your heart, you have no love to give your neighbor. But as you increase the flow of love into your own heart, you increase the love you have available to flow out to your neighbor.
…We spend a large part of every day in the supremely creative act of constructing our self. If this self has flaws, it is not because we are incompetent builders; rather, the problem is that our past mistakes have turned into us. Since adulthood, the process of making a self has been left in our own hands, but its roots to back to earliest childhood, when we had no choice but to imbibe our parent's version of selfhood. Without knowing it, we started to be shaped.
The life of the word "spiritual" has trouble staying within calling distance of the meaning of the word "spiritual." With roots in the Latin spiritus, the Hebrew ruach and the Greek pneuma, "spiritual" fundamentally means "aliveness."
Why We Should Meditate
Our daily life in office and home, in cars and airplanes, at parties and conferences, while reading magazines and watching television, while looking at advertisements and hearing radio, are in themselves continuous examples of a life which has lost the dimension of depth. It runs ahead, every moment is filled with something which must be done or seen or said or planned. But no one can experience depth with out stopping and becoming aware of himself. Only if he has moments in which he does not care about what comes next can he experience the meaning of this moment here and now and ask himself about the meaning of his life. As long as the preliminary transitory concerns are not silenced, no matter how interesting and valuable and important they may be, the voice of the ultimate concern cannot be heard.
Prayer is the affectionate reaching out of the mind for God.
Treat other people exactly as you would like to be treated by them – this is the essence of all true religion.
While happiness comes from the outside, joy comes from within. It's a feeling of deep satisfaction with life. Although it's defined as an emotion, it's also an outlook, a sense of being. Joyful people see the big picture, and they like what they see. They accept life the way it is, they focus on the good, and they find reasons to celebrate. Joy is closely related to thankfulness, which is both an attitude and a habit. The most joyful people in the world are not the ones who have the most, but the ones who appreciate the most. They're grateful to be alive.
Everything is possible to the man who believes.
As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.
In summary, wisdom is what historian Will Durant called "total perspective." It's the ability to see all the seemingly fragmented elements of the world, know that they're all somehow related, and understand that they fit together as part of a grand design. It's recognizing that there's a purpose for everything, including our lives.
Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
People with wisdom usually know far more than the average person, but never think they know enough. The more they learn, the more they realize how much more there is to learn. So lifelong learning becomes part of their nature. Every day is an adventure in learning, whether it's from reading, observing, listening or doing.
No man has ever risen to the real stature of spiritual manhood until he has found that it is finer to serve somebody else than it is to serve himself.
A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity.
Courage is resistance to fear, master of fear – not absence of fear.
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends: they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.
All that mankind has done, thought, gained, or been, it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books. They are the chosen possession of men.
Most people see what is, and never see what can be.
The soul needs an intense, full-bodied spiritual life as much as and in the same way that the body needs food. That is the teaching and imagery of spiritual masters over centuries. There is no reason to question the wisdom of this idea. But these same masters demonstrate that the spiritual life requires careful attention because it can be dangerous. It's easy to go crazy in the life of the spirit, warring against those who disagree, proselytizing for our own personal attachments rather than expressing our own soulfulness, or taking narcissistic satisfactions in our beliefs rather than finding meaning and pleasure in spirituality that is available to everyone.
Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources.
"One of the greatest things you can do for another person is give encouragement. The word means, literally, to give courage."
"The one who knows, does not say; the one who says, does not know." All revelations, however divine, are never any more than a finger pointing to the moon. As we say in the East, "When the sage points to the moon, all the idiot sees is the finger."
Modern Christianity – Deeply Flawed?
Either Christianity itself is flawed, failing, untrue, or our modern, Western, commercialized, industrial-strength verson of it is in need of a fresh look, a serious revision.
We were deliberately designed to learn only by trial and error. We're brought up, unfortunately, to think that nobody should make mistakes. Most children get de-geniused by the love and fear of their parents – that they might make a mistake. But all my advances were made by mistakes. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't.
"Be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God has forgiven you."
