God's Acceptance and Delight
"At the end of the day, we expect that God is disappointed with us and will greet us with a frown. The tragedy and sadness here is that we avoid God when we are most in need of love and acceptance. Because we think God is disappointed in us, especially at those times when we are disappointed in ourselves, we fail to meet the one person, the one love, and the one energy — God — that actually understands us, accepts us, delights in us, and is eager to smile at us."
— Prayer: Our Deepest Longing
The Fire Inside of Us
"Spirituality is about what we do with the fire inside of us, about how we channel our eros. And how we do channel it, the disciplines and habits we choose to live by, will either lead to a greater integration or disintegration within our bodies, minds, and souls, and to a greater integration or disintegration in the way we are related to God, others, and the cosmic world."
— The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality
Why the Incarnation?
"God takes on flesh so that every home becomes a church, every child becomes the Christ-child, and all food and drink become a sacrament. God's many faces are now everywhere, in flesh, tempered and turned down, so that our human eyes can see him. God, in his many-faced face, has become as accessible, and visible, as the nearest water tap. That is the why of the incarnation."
— The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality
Incarnational Flesh
"If I pray for a close friend today but do not send him a postcard to tell him I am thinking about him, how is that prayer supposed to touch him? If I pray for world peace, but do not, inside of myself, forgive those who have hurt me, how can God bring about peace on this planet? Our prayer needs our flesh to back it up."
— The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality
God Hung Among Thieves
"To be connected with the church is to be associated with scoundrels, warmongers, fakes, child-molesters, murderers, adulterers, and hypocrites of every description. It also, at the same time, identifies you with saints and the finest persons of heroic soul within every time, country, race, and gender. To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of soul . . . because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves."
— The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality
The Meaning of being Catholic
"What does it mean to be catholic? Jesus gave the best definition of the term when he said: 'In my Father's house there are many rooms.' This is not a description of a certain geography in heaven but a revelation of the breadth of God's heart. The bosom of God is not a ghetto. God has a catholic heart — in that catholic means universal, wide, all-encompassing. The opposite of a catholic is a fundamentalist, a person who has a heart with one room.
Thus, any spirituality of the church needs to emphasize wide loyalties and inclusivity."
— The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality
Heaven
"Heaven, the scriptures assure us, will be enjoyed within the communal embrace of billions of persons of every temperament, race, background, and ideology imaginable. A universal heart will be required to live there. Thus, in this life, it is good to get some practice at this, good to be constantly in situations that painfully stretch the heart. Few things — and we certainly all admit this — stretch the heart as painfully as does church community. Conversely, when we avoid the pain and mess of ecclesial encounter to walk a less painful private road or to gather with only persons of our own kind, the heart need not and generally does not stretch. Going to church is one of the better cardiovascular spiritual exercises available."
— The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality
Longing
"All life is fired by longing. The simplest of plants and the highest of human love have this in common — yearning, restlessness, a certain insatiable pressure to eat, to grow, to breed, to push beyond self. Yet longing is something that is rarely examined, despite the fact that it lies at the very heart of the soul. What is longing? What does it mean to yearn? What is this insatiable press inside of us to eat, to drink, to make love, to want to be outside our own skins and to want to make ourselves immortal? Mostly it is unconscious, a dark relentless pressure to reach beyond ourselves."
— Against an Infinite Horizon: The Finger of God in Our Everyday Lives
Radical Discipleship
"Like Jesus, we too are meant to give our lives away in generosity and selflessness, but we are also meant to give our deaths away, not just at the moment of our deaths, but in a whole process of leaving this planet in such a way that our diminishment and death is our final, and perhaps greatest, gift to the world. Needless to say, this is not easy. Walking in discipleship behind the master will require that we too sweat blood and feel 'a stone's throw' from everybody. This struggle, to give our deaths away, constitutes Radical Discipleship."
