As we come to grips with our own selfishness and stupidity, we make friends with the impostor and accept that we are impoverished and broken and realize that, if we were not, we would be God. The art of gentleness toward ourselves leads to being gentle with others -- and is a natural prerequisite for our presence to God in prayer.
And then, every time I didn't see her, there was a fall involved. I thought about dancing on the fifth-floor ledge outside out apartment. Every train she wasn't on felt something like hitting the pavement from five floors up. So maybe my father was right about that. Maybe happiness and excitement really are dangerous things.
A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.
Kuna vita za aina mbili zinazopiganwa hapa duniani: vita ya maisha na vita ya dhambi. Unaweza kushinda vita ya maisha (maisha ya raha) lakini ukashindwa vita ya dhambi (maisha ya laana). Kushinda vita ya dhambi ni lazima umkaribishe Mwana wa Mungu Mfalme wa Amani, Yesu Kristo wa Nazareti Aliye Hai, kama Bwana na Mwokozi wa maisha yako.
The priest invents and encourages every kind of suffering and distress so that man may not have the opportunity to become scientific, which requires a considerable degree of free time, health, and an outlook of confident positivism. Thus, the religious authorities work hard to make and keep people feeling sinful, unworthy, and unhappy.
The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden's?
A skeptical man with a credo, 'Seeing is believing'. One day he found something so alien and said, 'I can't believe what I just saw'. Then the other man with different credo, 'Blessed are they who believe without seeing'. One day he found something so alien and said,'This is blasphemy, sinful and evil'.
A wide and vague impression exists that so-called Eastern religion is more contemplative, innocuous, and humane than the proselytizing monotheisms of the West. Don't believe a word of this: try asking the children of Indochina who were dumped by their parents for inherited deformities that were attributed to sins in a previous 'life.
I sometimes wonder if God calls us into the church because it represents not the people of God at their best but us at our worst. I wonder if he calls us to become embedded in this wretched institution precisely because it is wretched. And calls us to be a part of it not to reform it or save it or control it in any way, but to simply love it.
Repentance grows as faith grows. Do not make any mistake about it; repentance is not a thing of days and weeks, a temporary penance to be got over as fast as possible! No; it is the grace of a lifetime, like faith itself. God's little children repent, and so do the young men and the fathers. Repentance is the inseparable companion of faith.
Ashlei was free to spout off how much she loved her savior because Jesus was not about to rear back and tell her He did not quite feel the same way, that He had died for the sins of the world just because it was fun and did not want things to be too serious. He was only thirty-three, after all, and might want to martyr himself for other people.
No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life.
His voice wavered and he looked down abruptly, at last making some vain effort to hide the shameful tears that tracked down his cheeks even as he continued to pin Boyd against the wall. 'I wish I could hate you. God, I wish I could fucking kill you for doing this to me. Why couldn't you just leave me alone if it was going to be this way?
Sin is when you turn away from God—or, in the other language, alienation occurs when the ego, that erratic, unreliable driver of the personality, temporarily turns aside from the great quest for integration with the inner self, the self that’s authentic, the self that contains the potential to be fully human, fully fulfilled and fully alive.
If you don’t delight in the fact that your Father is holy, holy, holy, then you are spiritually dead. You may be in a church. You may go to a Christian school. But if there is no delight in your soul for the holiness of God, you don’t know God. You don’t love God. You’re out of touch with God. You’re asleep to his character.