"...your body is meant to do more than carry your head around. To bear the Creator's signature stamp of YHWH, you were designed by God to experience life with all your senses until you become an expression of the divine. For a God who threw the divine bodily into our midst, for a God who knows what it is to be human, divine provenance requires that spirituality not be divorced from materiality. a spirituality that does not bring together body and mind is like an unconsummated marriage. It's a spirituality that could well be annulled. Truth is discovered in the reciprocal worlds of thought, and embodied experiences and relationships."
Three highways into the heart are silence and love and grief. Two highways out of the heart are creativity and acts of justice and compassion.
"There are two kinds of men and women, it has been said: those who stop and think, and those who stop thinking."
Modernity dismissed "intuition" as something only women took seriously, enthroning reason and logic and common sense so firmly that "anti-intellectual" or "irrational" became one of the most deadly epithets one could hurl at anyone. To become unreasonable and illogical was to become a traitor to the Enlightenment tradition. Postmodernity on the other hand, thrives on intuitional experience, elevating its attributes to the status of a true leader: Someone "gifted more than ordinary people with a mystical quality – intuition – which gives him 'inner conviction' and enables him to make difficult decisions in a manner denied to the common person. It is through creative intuition that postmoderns continue the work of divine creation.
The dark night of the soul descends on us all and the proper response is not addiction, such as shopping, alcohol, drugs, TV, sex or religion, but rather to be with the darkness and learn from it.
A church that is more preoccupied with sexual wrongs than with wrongs of injustice is itself sick.
Evil can happen through every people, every nation, every tribe, and every individual human, and so vigilance and self-criticism and institutional criticism are always called for.
"There's a big difference between an empty head and an open mind. An open mind is really an attitude of receptiveness, being open to new information and to other points of view."
"Forgiveness is the final form of love."
"We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love."
"We are all pencils in the hand of God."
"If we were supposed to talk more than we listen, we would have two mouths and one ear."
"I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times the conclusion is false. The hundreth time I am right. It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."
"If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention than to any other talent."
"Giving brings happiness at every stage of its expression. We experience joy in forming the intention to be generous. We experience joy in the actual act of giving something. We experience joy in remembering the fact that we have given."
Spirituality refers first of all to the universal gift of aliveness that exists within all religions and outside of religions. It breathes out the air that "inspires." Those who have been in-spired with aliveness by the kiss of God will "con-spire" to kiss others into coming alive to the spiritual dimensions of existence. "In-spire" means to breathe in. "Con-spire" means to breathe together.
"It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself."
"He who obtains has little. He who scatters has much.
"Every charitable act is a stepping stone towards heaven."
"Do ordinary things with extraordinary love."
"The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated."
The equation of science with knowledge has reached the limits of its use and has begun to be a real hindrance. Postmodern scientists like physicist/Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner now admit that scientists don't know everything. That indeed, "it would not be good if we knew everything." Or, as another physicists/Nobel laureate, Richard Feynman, put it shortly before his death, "A great deal more truth can be known than can be proved." They dispute the dichotomy of a know-it-all science and a know-nothing religion. Some things are unsuited to "scientific" testing. Besides, we will never have all the facts, and there is no such thing as a "neutral observer" or "the naked eye." Decisions must be made without knowing everything that would help to make the decision and without bracketing one's beliefs. The longer we wait, the more facts we will have, but the more facts also will change. In other words, you can know too much.
The cosmos is God's holy temple and our holy home.
What saves a man is to take a step.
Then another step.
God speaks today, as in the past, through all religions and all cultures and all faith traditions, none of which is perfect and an exclusive avenue to truth, but all of which can learn from each other.
If all men knew what others say of them,
there would not be four friends in the world
If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try, Again.
It is not true that if you try and try and try, you can open any door. Many times it is only when you stop trying that you can begin to succeed. The postmodern sensibility is to look for another door when the one you're banging on doesn't open, or slams in your face. Jesus called this the sacrament of failure: Shake the dust off your feet and go elsewhere. Even God did not get it right the first time: "Then the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone" (Gen. 2:18 RSV). In other words, the work of creation involves learning from experience, indeed, creating as creation goes. The translator Charles B. Williams takes Paul's phrase "struck down, but not destroyed" (2 Cor. 4:9 NRSV) and turns it into "always getting a knockdown but never a knockout."