— Sacred Fire: A Vision for A Deeper Human and Christian Maturity
The Need to be Blessed
"So much of our hunger is a hunger for blessing. So much of our aching is the ache to be blessed. So much of our sadness comes from the fact that nobody has ever taken delight and pleasure in us in a non-exploitative way. When has anyone ever made you the object of delight? When has anyone taken, in a non-exploitive way, delight in your body, your beauty, your intelligence, your person? When have you last felt that you are someone in whom others, and God, take pleasure and delight?"
— Against an Infinite Horizon: The Finger of God in Our Everyday Lives
A Good Marriage
"• A good marriage is a warm fireplace. The love that two people have for each other generates a warm place. But the warmth it creates does not just warm the two people in love, it warms everyone else who comes near them — their children, their neighbors, their community, and everyone who meets them.
• A good marriage is a big table, loaded with lots of food and drink. When two people love each other sacramentally that love becomes a place of hospitality, a table where people come to be fed — figuratively and really. Again, love, in a true marriage, feeds not just the two people who are generating it, but, because it is sacramental, it always contains more than enough surplus to feed everyone who is fortunate enough to meet it.
• A good marriage is a container that holds suffering. An old axiom says: 'Everything can be borne if it can be shared!' That's true. Anyone fortunate enough to have a true moral partner in this life can bear a lot of suffering. That is even more true in a good marriage where the wife and husband, because of their deep moral and emotional affinity, can carry not just their own sufferings but also can help carry the sufferings of many others."
— Against an Infinite Horizon: The Finger of God in Our Everyday Lives
The Difficult in Believing the Incarnation
"Part of the difficulty in believing in the incarnation is precisely the fact that it is too good to be true: God is not hidden and hard to contact; forgiveness, grace, and salvation are not the prerogative of the lucky and the few; we don't have to save ourselves; we don't have to get our lives perfectly in order to be saved; we don't have to make amends for our sins; human flesh and this world are not obstacles, but part of the vehicle to heaven; we can help each other on the journey; love, indeed even human love, is stronger than death; and to love someone is indeed to say: 'you at least will never die!' "
— Against an Infinite Horizon: The Finger of God in Our Everyday Lives
Gratitude and Delight
"The first exercise we must do to restore our contemplative faculty to its full powers is to work at receiving everything — life, health, others around us, love, friendship, food, drink, sexuality, beauty — as gift. Becoming a more grateful person is the first, and the most important step, that there is in overcoming the practical atheism that besets our everyday lives. To the extent that we take life for granted we will never see the Giver behind the gift. Conversely, though, once we stop taking life for granted we will, soon enough, begin to feel it as granted to us by God.
"The first proof for the existence of God is not theoretical. It is the practical reversal of the Adam and Eve story within our lives: live in deep gratitude, count blessings, and see whether God is absent from ordinary consciousness."
— The Shattered Lantern
Being Obedient to Love
"To be obedient to love, to give oneself over to its inherent dynamics, means, always, hearing the call to self-sacrifice, to self-abandonment, to let oneself be 'broken'. . . . The mystics tell us that we come to purity of heart by moving beyond ourselves; the Protestant tradition on holiness assures us that purity of heart lies in submission to the Holy; and the tradition of philosophical theism highlights the point that we are in fact always acting under obedience to some God. Thus, for all of them, purity of heart will only come when we give ourselves over to something above us."
— The Shattered Lantern
Touching the Poor, Touching Christ
"Today many of us struggle with the same issues as did the pre-converted Francis, with a pampered life and a mediocre and dying faith. We know that our faith calls us to work for social justice and that this demand is non-negotiable. We know too, as somebody once put it with a succinctness that is praiseworthy, that strength without compassion is violence; that compassion without justice is weakness; that justice without love is Marxism; and that love without justice is baloney! What we often don't know is that the preferential option of the poor is the cure for our mediocre and dying faith. We must kiss the leper.
"Simply put, if we touch the poor we touch Christ. In this way, touching the poor can be a functional substitute for prayer and, given the power of Western culture today, we often need this substitute. . . .
"Thus, like Francis, we need to get off our horses and kiss the leper. If we do, something will snap, we will see our pampered lives for what they are, and God and love will break into our lives in such a way that we will never be the same again."
— The Shattered Lantern
