Quotes about Experience

Humans are creators of meaning, and finding deep meaning in our experiences is not just another name for spirituality but is also the very shape of human happiness.

Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality.

But in this book, I use "prayer" as the umbrella word for any interior journeys or practices that allow you to experience faith, hope, and love within yourself.

It seems that in the spiritual world, we do not really find something until we first lose it, ignore it, miss it, long for it, choose it, and personally find it again--but now on a new level.

Death is largely a threat to those who have not yet lived their life. Odysseus has lived the journeys of both halves of life, and is ready to freely and finally let go.

This new world order is based on the experience of a God who is experienced personally. Jesus seems to be saying that God is not a philosophical system, a theory to be proven or an energy to be discussed or controlled, although we have often reduced God to such. Jesus believes that God is a Person to be imitated, enjoyed and loved.

Remember this: pure literalism always leads to a decrease in meaning. Mythology and sacred texts try to lead us and allow us to have the experience for ourselves. Through our experience we discover that encounter is not only possible but desirable. So often we struggle with experiencing our experiences.

Say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys as a penance" still perpetuated a de facto notion of a juridical exchange instead of any deep experience of healing forgiveness or unearned grace. You cannot deal with spiritual things in a courtroom manner. It does not achieve its purpose; it does not work at a deep level. We forgot our own unique job description as people of the Gospel and imitated courts of law instead.

We don't think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.

Begin with a concrete moment of encounter, based in this physical world, and the soul universalizes from there, so that what is true here becomes true everywhere else too.

God can never be experienced apart from your best interests being involved.

Both Catholics and Protestants have failed our people by mystifying the very notion of mysticism. The word itself has become relegated to a "misty" and distant realm that implies it is only available to very few and something not to be trusted, much less attractive or desirable. For me, the word "mysticism" simply means experiential knowledge of spiritual things, as opposed to book knowledge, secondhand knowledge, or even church knowledge.