Quotes Tagged "belief"

Sometimes it seems I can happily hold all Christian tenets in an active abeyance, a fusion of faith and skepticism that includes and transcends all literal and figurative truths, if I hold fast to one indestructible fact (FACT!?): Christ's resurrection. This event answers every impulse, fear, and need of my imagination, quiets and clarifies the raucous onslaught of time, suffers me—the mute, destitute, unselfed seed of being that is most me—to understand what suffering is, and what it means. But no. The reality wavers, the image fades like a reflection on the water, for under every assertion about God, including the one I am making at this very minute, the ground gives way, and once again I am left with the vital and futile truth that to live in faith is to live like the Jesus lizard, quick and nimble on the water into which a moment's pause would make it sink.

Life tears us apart, but through those wounds, if we have tended them, love may enter us. It might be the live of someone you have lost. It may be the love of your own spirit for the self that at times you think you hate. However it comes though, in all these—of all these and yet more than they, so much more—there burns the abiding love of God. But if you find that you cannot believe in God, then do not worry yourself with it. No one can say what names or forms God might take, nor gauge the intensity of unbelief we may need to wake up our souls.

It is true that Christ makes a man anew, that there is some ultimate change in him. But part of that change is the ability to see your life as a whole, to feel the form and unity of it, to become a creature made for and assimilated into existence, rather than a desperate, fragmented man striving against existence or caught forever just outside of it.

Faith, in its forming of images of the ultimate environment, never finds analogues that fully or with complete accuracy bring out and express its knowing.

How do we explain God? Maybe we explain Him as unexplainable.

Prayers, maybe most of them, go unanswered. You two, you’re too young, too fortunate, to know that. You will. Prayers go unanswered. Not God’s fault. People keep getting in His way.

A belief is your brain’s self-maintenance mechanism.

The purpose of a belief is self-preservation.

The lyrics that I sing in my head dictate the attitude of my heart. And because that’s the case, I’d prefer the music of God to the songs of men.

Repudiation reinforces beliefs.

I am the prayer.

In no way does God’s absence call His existence into question. To the contrary, His absence calls into question my unwillingness to surrender to His existence.

Trust is what I give to others out of the hope that they will give it back to me. But too often the return on such an investment is that it doesn’t return.

Frankly speaking, I could care less if my plans succeed. However, I do care if God’s plans do. Therefore, none of myself and all of God is the plan.

You are being called to be an agent of the divine. Will you accept your mission?

...if (they) wish to love God, (they) be prepared to do so no matter what His intentions. God is not just, God is not kind, God is not merciful, and understanding that is essential to true devotion.

You are as strong as you believe yourself to be.

Several times over the years Kate would tell me how she saw Grady in her dreams. In the dream Kate would say to her, “You can't be here, Grady, you died.” Inevitably as she said that, Grady would disappear, poof, just like that. I tried to explain to her that she needed to accept Grady into her dreams. She needed to give Grady permission to stay. Until she did, Grady would have to honor what Kate believed to be true. When Kate said, “You can’t be here,” Grady could not stay. That’s the way it works. A loyal dog obeys its master, even beyond the grave.

Of course I can’t reach God. But He can reach me.

I tell myself that I have no problem believing in God, if “belief” can be defined as some utter interior I sent to in life that is both beyond and within this one, and if “assent” can be understood as at once active and unconscious, and if “God” is in some mysterious way both this action and its object, and if after all these qualifications this sentence still makes any effing sense.