Spiritual Context Quotes

I've always been spiritual but I've never had a proper context, and it took me awhile to find the proper context. It's hard to realize you can have any kind of relationship with God you want... and so I now have a punk rock relationship with God.

It only makes sense to ask God for guidance in the context of a life committed to "seeking first the kingdom."

The community in which one hears the voice of God structures how one hears that voice and interprets what it says.

There are some religious traditions that view human beings as participants in creation. This is true of the Jewish tradition, from which I come.

A split second is nothing compared to twenty-four hours. On God's clock you're in the middle of your millisecond. Compared to eternity, what is seventy, eighty, ninety years?

According to Biblical history and all of the history of the world, the blues was built in man from the beginning. The first thing that came out of man is the blues because, according to the Scriptures, when God made man, man was lonesome and blue.

What gnats are compared with humans, so is the whole creation compared with God.

I grew up in a mostly Buddhist environment.

If we discount the account of creation, we remove the significance of Christmas.

If you want to read a letter from the Buddha's world, it is necessary to understand Buddha's world.

The Prophets even express their surprise that God should take notice of man, who is too little and too unimportant to be worthy of the attention of the Creator; how, then, should other living creatures be considered as proper objects for Divine Providence!

It is impossible to look into the Bible with the most ordinary attention without feeling that we have got into a moral atmosphere quite different from that which we breathe in the world, and in the world's literature.

The Bible is a study guide for social interaction.

I'm very eclectic, musically as in other things! But also to frame the hearing and knowing of Scripture within a context of worship, which is what Anglican liturgy does, just seems to me such a very complete and compelling thing.

Buddha's Wife tells a fascinating story, little known in the west, about the woman whom Buddha left behind. Gabriel Constans focuses the reader's attention on the strong and complicated women who surrounded Buddha and makes us re-think the nature of spiritual life.

Our afflictions brothers and sisters often will not be extinguished, they will be dwarfed and swallowed up in the joy of Christ. That’s how we overcome, most of the time. It’s not their elimination, but the placing of them in that larger context.

All religions, all indigenous traditions, all origin stories provide a large map of where you are.

If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it's only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean.

In all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God.

History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

We sometimes get so caught up in one or another aspect of the teaching, we forget that if a person hasn't been introduced to Christ, if a person hasn't embraced the risen Lord and the church that's an expression of that experience, what we're saying just sounds like a bunch of rules or negative statements limiting their personal freedom.

Religion is a temper, not a pursuit. It is the moral atmosphere in which human beings are to live and move. Men do not live to breathe: they breathe to live.

Human reason is a pin dancing on the head of an angel, so small is it in comparison to the Divine vastness that encircles us.

I often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presided over the domain of food and feeding for thousands of years, were historically and routinely barred from presiding over it in a spiritual context. And when the priest held out the host and said, "This is my body, given for you," not once did I recognize that it is women in the act of breastfeeding who most truly embody those words and who are also most excluded from ritually saying them.