Quotes about Spirituality

Those who choose to live without God will one day find that they have forfeited their likeness to him.

Beauty matters, dare I say, almost as much as spirituality and justice.5 Of course, if you have to choose between beautiful slavery and an ugly Exodus, you must go for the Exodus, but, as William Temple said in a different (though related) context, fortunately we don't have to make that choice.

We mustn't imagine that our feeling of being close to God is a true index of the reality.

So, then, since the person you are and the world God has made will be gloriously reaffirmed in God's eventual future, you must be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the Lord's work, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in vain." Belief in the bodily resurrection includes the belief that what is done in the present in the body, by the power of the Spirit, will be reaffirmed in the eventual future, in ways at which we can presently only guess.

Many devout Christians accepted that unbiblical cosmology, opting for a detached spirituality (a heavenly-mindedness with a questionable earthly use) and an escapist eschatology (leaving the world and going to heaven).

The alternative teaching of the Gnostics had proposed that one should replace the very Jewish message of God's kingdom on earth as in heaven by a very non-Jewish message about a "kingdom" that turned out to be a new form of self-help spirituality. The

We are saved not as souls but as wholes. (All

To be baptized was therefore to die and rise with Jesus, to leave behind the old life and to be reborn into the new one.

My fourth starting-point towards a fresh approach is to insist on some kind of lectio continua, both personally and publicly. There are, to be sure, many times and occasions when we need to choose special readings to suit a particular moment or challenge. But the church's staple diet ought to be to work through the books of the Bible on a more or less continuous loop.

The Bible is part of God's answer to the ancient human quest for justice, spirituality, relationship, and beauty. Read it and see.

The Temple was, after all, the place where heaven and earth met. Why not say that one particular person might be the ultimate example of the same phenomenon, a person equally at home in both dimensions?

If we spend time in the prayer of lament, new light may come, rather than simply the repetition of things we might have wanted to say anyway.