Quotes about Spirituality

Many people think that being Christian makes you sort of subhuman or, at least, less than fully human. Guys out there on the street (people think) are having a wonderful time enjoying human life to the fullest, and we in the church are sort of cramped and constricted. Well, things shouldn't be that way. Being a Christian is supposed to make you more truly human , more fully yourself. That means that you are supposed to become somebody who is reflecting the image of God.

If you're a Christian you're just a shadow of your future self.

Christian ethics is not a matter of discovering what's going on in the world and getting in tune with it. It isn't a matter of doing things to earn God's favor. It is not about trying to obey dusty rulebooks from long ago or far away. It is about practicing, in the present, the tunes we shall sing in God's new world.

When Jesus's followers asked him to teach them to pray, he didn't tell them to divide into focus groups and look deep within their own hearts.

But to reject, marginalize, trivialize, or be suspicious of the sacraments (and quasi-sacramental acts such as lighting a candle, bowing, washing feet, raising hands in the air, crossing oneself and so forth) on the grounds that such things CAN be superstitious or idolatrous or that some people might suppose they are putting God in their debt, is like rejecting sexual relations in marriage on the grounds that it's the same act that in other circumstances constitutes immorality.

Lent is a time for discipline, for confession, for honesty, not because God is mean or fault- finding or finger-pointing but because he wants us to know the joy of being cleaned out, ready for all the good things he now has in store.

Do not despise the small but significant symbolic act. God probably does not want you to reorganize the entire discipline or the entire world of your vocation overnight. Learn to be symbol-makers and story-tellers for the kingdom of God.

Christian living means dying with Christ and rising again. That, as we saw, is part of the meaning of baptism, the starting point of the Christian pilgrimage.

since humans are made for the life that comes from God and God alone, to worship that which is not God is to fall in love with death. Here

Christian spirituality combines a sense of the awe and majesty of God with a sense of His intimate presence.

Successful resistance to temptation may result in an increase of moral muscle, but that is because one is going to need it. A temptation resisted may become more, not less, fierce.

To open the Bible is to open a window toward Jerusalem, as Daniel did (6:10), no matter where our exile may have taken us.