The Holy Spirit works through all cultures and all spiritual traditions; it "blows where it will" and is not the exclusive domain of any one tradition and never has been.
A man must wrestle til the dark centre,
that is shut up close, break open,
and the spark lying therein kindle.
You can have it all – but not all at once. Or in the 1969 words of the biologist C.H. Waddington, "The acute problems of the world can be solved only by whole men, not by people who refuse to be…anything more than a technologist, or a pure scientist, or an artist."
You can't conceive, nor can I,
the appalling strangeness
of the mercy of God.
Thus it can be said that God is experienced through ecstasy, joy, wonder, and delight (via positiva.)
You ask my thoughts through the long night?
I spent it listening
to the heavy rain
beating against the windows.
An absolute faith stance can be shown to be compatible with the notion that truth is relative. In Philosophy of Religion Society founder Joseph Runzo's words, "To believe that your faith is best, you need not believe that only the beliefs inherent in your faith can be right."
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
"Second hand religion is religion learned from others. It is religion as a set of teachings and practices to be believed and followed – in other words, religious conventional wisdom. Firsthand religion is the religion that flows from the firsthand experience of God."
Sexuality is a sacred act and a spiritual experience, a theophany (revelation of the Divine), a mystical experience. It is holy and deserved to be honored as such.
The devolution of wisdom into knowledge into information may be the supreme source of degeneration in postmodern society. P 120
Jesus, not unlike many spiritual teachers, taught us that we are sons and daughters of God and are to act accordingly by becoming instruments of divine compassion.
The message of Jesus is so profound that the world is still deciphering it thousands of years later. God's purposes are veiled and understood only "in the fullness of time." Truth often unfolds as slowly as a symphony. A note struck early on might be picked up much later and developed fully even later than that. The music of truth may take centuries to play itself out. Not all of God's communications are released overnight. Indeed, many of them may be in the process of being created as we go along.
Attitude = Behavior
"Behaviors are beliefs turned into action. Behaviors deliver the results."
"I can't be me without you" is how one New Light pastor, Moses Dillard, puts it to his congregation. Individual identity is realized only when it is devoted to a greater whole. People are free and whole only when they belong to a living community, not when they are off on an island somewhere. Without the whole, we lack the inner strength of selfhood and the outer strength of community. P115-16
"Jesus does not call us to a new religion, but to life" (Dietrich Bonhoeffer). Spirituality is living life at a depth of newness and gratitude, courage and creativity, trust and letting go, compassion and justice.
The challenge is for Christians to "save ourselves from the old mistake of erecting what has been the word of God to us into a restrictive and stultifying dogma for others."
Wisdom is love of life. (See the Book of Wisdom, "This is wisdom: to love life," and Christ in John's Gospel:
"I have come that you may have life and have it in abundance."
A Leader's Mission:
There is a mission to life. There is a mission for every person. God has a mission for our lives. And it has to be bigger than ourselves – certainly bigger than "growth." A life of mission is the mission of life.
The opportunity for mission is great because the problems are huge. No one person, corporation, or organization can solve them alone.
Across the world, 1.3 billion people live on less than $1 a day; 3 billion people live on under $2 a day; 1.3 billion have no access to clean water; 3 billion have no access to sanitation; 2 billion have no access to electrical power. When it comes to missions bigger than ourselves, there are plenty to go around!
A mission is what buys us life space. To be born is to be chosen – chosen for a mission. If you're alive, your mission on earth is unfinished.
"All the names we give to God come from an understanding of ourselves" (Meister Eckhart). Thus people who worship a Punitive Father are themselves punitive.
Surrounded by God
"I will introduce two different 'root concepts' for thinking about God. Both are found in the Bible and the Christian tradition. They are fundamentally different. The first conceptualizes God as a supernatural being "out there," separate from the world, who created the world a long time ago and who may from time to time intervene within it. In an important sense, this God is not "here" and thus cannot be known or experienced but only believed in (which, within the logic of this concept, is what "faith" is about). I will call this way of thinking about God "supernatural theism." Widespread within Christianity, it is perhaps what a majority of people (both believers and non-believers) think of when they think of God. Some accept the existence of such a being, and some reject it. But it is the notion of God as a supernatural being "out there" that is being accepted or rejected."
