Spirituality Quote of the Week

The more we can expand our focus to include others' interests alongside our own, the more securely we build the foundations of our own happiness.

-- The Dalai Lama

Spirituality Quote of the Week

We celebrate Christmas. We celebrate the birth of a child. But we have to look into ourselves. There is a child in us to be born. Our practice is to allow the child to be born every moment of our daily life.

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

Spirituality Quote of the Week

Gratitude begins in our hearts and then dovetails into behavior. It almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy resides.

-- Anne Lamott

Spirituality Quote of the Week

Accepting other people's generosity is a form of generosity. How we receive a gift can be a gift to the giver.

-- Sue Bender

Spirituality Quote of the Week

We must try to converse with God in little ways while we do our work; not in memorized prayer, not trying to recite previously formed thoughts. Rather, we should purely and simply reveal our hearts as the words come to us.

-- Brother Lawrence

Spirituality Quote of the Week

The spiritual life, to which art belongs and of which she is one of the mightiest elements, is a complicated but definite and easily definable movement forwards and upwards. This movement is the movement of experience. It may take different forms, but it holds at bottom to the same inner thought and purpose.

-- Wassily Kandinsky

Spirituality Quote of the Week

Family is most truly family in its complexity, including its failures and weaknesses. In my own family, the uncle who was my ideal source of wisdom and morality was also the one who drank excessively and who scandalized the rest by refusing to go to church.

-- Thomas Moore

Spirituality Quote of the Week

In my view, the realistic goal to be attained through spiritual practice is not some permanent state of enlightenment that admits of no further efforts, but a capacity to be free in this moment, in the midst of whatever is happening. If you can do that, you have already solved most of the problems you will encounter in life.

-- Sam Harris

Every God

Every God is too small.

Spirituality Quote of the Week

To understand that we are connected, that we belong to one another, is a powerful deterrent to fratricide, terrorism, slavery, and violence. We are not warring tribes. We are the same tribe.

-- Diana Butler Bass

Spirituality Quote of the Week

Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of LIFE NOW is true prosperity.

-- Eckhart Tolle

Spirituality Quote of the Week

We have to rid ourselves of all notions of God in order for God to be there. The Holy Spirit, the energy of God in us, is the true door.

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

Spirituality Quote of the Week

The concern for reconciliation finds expression in the simple human desire to understand others and to be understood by others. These are the building blocks of the society of man, the precious ingredients without which man's life is a nightmare and the future of his life on the planet doomed.

-- Howard Thurman

Spirituality Quote of the Week

We all become a well-disguised mirror image of anything that we fight too long or too directly. That which we oppose determines the energy and frames the questions after a while. You lose all your inner freedom.

-- Richard Rohr

Spirituality Quote of the Week

You cannot lay remorse upon the innocent nor lift it from the heart of the guilty. Unbidden shall it call in the night, that men may wake and gaze upon themselves.

-- Kahlil Gibran

Drawn Back

Loving communities
draw us back from fear.

Spirituality Quote of the Week

We meditate to discover our own identity, our right place in the scheme of the universe. Through mediation, we acquire and eventually acknowledge our connection to an inner power source that has the ability to transform our outer world.

-- Julia Cameron

No Name

As I understand it, "Tao" means "way" or "path," as in "the way things are" or "the way of life" or "the way to live life."

But it also points a finger at the source of all, the well from which time and space pour out into time and space. The garden of yin and yang.

Tao is not God. Tao is how we discover God. Tao is how we learn God. Tao is how we live God.

God is not God, either, by the way.

No name is.

Spirituality Quote of the Week

Nothing, ever, is worth closing your heart over.

-- Michael A. Singer

Sad

The more we do to isolate
ourselves from others,
the more fear we experience.

The more fear in our lives,
the more chaos and hatred,
the more greed and anger,
the more violence and ruin,
the more gnashing of teeth.

The more fearful we are,
the harder it is to live lives
of trust and compassion,
of mercy and gratitude,
of serenity and joy.

Sad.

Spirituality Quote of the Week

I have often suspected that the most profound product of this world is tears. I don't mean that to be morbid. Rather, I mean that tears express that vulnerability in which we can endure having our heart broken and go right on loving.

-- Cynthia Bourgeault

The God of Our Minds

What is God if there is no God?

