The worst thing is not the sorrow or the loss or the heartbreak. Worse is to be encountered by death and not to be changed by the encounter. There are pills we take to get through the experience, but the danger is that we then do not go through the experience but...
He who counts the stars and calls them by their names is in no danger of forgetting his own children.-----------------------------------Gender-neutral version: God who counts the stars and calls them by their names is in no danger of forgetting God's own children.
What is the cost of lies? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves...
I believe that we can only safely read Scripture—which is a dangerous book in the wrong hands—if we are somehow sharing in the divine gaze of love. A life of prayer helps us develop a third eye that can read between the lines and find the golden thread which is moving...
God is not a belief-system. Jesus is not a religion. Christianity is not a check-list. Church is not an address. The Bible is not a book of doctrines. Community is not a meeting. Grace has no exceptions. Ministry is not a program. Art is not carnal. Women are not...
If all the things you are afraid will happen, happen... and you survive it... You become dangerous.
I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.
Many new friends have come into my life...Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, New Agers, and others—including lots of atheists and agnostics, too. One of the most dramatic of those friendships began in the aftermath of 9/11/2001. Like a lot of churches, our little...
For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it.
One discovers the light in the darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a...