"It is crucial that Jesus is led by the Spirit. There are two wildernesses, two darknesses in the spiritual journey. One you go into by your own stupidity, by your sin, blindness, ignorance and mistakes. We all do that. But there's another darkness. The holy darkness is the darkness that God leads us into, through and beyond. This is a necessary darkness for the journey. In a certain sense, God's darkness is a much better teacher than light. There comes a time when you have to either go deeper into faith or you will turn back, when you have to live without knowing or you lose faith altogether. So we have the Spirit leading Jesus into the wilderness, to face the essential darkness."

"Denial of our pattern of failure seems to be a kind of practical atheism or chosen ignorance among many believers and clergy."

"The Church, as Jesus seems to be defining it, is the gathering of accepted brokenness. It's not the gathering of the saved."

"Every missed rite of passage leads to a new rigidification of the personality."

"True baptism allows us to reframe, and contain, the reality of evil, without needing to blame anyone else, without any need for shame or vengeance. We are all in this together, and our common wound shows itself in different ways."

"Our first experience of life is primarily felt in the *body.* ... We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us and gaze upon us. It's not heard or seen or thought it's felt. That's the original knowing."

"Organized religion is no longer good news for most people, but bad news indeed. It set us up for the massive atheism, agnosticism, hedonism, and secularism we now see in almost all formerly Christian countries."

"Without law in some form, and, also, without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily or naturally. We have to have something hard and half - good to rebel against."

"You know after any truly initiating experience that you are part of a much bigger whole. Life is not about you henceforward, but you are about life."

"Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead. It is such a willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man."

"The big truth for men is that often we have to leave home in the first half of life before we can return home at a later stage and find our soul there."

"Sacramental listening reminds us that current suffering isn't the end of the story. God loves us deeply, and the vision for the future is vaster and more magnificent than we could ever imagine. In these moments of profound human presence, we are awakened to the divine presence and see that the kingdom of God is coming and yet is already here."

"His Kingship, precisely because it is so broad, so total, is doomed to be rejected by anybody who is still into tribalism, or small belonging systems. We don't really like the big Kingdom if it gets in the way of our smaller kingdoms, and it always does."

"Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it."

"If we don't learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them."

"I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic."

"God seems to be about turning our loves around and using them toward the great love that is their true object."

"Those who are not true leaders or elders will just affirm people at their own immature level, and of course immature people will love them and elect them for being equally immature. You can fill in the names here with your own political disaster story. But just remember, there is a symbiosis between immature groups and immature leaders, I am afraid, which is why both Plato and Jefferson said democracy was not really the best form of government. It is the safest. A truly wise monarch would probably be the most effective at getting things done."

"When you get your, 'Who am I?', question right, all of your, 'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves"

"Religion either produces the very best people or the very worst."

"If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God."

"The people who know God well - mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God - always meet a lover, not a dictator."

"The ego hates losing ' even to God."

"We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses."

"Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners."

"I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona."

"Every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us."

"True spirituality is not taught, it's caught. Once our sails have been unfurled to the Spirit, henceforth our motivation for the journey toward holiness and wholeness is immense gratitude."

"The way to transmute the pain of life is to reveal the wounded side of things, evil, even, and then place the wound inside of sacred space. The Bible is about naming, facing, and then forgiving the wounds of history."

"It is no surprise that the first and always unwelcome message of male initiation rites is LIFE ' IS ' HARD."

"Forgiveness becomes central to Jesus' teaching, because to receive reality is always to 'bear it, to bear with reality for not meeting all of our needs. To accept reality is to forgive reality for being what it is, almost day by day and sometimes even hour by hour. Such a practice creates patient and humble people.Forgiveness reveals three goodnesses simultaneously. When we forgive, we choose the goodness of the other over their faults, we experience God's goodness flowing through ourselves, and we also experience our own capacity for goodness in a way that almost surprises us. We are finally in touch with a much Higher Power, and we slowly learn how to draw upon this Infinite Source."

"A lot of us pray as if prayer is really twisting the arm of God or convincing God to do something. We think by saying more words we'll talk God into it. We think, 'If I say it one more time, God will agree with me. That very attitude is an alienating attitude. It keeps us in the role of doing it 'right or often enough to convince an unready or unwilling God. Wrong, wrong, wrong!19 minutes ago"

"Nature is the one song of praise that never stops singing."

"One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway. We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking. The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality."

"Final authority in the spiritual world does not tend to come from any kind of agenda success but from some kind of suffering. Insecurity and impermanence are the best spiritual teachers."

"True masters deconstruct as well as reconstruct."

"Our religious institutions are not giving very many men access to credible encounters with the holy or even with their own wholeness. We largely give men mandates, signposts, scaffolding and appealing images that tend to create religious identity and boundaries, but from the outside."

"With improved historical records, and easier access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another."

"Our wounds are the only thing humbling enough to break our attachment to our false self."

"If we seek spiritual heroism ourselves, the old ego is just back in control under a new name. There would not really be any change at all, but only disguise, just bogus self - improvement on our own terms."

"Pain and suffering that are not transformed are usually projected onto others."

"I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you."

"Christians are usually sincere and well - intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast - food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of 'Christian' countries that tend to be as consumer - oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else - and often more so, I'm afraid."

"It is hard to hear God, but it is even harder not to hear God. The pain one brings upon oneself by living outside of evident reality is a greater and longer - lasting pain than the brief pain of facing it head on."

"Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new self in God."

"You cannot contain evil by shaming it, or making people feel guilty, but only by revealing it toward it is, and then seeing the good as better."

"All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain."

"If our love of God does not directly influence, and even change, how we engage in the issues of our time on this earth, I wonder what good religion is."

"If the mystery of the Trinity is the template of all reality, what we have in the Trinitarian God is the perfect balance between union and differentiation, autonomy and mutuality, identity and community."

"Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God."