Quotes about Acceptance

Only when we rest in God can we find the safety, the spaciousness, and the scary freedom to be who we are, all that we are, more than we are, and less than we are.

The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It's not the gathering of the saved.

Human maturity is neither offensive nor defensive; it is finally able to accept that reality is what it is.

I believe contemplation shows us that nothing inside us is as bad as our hatred and denial of the bad. Hating and denying it only complicates our problems. All of life is grist for the mill. Paula D'Arcy puts it, "God comes to us disguised as our life." Everything belongs; God uses everything. There are no dead-ends. There is no wasted energy. Everything

If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest will find it! A "perfect" person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection.

Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now.

the Eucharistic bread and wine are not a prize for the perfect or a reward for good behavior. Rather they are food for the human journey and medicine for the sick. We come forward not because we are worthy but because we are all wounded and somehow "unworthy.

Perfection, rather, is the ability to incorporate imperfection! There's no other way to live: You either incorporate imperfection, or you fall into denial. That's how the Spirit moves in or out of our lives. —from Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

All Mature Spirituality Is About Letting Go

Once we can accept that God is in all situations, and can and will use even bad situations for good, then everything becomes an occasion for good and an occasion for God, and is thus at the heart of religion. The Center is everywhere.

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 is not working. It attaches to past and present, and fears the future.

Listen to his dangerous and inclusionary thinking: "My Father's sun shines on the good and the bad, his rain falls on the just and the unjust" (Matthew 5:45). Or "Don't pull out the weeds or you might pull out the wheat along with it. Let the weeds and the wheat both grow together until the harvest" (Matthew 13:29—30). If I had presented such fuzzy thinking in my moral theology class, I would have gotten an F!