“Fear, shame, and guilt often make us stay in our isolation and prevent us from realizing that our handicap, whatever it is, can always become the way to an intimate and healing fellowship in which we come to know one another as humans. After all, everyone shares the handicap of mortality. Our individual, physical, emotional, and spiritual failures are but symptoms of this disease. Only when we use these symptoms of mortality to form a fellowship of the weak can hope emerge. It is in the confession of our brokenness that the real strength of new and everlasting life can be affirmed and made visible” (Henri Nouwen).

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“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know” (Pema Chodron).

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“Sometimes people get the mistaken notion that spirituality is a separate department of life, the penthouse of existence. But rightly understood, it is a vital awareness that pervades all realms of our being” ( Br. David Steindal-Rast).

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“The Bible, in its entirety, finds a fine balance between knowing and not-knowing, between using words and having humility about words. The ensuing Christian traditions have often not found that same balance. What I’ve called “Churchianity” typically needs to speak with absolutes and certainties. It thinks it has the right and the obligation to make total truth-claims and feels very insecure when it cannot.  Thus, it is not very well trained in insecurity and trust” (Richard Rohr in Daily Meditation for January 31, 2021).

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“The opportunity of repentance John [the Baptist] preaches is the opportunity to look in a mirror and ask the question: What in me needs to go another way? When have I spoken when I should have been silent or been silent when I should have spoken? Where have I allowed being nice to take the place of telling the truth? When have I been willing to find gray areas, explain away, and ignore the parts of our common life I find to be ugly because I like some particular policy, or because it did me some particular good, or because it simply didn’t affect me?” (The Rev. Shannon Kershner, pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago).

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“I know a pastor who began his sermon after the Charleston massacre by asking, ‘How come our Bible studies in this church have not been truthful enough, intense enough, for anybody to want to kill us?’ Church, we need to figure out how to be so faithful in our life together that the world can look at us and see something that it is not. Our little congregation is called to be a showcase of what a living God can do!” (William Willimon).

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“A verse I had memorized in my childhood came to mind: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding” [Proverbs 3:5]. For the first time, it dawned on me: there’s a difference between doubting God and doubting my understanding of God, just as there’s a difference between trusting God and trusting my understanding of God. Would I be able to doubt my understanding of God while simultaneously trusting God beyond my understanding? In a strange way, that question for the first time in my life allowed me to see G0d as a mystery distinct from my concepts of God” (Brian McClaren in Faith After Doubt, Why your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do About It).