Is God just a "spiritual" experience? What is that, and why do so many people across time and space have them? Why are these experiences so compelling, so convincing? Why are they so nakedly personal and unshareable?

How do we know they're even real, that they're not just a cloud of brain chemistry? How do we know they aren't some random constellation of neurons firing inside our skull?

Why is it that some people have them and some people don't? Why do some who want them never seem to get them while others who have no interest in anything "spiritual" do?

Do we create God just by choosing to believe in a god? In other words, if we choose to believe in God, that decision changes the way we look at our surroundings, and that changes what we see when we look. Suddenly, we see the Divine all around us -- and even within us -- all because we choose to believe.

On the other hand, if we choose to believe that to have faith in any kind of Supreme Being is stupid, superstitious, and potentially lethal, then we don't look for evidence of some supernatural Grandfather, and in turn, we don't see evidence of the Divine, and there is no God. There is no God because we don't believe in God.

Do we create the God we need -- including nonexistent ones?

Yes. But only in our minds.

For me, it's about being awake. When I look, I see. When I listen, I hear. But only when I'm awake. Only when I'm aware. Only when I'm paying attention.

Spirituality Quote of the Week

The more our sense of identity and well-being depends upon what we possess or what people think of us, the less we are aware of our own intrinsic worth and, consequently, the more we are enslaved to the fear of loss.

-- Kabir Helminski

Buddha Jesus

I know a lot of people who don't have a religious life. They don't see a need for one. Why waste all that time in church?

I'm fine with that. I'm mostly fine with whatever people choose to believe or not believe about church and God and Jesus and Tao and barbecue sauce. And I can understand why someone would opt out of the whole religion thing. One of my closest friends opted out decades ago, and another never opted in in the first place. Same with my wife.

And yet, I still go. I get up on Sunday mornings and go to church. I'm usually there on Wednesday nights, too. In fact, I spend a lot of time at my little Presbyterian church. I love the people there. I love the conversations we have. I love the Sunday morning services. I love that it's a little church with a big, fat social justice heart. I love that it tries to do right by people.

At the same time, there's a big part of me that thinks I don't really belong there. I feel like an interloper because I see a different Jesus and Bible and God than most Christians see. The good news for me is that even though I'm more open about what I do believe these days, they still seem willing to let me stick around.

That's community.

As I've written elsewhere, I've come to see Jesus the way a Buddhist sees the Buddha. I don't need Jesus to be a uniquely Divine Being in a human body come to save my sorry ass and return me to God. I see Jesus as a finger pointing at the moon.

I guess you could say I'm a Jesusist more than I am a Christian. But then, why should my religious perspectives really matter to anyone beyond my own skin anyway? We can have community without that.

If we want it.

Spirituality Quote of the Week

Where there is no disinterested love (or, more briefly, no charity), there is only biased self-love, and consequently only a partial and distorted knowledge both of the self and of the world of things, lives, minds, and spirit outside the self.

-- Aldous Huxley

Fearmonger

Racism is about fear,
not about superiority.

If I'm racist against you,
it's because I'm afraid,
not because I think I'm better.

But that doesn't stop me
from convincing myself otherwise.

Spirituality Quote of the Week

The ignorant work for their own profit; the wise work for the welfare of the world, without thought for themselves.

-- The Bhagavad Gita

Carrier of Blessings

Gratitude seems like such an odd little animal to me sometimes.

A hurricane swamps a woman's business in so much saltwater that it'll never dry out, and she's thankful nobody got hurt. A tornado grinds a man's house down to the concrete slab, and he's thankful nobody died. A sink hole opens its big fat mouth and swallows a woman's parents, their house, and both cars, and she's thankful it didn't happen the day before on Christmas when the whole family was there.

This is what gratitude does. It changes the way we see the shit in our lives. It focuses our eyes not on what went wrong but on what went right -- what could've gone wrong but didn't. It also reminds us that even the shit in our lives is temporary.

As for me, gratitude has also shown me there's value in pain. In fact, there are certain things -- valuable things -- that can only come to me through pain, but I have to watch for them or I'll miss them. When I see them, I say thank you.

Pain. A carrier of blessings.
Gratitude. A gift we give ourselves.

Spirituality Quote of the Week

The representatives of God are seldom divine and the minions of Satan are never quite diabolical.

