Cormac McCarthy Quotes

Religious life is an encounter with the living God. Sometimes that encounter is preceded by a kind of soul-searching agony that tries desperately not to hear, runs in the opposite direction, and frantically tries to reason itself out of answering the invitation.

I became a student of the history of religion. I am fascinated by how religions often center on mystical experience, and in the Old Testament tradition you find flames, the burning bush.

Longing is like the rosy dawn. After the dawn out comes the sun. Longing is followed by the vision of God.

Every few thousand years some shepard inhales smoke from a burning bush and has a vision or eats moldy rye bread in a cave and sees God.

I had a million questions to ask God: but when I met Him, they all fled my mind; and it didn't seem to matter.

The eyes of the soul of the multitudes are unable to endure the vision of the divine.

I've never heard God speak out loud to me. That's not an experience I have had.

I have always found the baptism of Jesus, with a dove descending and voice from Heaven, one of the great moments in the Jesus story. This is where Jesus hears the deep call from God.

Off to one side sits a group of shepherds. They sit silently on the floor, perhaps perplexed, perhaps in awe, no doubt in amazement. Their night watch had been interrupted by an explosion of light from heaven and a symphony of angels. God goes to those who have time to hear him-and so on this cloudless night he went to simple shepherds.

The Spirit bears witness. Ecstasy and enlightenment, inspiration and intuition are not necessary. Happy is the man who is worthy of these; but woe unto us if we wait for such experiences; woe unto us if we do not perceive that these things are of secondary importance.

The inward offer is a kind of spiritual enlightenment, whereby the promises are presented to the hearts of men, as it were, by an inward word.

I sped through heaven and saw god at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.

O eternal truth and true love and beloved eternity! You are my God; to you I sigh by day and by night. And when I first knew you, you raised me up so that I could see that there was something to see and that I still lacked the ability to see it. And you beat back the weakness of my sight, blazing upon me with your rays, and I trembled in love and in dread.

For now, oh my God, it is to You alone that I can talk, because nobody else will understand. I cannot bring any other man on this earth into the cloud where I dwell in Your light, that is, Your darkness, where I am lost and abashed. I cannot explain to any other man the anguish which is Your joy nor the loss which is the Possession of You, nor the distance from all things which is the arrival in You, nor the death which is the birth in You because I do not know anything about it myself and all I know is that I wish it were over - I wish it were begun.

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

The call of God creates sight in us. It's the work of God in our hearts to awaken us before his word.

I told you, God is not coy. He's more likely to hit you across the forehead with a two-by-four than whisper in your ear

The step between ecstatic vision and sinful frenzy is all too brief.

I remember, when I have preached at different times in the country, and sometimes here, that my whole soul has agonized over men, every nerve of my body has been strained and I could have wept my very being out of my eyes and carried my whole frame away in a flood of tears, if I could but win souls

Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!

I believe that's when God first started speaking to my heart--the very day I started speaking to His!

God is, of course, a terrifying reality. I had thought that I knew all about God, and had Him in a pigeon hole. But I met Him at the corner of a street -- He entered my mind with a bang, and nearly burst my head open.

Revival is the visitation of God which brings to life Christians who have been sleeping and restores a deep sense of God's near presence and holiness. Thence springs a vivid sense of sin and a profound exercise of heart in repentance, praise, and love, with an evangelistic outflow.