“Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows Himself everywhere, in everything—in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. It’s impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it. 4” — Thomas Merton
— The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith by Marcus J. Borg
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What do we do with our pain?
“It seems that God must be trying to address a very central human problem in coming among us as a crucified and forgiving Victim. I ask again, isn’t this—sooner or later—at the heart of everybody’s spiritual problem: what we do with our pain?”
— The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Chaos, Reorder by Richard Rohr OFM
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Expulsion Is The Problem
“One day, the mainline Christian movement will itself recognize that Jesus was never into expelling or excluding—only transforming and integrating. In fact, you might say that, for Jesus, the very act of expulsion is the problem.”
— The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Chaos, Reorder by Richard Rohr OFM
Trust Wisdom Beyond Our Understanding
“When we can let go of our judgments and resentments and come to trust Wisdom beyond our understanding, we discover that life seems bent on taking what manifests in the moment as bad news and transforming it into good news and further evolutionary development.”
— Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World by Michael Dowd
http://a.co/4eMvqF9
Gratitude
“Gratitude is not a form of passive acceptance or complicity. Rather, it is the capacity to stare doubt, loss, chaos, and despair right in the eye and say, “I am still here.” It is like the mantra of British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking: “While there’s life, there is hope.” Being alive is radical gratitude.”
— Grateful: The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks by Diana Butler Bass
http://a.co/9Fc2ADJ
Authentic Christianity
“Authentic Christianity is not so much a belief system as a life-and-death system that shows you how to give away your life, how to give away your love, and eventually how to give away your death. Basically, how to give away—and in doing so, to connect with the world, with all other creatures, and with God.”
— The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe by Richard Rohr
http://a.co/f6MuReg
Need To Learn How To Believe
“What many have begun to see is that you need to have a nondualistic, non-angry, and nonargumentative mind to process the really big issues with any depth or honesty, and most of us have not been effectively taught how to do that in practice. We were largely taught what to believe instead of how to believe. We had faith in Jesus, often as if he were an idol, more than sharing the expansive faith of Jesus, which is always humble and patient (Matthew 11: 25), and can be understood only by the humble and patient.”
— The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe by Richard Rohr
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The Story Does Not Begin On Christmas
Christians are taught that the story of Jesus, and thus our story, begins on Christmas and ends on Easter. As a Christian I think it better if we were taught that our story begins in Babylon. The destruction of the temple, the exile of Judah, the release from exile, reconstruction of the temple and religious cooperation with political power set the context of the New Testament. To understand meaning, one must start at the beginning.
Good News!
“No Gospel will ever be worthy of being called “Good News” unless it is indeed a win-win worldview, and “good news for all the people” (Luke 2: 10)—without exception. The right to decide who is in, and who is out, is not one that our little minds and hearts can even imagine. Jesus’s major theme of the Reign of God is saying, “Only God can do such infinite imagining, so trust the Divine Mind.””
— The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe by Richard Rohr
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Church or Body?
“The church was meant to be an alternative society in the grip of an altogether different story line.”
— The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe by Richard Rohr
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