"Once you see that your skin and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it. It preserves religion from any arrogance and denial."

"The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo ' even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future."

"We have been shown how to fight hate without becoming hate ourselves. We have been given a Companion and a Friend and not just a good idea. We have been given joy in the midst of failure, and not just a way of winning or being right."

"Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing."

"Seventy times seven' is a medicine for a healing community, not for a community with all the answers beforehand and all the appropriate punishments afterwards."

"You can unlock spiritual things only from within."

"Faith for Jesus is the opposite of anxiety. If you are anxious, if you are trying to control everything, if you are worried about many things, you don't have faith, according to Jesus. You do not trust that God is good and on your side. You're trying to do it all yourself, lift yourself up by your own bootstraps."

"Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you."

"Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future."

"Life is all about practicing for heaven.' p 101."

"Your heart has to be prepared ahead of time through faith and prayer and grace and mercy and love and forgiveness so you can keep your heart open in hell, when hell happens."

"In the second half of life, people have less power to infatuate you. But they also have much less power to control you or hurt you."

"Self - help courses will only help you if they teach you to pay attention to life itself."

"THE MALE JOURNEY t some point in time, a man needs to embark on a risky - journey. It's a necessary adventure that takes him into uncertainty, and it almost always involves some form of difficulty or failure. On this journey the man learns to trust God more than he trusts a sense of right and wrong or his own sense of self - worth."

"You ironically have to have a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while."

"If you do not acquire good training in detachment, you may attach to all the wrong things."

"Most Christian 'believers' tend to echo the cultural prejudices and worldviews of the dominant group in their country, with only a minority revealing any real transformation of attitudes or consciousness. It has been true of slavery and racism, classism and consumerism and issues of immigration and health care for the poor."

"Jesus was trying to present value of a life of vulnerability in which one would have practical and needed experience of the same. It would be a life without baggage, so one would learn to accept others and their culture instead of always carrying along our own country's assumptions and calling them the Gospel."

"A mystic doesn't say 'I believe. They say 'I know. A true mystic will ironically speak with that self - confidence but at the same time with a kind of humility. So when you see that combination of calm self - confidence, certitude, and humility all at the same time you have the basis for mysticism in general."

"How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?"

"When 'happiness' eludes us - as, eventually, it always will - we have the invitation to examine our programmed responses and to exercise our power to choose again."

"The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food."

"We do not handle suffering. Suffering handles us."

"People who have been initiated 'broke through in what felt like breaking down'."

"Those who are not true leaders will just affirm people at their own immature level."

"The human art form is in uniting fruitful activity with a contemplative stance, not one or the other, but always both at the same time."

"It's true all the time everywhere or it's not true! And that one truth is always Mystery."

"Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh."

"This seems to have been St. Augustine's very notion of 'memory, ' not just nostalgia for some past moment, but connecting past, present, and future in one complete contemplative knowing."

"Often it takes outer authority to send us on the path to our own inner authority."

"When I am not king, then THE Kingdom has its best chance of breaking through."

"Knowing without loving is frankly dangerous for the soul and for society. You'll critique most everything you encounter and even have the hubris to call this mode of reflexive cynicism 'thinking' (whereas it's really your ego's narcissistic reaction to the moment). You'll position things to quickly as inferior or superior, 'with me' or 'against me, ' and most of the time you'll be wrong."

"If we know our original blessing, we can easily handle our original sin. If we rest in a previous dignity, we can bear insults effortlessly. If you really know your name is on some eternal list, you can let go of the irritations on the small lists of time. Ultimate security allows you to suffer small insecurity without tremendous effort. If you are tethered at some center point, it is amazing how far out you can fly and not get lost."

"Men need men to keep their edges hot and clean, whereas women keep us warm and soft."

"A skilled listener can help people tap into their own wisdom."

"Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events."

"The theological virtue of hope is the patient and trustful willingness to live without closure, without resolution, and still be content and even happy because our Satisfaction is now at another level, and our Source is beyond ourselves."

"The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usual list of hot sins. God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything."

"If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage as if it were God."

"I would wonder if you could be a hero or heroine if you did not live in deep time, that is, Past, present, and future all at once."

"God created us for love, for union, for forgiveness and compassion and, yet, that has not been our storyline. That has not been our history."

"Whatever good, true, or perfect things we can say about humanity or creation, we can say of God exponentially. God is the beauty of creation and humanity multiplied to the infinite power."

"Men as a class appear to be 'at risk, ' maybe even at high risk."

"The cross solved our problem by first revealing our real problem, our universal pattern of scapegoating and sacrificing others. The cross exposes forever the scene of our crime."

"When we fail we are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us."

"People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place."