"The second root concept of God in the Christian tradition thinks of God quite differently. God is the encompassing Spirit; we (and everything that is) are in God. For this concept, God is not a supernatural being separate from the universe; rather, God (the sacred, Spirit) is a nonmaterial layer or level or dimension of reality all around us. God is more than the universe, yet the universe is in God. Thus, in a spatial sense, God is not "somewhere else" but "right here." I will call this concept of God "panentheism" This way of thinking about God is found among many of the most important voices in the Christian theological tradition."
Learning A Living
What's the best thing that's going to happen during your years of education? Getting your diploma? Your degree? Making great contacts?
The greatest result of your education would be, as Socrates put it in the Apology, "to know that we do not know." Socrates believed that "the wise man knows that he knows
nothing."
Learning A Living:
I warn students that at my very best, 80 percent of my theology is correct, 20 percent is wrong. The problem is, I'm not sure which is the 80 percent and which isn't.
The Church, which is entrusted with the truth, is a body of sinful men and women who falsely identify their grasp of truth with the truth itself. The paradox of grace, that the church is a body of forgiven sinners, both forgiven and sinful, applies to the church's understanding of the truth. At the very point of his confession of the truth, Peter could become an agent of Satan (Mark 8:29, 33). He grasped the truth but immediately made it an instrument of falsehood.
Know-it-alls
The epigraph in the Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz is this saying from "an old Jew of Galicia"
When someone is 55 per cent right, that's very good and there's no use wrangling. And if someone is 60 percent right, it's wonderful, it's a great luck, and let him thank God. But what's to be said about 75 percent right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well, and what about 100 percent right? Whoever says he's 100 percent right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.
"There is far too much God talk; the world is sick of it. There is too little awareness, too little love, too little happiness, but let's not use those words either. There's too little dropping of illusions, dropping of errors, dropping of attachments and cruelty, too little awareness. That's what the world is suffering from, not from a lack of religion. Religion is supposed to be about a lack of awareness, of waking up."
The legacy of the fundamentalist strain in American religion has been to inculcate in all of us the idea that tenacious certitude is the chief ingredient in strong religious faith. Doubt is the enemy. Questioning is dangerous. Education is suspect.
Your Mission
You are here with a mission. God is guiding you every day in your mission. Sing your song and help others sing theirs.
"As one man said, "I got a pretty good education. It took me years to get over it." That's what spirituality is all about, you know: unlearning. Unlearning all the rubbish they taught you."
Make a Difference!
…to be a Christian means to participate in the life of the world, to serve God in the world, and not merely in some sterile religious sanctuary or in an isolated, sheltered Christian enclave. The church is "to stand in the center of the village," he argued, and the Christian life is to be lived in the world.
Finding Joy
Character does not exist to exist; it only comes into its own when it is enlisted in the cause of a mission. It is a moral imperative of leadership to give yourself to something larger than yourself. Joy comes not because we work for it or aim for it in life; joy comes our way while we're on a mission larger than we are.
"The unaware life is a mechanical life. It's not human, it's programmed, conditioned. We might as well be a stone, a block of wood."
Strengths and Weaknesses of the Sexes
If the healthy masculine principle tends toward autonomy, strength, independence, and freedom, when that principle becomes unhealthy or pathological, all of those positive virtues either over- or underfire. There is not just autonomy, but alienation; not just strength, but domination; not just independence, but morbid fear of relationship and commitment; not just a drive toward freedom, but a drive to destroy. The unhealthy masculine principle does not transcend in freedom, but dominates in fear.
If the healthy feminine principle tends towards flowing, relationship, care and compassion, the unhealthy feminine flounders in each of those. Instead of being in relationship, she becomes lost in relationship. Instead of a healthy self in communion with others, she loses herself altogether and is dominated by the relationships she is in. Not a connection, but a fusion, not a flow state, but a panic state; not a communion, but a meltdown. The unhealthy feminine principle does not find fullness in connection, but chaos in fusion.
"The three most three most difficult things for a human being are not physical feats or intellectual achievements. They are, first, returning love for hate; second, including the excluded; third, admitting that you are wrong."
