“We should honor the gifts of the mind to understand and make sense of religious experience. A framework of convictions provides a circumference for the practice of faith. For instance, I’ll sign on to a declaration proclaiming God is the Creator, Jesus is the Christ, and the Spirit is the Giver of Life. But too often Western Christianity has compressed faith into rational formulas capable of consent without consequence, partitioned from emotive experience, and devoid of mystery” (Wes Granberg-Michaelson).

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” . . .  it is not an enviable position, this Christian thing. Following Jesus is a vocation to share the fate of God for the life of the world. To allow what God for some reason allows—and uses. And to suffer ever so slightly what God suffers eternally. Often, this has little to do with believing the right things about God—beyond the fact that God is love itself” (Richard Rohr).

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“A practice of gratitude is not about dismissing sadness, anger, fear, or confusion. Rather, it offers us the opportunity to see that we often experience multiple feelings at once; to welcome joy into the same places where we hold grief; to turn our attention to what is quietly growing and breathing day by day, which, to our possible surprise, includes ourselves” (Kristin Lin).

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“I don’t want to distance the secular but always bring it closer. It’s only then that ordinary things and moments become epiphanies of God’s presence. Some man said to me once, “I want to become more spiritual.” Yet God is inviting us to inhabit the fullness of our humanity. God holds out wholeness to us. Let’s not settle for just spiritual. We are sacramental to our core when we think that everything is holy. The holy not just found in the supernatural but in the Incarnational here and now. The truth is that sacraments are happening all the time if we have the eyes to see. . . .” (Father Greg Boyle).

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“A sky full of God’s children! Each galaxy, each star, each living creature, every particle and sub-atomic particle of creation, we are all children of the Maker. From a sub-atomic particle with a life span of a few seconds, to a galaxy with a life span of billions of years, to us human creatures somewhere in the middle in size and age, we are . . . children of God, made in God’s image” (Madelyn Le Engle).

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“What if not a word is lost? / What if every word we cast; / Cold, cunning, cold, accurst / Every word we cut and paste, / Echoes to us from the past, / Fares and finds us first and last, / Haunts and hunts us down?” (Malcolm Guite).

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 “God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk” (Meister Eckhart).