We can handle God as long as he stays God. We can build him a fountain. But when he becomes a man we have to give him a cup of water. from The Substance of Faith —————————-Gender-neutral version: We can handle God as long as God stays God. We can build God a fountain....
Granted, a nation must have greatness of spirit and pioneers who will lead it toward new goals. Just as much, if not more so, however, a nation needs men and women of lifelong performance of duty, of clearheaded loyalty, of discipline of heart and body. A nation needs...
The awareness that we are yet meant to do more than we are signals where God lies in wait for us to become what we are meant to be. Then the spiritual life, the awareness of a driving energy within that is greater than ourselves, greater than anything around us,...
But sooner or later we must distinguish between what we are not and what we are. We must accept the fact that we are not what we would like to be. We must cast off our false exterior self like the cheap and showy garment that it is. We must find our real self in all...
Saints never know they’re saints. That’s why they’re saints. They are too busy talking to God to look in the mirror. The same moles and wrinkles are there but contact with the Eternal has given them a borrowed glory. Divine conversation has left a residual luster. The...
All Saints Day and All Souls Day are the feasts of every saint and of every soul who has died and gone home into the eternal love of God. All of them and therefore not only those already celebrated…but also the silent, unknown ones who have departed as if they had...
As someone has put it, the biblical understanding of human beings is not that they have bodies, but that they are bodies… Those who believe in the immortality of the soul believe that life after death is as natural a human function as waking after sleep. The Bible...
Religion gives us the structures that weld the habits and disciplines of the soul into one integrated whole. Those same structures can also, however, smother the very spirit they intend to shape. We can get caught in the structures and the forms that are the basilica...
Believers throughout the centuries have tried to describe God, but very few have been satisfied with their descriptions. Their words turn out to be too frail to do the job. …The best any of us has ever been able to do is to describe what the experience of God is...
We have resorted to magical categories and overlook God’s gift of sacred significance in the commonplace events of our lives. As a result, we may choose to take a particular job because of what we describe as God’s leading, but then do the job with little or no sense...