In the Church, bodily asceticism has always been the supreme road totheological knowledge. It is not possible for man to come to know the truth of life, the truth of Godand the truth of his own existence purely through intellectual categories...
When we get our spiritual house in order, we'll be dead. This goes on. You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don't expect faith to clear things up for you. It is trust, not certainty.
In order for a person to be able to “turn our lives and our wills” over requires something very difficult for a spiritually wounded person to accomplish - Trust. Yet, to accomplish this step, trust of the spirit must be present.
In the Church, bodily asceticism has always been the supreme road totheological knowledge. It is not possible for man to come to know the truth of life, the truth of God and the truth of his own existence purely through intellectual categories...
When God is driven to the periphery of the public square, the human spiritual capacity longs for exercise, and it often finds it in the “suspension of disbelief” and activity of the imagination that are available in novels and movies.
On some dimension or other, every event in life can be causing only one of two things: either it is good for you, or it is bringing up what you need to look at in order to create good for you. Evolution is win-win…life is self-correcting.
Peace and supreme joy may seem like end-states to practitioners on more difficult spiritual paths, but the path of devotion should be filled with peace and joy from the very beginning. Their absence is an indication that something is amiss. (125)
When life beats us down, we often do not feel worthwhile to ourselves nor to anyone else. Often, we try to hide our feelings of inadequacy in pursuit of perfection, which develops into self-loathing. If only we can be perfect, then we can be okay.
I have a firm belief in such things as, you know, the water, the Earth, the trees and sky. And I'm wondering, it is increasingly difficult to find those elements in nature, because it's nature I believe in rather than some spiritual thing.
Animals suffer both emotionally and physically, but they don't suffer metaphysically. That is, they don't suffer about suffering, don't get thrown into spiritual confusion by it, or fall out of connection with the divine because of it.
The speculative thinker makes Christianity into theology, instead of recognizing that a living relationship to Christ involves passion, struggle, decision, personal appropriation, and inner transformation.' (Moore's summary of Kierkegaard)
No matter how many sins you make or how slow you travel back toward God's valley, you are still way ahead of a person who never made a mistake and doesn't know what it is like to climb out of a pit of shame and rise above their temptations.
We can be safe and live with other defined truths exemplified by a capital “T” or we can change and with our limited time experience truth with a small “t,” seeking our own understanding, which can change with new awareness.
We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I In a Berkshire bar. The big workman Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe All the evening, from his empty mug With gleaming eye glanced towards us: "I seen 'em myself!" he said fiercely.
The muscles behind both eyes hurt and the skin all down the frontis swelling from the veins burst though the circles look less sunk. Tears did fill them in though and I did push the waves right from my own souls windows to water down it's grave
