To seek God within ourselves avails us far more than to look for Him amongst creatures.
TERESA OF AVILA, The Interior Castle
We seem to think that God speaks by seconding the ideas we've already adopted, but God nearly always catches us by surprise. If it's God's Spirit blowing, someone ends up having feathers ruffled in an unforeseen way. God tends to confound, astonish, and flabbergast.
SUE MONK KIDD, When the Heart Waits
We can approach belief from an intellectual path, but in the end, God must be taken on faith. Proofs are for things of this world, things in time and of time, not beyond time.
God, wishing His elect to realize their own misery, often temporarily withdraws His favours: no more is needed to prove to us in a very short time what we really are.
TERESA OF AVILA, The Interior Castle
Without the assistance of that Divine Being ... I cannot succeed. With that assistance, I cannot fail.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, speech, Feb. 11, 1861
- The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything.
- God is the ground, the substance,
- the teaching, the teacher,
- the purpose, and the reward for which every soul labors.
JULIAN OF NORWICH, Meditations with Julian of Norwich
God speaks to souls through words uttered by pious people, by sermons or good books, and in many other such ways. Sometimes he calls souls by means of sickness or troubles, or by some truth He teaches them during prayer, for tepid as they may be in seeking Him, yet God holds them very dear.
TERESA OF AVILA, The Interior Castle
Giving yourself up o love is melting into God. It is falling into the hands of the living God with complete abandon. This is the deep, interior prayer for which we have been striving. Here we must let go of our dependency on thoughts, words, and images. We go into the beautiful darkness. We stop struggling. We let the angels carry us. Surrender is the only word we know.
MACRINA WIEDERKEHR, A Tree Full of Angels
However many years life might last, no one could ever wish for a better friend than God.
TERESA OF AVILA, The Interior Castle
- O Eternal God, now may it please you
- to burn in love
- so that we become the limbs
- fashioned in the love you felt
- when you begot your Son
- at the first dawn
- before all creation.
- And consider this need which falls upon us,
- take it from us for the sake of your Son,
- and lead us to the joy of your salvation.
HILDEGARD OF BINDEN, "O eterne deus"
O Shepherd God, companion me on all the journeys of my life. Dance through the darkness with me.
MACRINA WIEDERKEHR, The Song of the Seed
- The marvels of God are not brought forth from one's self.
- Rather, it is more like a chord, a sound that is played.
- The tone does not come out of the chord itself, but rather,
- through the touch of the Musician.
- I am, of course, the lyre and harp of God's kindness.
HILDEGARD OF BINGEN, attributed, Soul Weavings
There's something infinitely sad about little girls who grow up understanding (usually unconsciously) that if God is male, it's because male is the most valuable thing to be. This belief resonates in a thousand hidden ways in their lives. It slowly cripples girl children, and it cripples female adults.
SUE MONK KIDD, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter
- God is not only fatherly,
- God is also mother
- who lifts her loved child
- from the ground to her knee.
- The Trinity is like a mother's cloak
- wherein the child finds a home
- and lays its head on the maternal breast.
MECHTILD OF MAGDEBURG, attributed, Soul Weavings
God speaks silently, he speaks in your heart; if your heart is noisy, chattering, you will not hear.
CARYLL HOUSELANDER, This War is the Passion
What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky wormbent tabernacle.
God has made it possible for us to come to know Him through the visible and tangible things of our world. Have you ever looked at a sunset and been reminded of who's really in charge in this world? Have you ever gawked at majestic mountain peaks and been jerked back into the reality of how much bigger God is than you and your problems? Have you ever shaken your head at the brilliant lines, patterns and colors on the wings of a butterfly and contemplated the stunningly detailed imagination of the Creator? Then you've seen God's glory and encountered the efforts of a Father longing to be recognized by His children.
CHRIS SEIDMAN, Little Buddy
It wasn't that she had anything against the faith of the New Testament; left alone, it would be a tender and compassionate religion.... No, what Adelia objected to was the Church's interpretation of God as a petty, stupid, moneygrubbing, retrograde, antediluvian tyrant who, having created a stupendously varied world, had forbidden any inquiry into its complexity, leaving His people flailing in ignorance.
ARIANA FRANKLIN, Mistress of the Art of Death
Everything flows from God, but we are limited by imposing our human perceptions upon him. Man designs God according to his own image and the image man has of himself is flawed.
TOBSHA LEARNER, The Witch of Cologne
God is found in this Life ... to wait for another is folly.
- All human love is a faint type of God's;
- An echoing note from a harmonious whole;
- A feeble spark from an undying flame;
- A single drop from an unfathomed sea:
- But God's is infinite; it fills the earth
- And heaven, and the broad, trackless realms of space.
ALBERT LAIGHTON, "The Love of God"
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