"The great Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." That's a self-evident truth. Most people don't live aware lives. They live mechanical lives, mechanical thoughts – generally somebody else's mechanical emotions, mechanical actions, mechanical reactions."
"Do you want to change the world? How about beginning with yourself? How about being transformed yourself first? But how do you achieve that? Through observation. Through understanding. With no interference or judgment on your part. Because what you judge you cannot understand."
The messge of Jesus is so profound that the world is still deciphering it thousands of years later. God's purposes are veiled and understood only "in the fullness of time." Truth often unfolds as slowly as a symphony. A note struck early on might be picked up much later and developed fully even later than that. The music of truth may take centuries to play itself out. Not all of God's communications are released overnight. Indeed, many of them may be in the process of being created as we go along.
"The most difficult thing in the world is to listen, to see. We don't want to see. Do you think a capitalist wants to see what is good in the communist system? Do you think a communist wants to see what is good and healthy in the capitalist system? Do you think a rich man wants to look at poor people? We don't want to look, because if we do, we may change. We don't want to look. If you look, you lose control of the life that you are so precariously holding together. And so in order to wake up, the one thing you need the most is not energy, or strength, or youthfulness, or even great intelligence. The one thing you need most of all is the readiness to learn something new. The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion to the amount of truth you can take without running away. How much are you ready to take? How much of everything you've held dear are you ready to have shattered, without running away? How ready are you to think of something unfamiliar?"
The Disappearing Kingdom of God
Because the Kingdom of God has been dropped as the primary and comprehensive aim of Christianity, and personal salvation has been substituted for it, therefore men seek to save their own souls and are selfishly indifferent to the evangelization of the world.
Because the individualistic conception of personal salvation has pushed out of sight the collective idea of a Kingdom of God on earth, Christian men seek for the salvation of individuals and are comparatively indifferent to the spread of the spirit of Christ in the political, industrial, social, scientific and artistic life of humanity, and have left these as the undisturbed possession of the spirit of the world.
Because the Kingdom of God has been understood as a state to be inherited in a future life rather than as something to be realized here and now, therefore Christians have been contented with a low plane of life here and have postponed holiness to the future.
…the Bible no longer exercises anything like the authority it once did in many Christian communities. And in those communities where the Bible continues to exercise its traditional role there is little or no serious engagement with the problems of the twentieth century.
Closed Minds
Fundamentalists covet absolutes: For them, true religion is a matter of giving oneself over to a set of inflexible doctrines and of keeping one's own mind and spirit in check to the extent that they threaten to rebel. The doctrines cannot be questioned, even if they are plainly inconsistent with the testimony of reason and experience and even if they contain blatant internal contradictions.
Modern Christianity – Deeply Flawed?
Either Christianity itself is flawed, failing, untrue, or our modern, Western, commercialized, industrial-strength verson of it is in need of a fresh look, a serious revision.
God Beyond God
Paul Tillich's concept of "God beyond God" – his recognition that there is something humanly unknowable beyond all theological doctrines – is a useful insight. Why can't we simply accept with humility, whatever our doctrinal differences, that we don't know all there is to know about God, and that we may actually be wrong about some things? Why must there be such powerful pressure from so many quarters to pretend that we know everything about God? Why can't we simply acknowledge that none of us is omniscient, and that above and beyond the various faith statements to which we subscribe is a single God who knows our hearts, understands our limitations, and loves us anyway?
We spend a large part of every day in the supremely creative act of constructing our self. If this self has flaws, it is not because we are incompetent builders; rather, the problem is that our past mistakes have turned into us. Since adulthood, the process of making a self has been left in our own hands, but its roots to back to earliest childhood, when we had no choice but to imbibe our parent's version of selfhood. Without knowing it, we started to be shaped.
The challenge is for Christians to "save ourselves from the old mistake of erecting what has been the word of God to us into a restrictive and stultifying dogma for others."
You can have it all - but not all at once. Or in the 1969 words of the biologist C.H. Waddington, "The acute problems of the world can be solved only by whole men, not by people who refuse to be.anything more than a technologist, or a pure scientist, or an artist."
CHRF
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