-- Reinhold Niebuhr

Spirituality Quote of the Week

The best thing I can give to others is to liberate myself from the common delusions and be, for myself and for them, free. Then grace can work in and through me for everyone.

-- Thomas Merton

Spirituality Quote of the Week

You are a spark of an Eternal Flame. You can hide the spark, but you can never destroy it.

-- Paramahansa Yogananda

Spirituality Quote of the Week

God cannot be known the way we know a tree, a scientific fact or a book. God can only be known as a fellow subject. That's a reciprocal knowing, where we "know as fully as we are known."

-- Richard Rohr

Spirituality Quote of the Week

One of the most damaging ideas our culture perpetrates is the idea that we cannot trust ourselves or our perceptions. We are raised to doubt ourselves, to seek outside validation for our perceptions, to assume that someone other than ourselves can tell us our truth more clearly than we can tell ourselves.

-- Julia Cameron

Spirituality Quote of the Week

No man has learned to live until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Spirituality Quote of the Week

Compassion, if nurtured, will eventually win out over even the most inhumane structures.

-- Kent Nerburn

Spirituality Quote of the Week

The nonverbal, concrete world contains no classes and no symbols which signify or mean anything other than themselves. Consequently it contains no duality. For duality arises only when we classify, when we sort our experiences into mental boxes, since a box is no box without an inside and an outside.

-- Alan Watts

Spirituality Quote of the Week

If God finds a soul filled with a lively faith, God pours grace into it in a torrent that, having found an open channel, gushes out exuberantly.

-- Brother Lawrence

Spirituality Quote of the Week

When we put too much emphasis on superficial differences, and on account of them make even small, rigid discriminations, we cannot avoid bringing about additional suffering both for ourselves and others.

-- The Dalai Lama

Spirituality Quote of the Week

Somewhere along the line, I have actually come to believe that a person being herself is beautiful -- that contentment and acceptance and freedom are beautiful.

-- Anne Lamott

Spirituality Quote of the Week

Socrates and Jesus, two teachers of virtue and love, were executed because of the unsettling, threatening power of their souls, which was revealed in their personal lives and in their words. They did not carry guns, yet still they were a threat, because there is nothing more powerful than the revelation of one's own soul.

-- Thomas Moore

Spirituality Quote of the Week

God wishes to be known, and is pleased that we should rest in God.

-- Julian of Norwich

Spirituality Quote of the Week

Some people think that prayer or meditation involves only our minds or our hearts. But we also have to pray with our bodies, with our actions in the world.

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

Spirituality Quote of the Week

After all is said and done, after all our spiritual practices and all the esoteric knowledge that might be acquired, the real measure of soulfulness is simply the degree of our humility, gratitude, patience, and love.

-- Kabir Helminski

Spirituality Quote of the Week

There are two parallel tasks in spiritual life. One is to discover selflessness, and the other is to develop a healthy sense of self. Both sides of that apparent paradox must be fulfilled for us to awaken.

-- Jack Kornfield

Spirituality Quote of the Week

If you want to grow and be free to explore life, you cannot spend your life avoiding the myriad things that might hurt your heart or mind.

-- Michael A. Singer

Spirituality Quote of the Week

Small miracles are all around us. We can find them everywhere -- in our homes, in our daily activities, and, hardest to see, in ourselves.

-- Sue Bender

Spirituality Quote of the Week

The true purpose of all spiritual disciplines is to clear away whatever may block our awareness of that which is God in us. The aim is to get rid of whatever may so distract the mind and encumber the life that we function without this awareness, or as if it were not possible.

-- Howard Thurman

Spirituality Quote of the Week

Jesus never asked anyone to form a church, ordain priests, develop elaborate rituals and institutional cultures, and splinter into denominations. His two great requests were that we "love one another as I have loved you" and that we share bread and wine together as an open channel of that interabiding love.

-- Cynthia Bourgeault

Spirituality Quote of the Week

Maybe if more of us showed we cared, then maybe the guns would be silent, and the bullets would fly no more.

-- Reverend Henry Brown

Spirituality Quote of the Week

When you look at the clouds, they are not symmetrical. They do not form fours and they do not come along in cubes, but you know at once that they are not a mess. A dirty old ashtray full of junk may be a mess, but clouds do not look like that.

-- Alan Watts