Our culture is so fixated on dying and going to heaven when the whole Scripture is about heaven coming to earth.

If you want to know who God is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what it means to be human, look at Jesus. If you want to know what love is, look at Jesus. If you want to know what grief is, look at Jesus. And go on looking until you’re not just a spectator, but you’re actually part of the drama which has him as the central character.

But if Christians don’t get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?

The very success of science in showing us how deeply ordered the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause for that order.

God to me is a mystery, but is the explanation for the miracle of existence – why there is something rather than nothing.

The heart of monotheism is that God, who is outside history, is the guarantor of meaning.

God loves an enquiring mind, a fact that has been a great encouragement to me in my study of mathematics and the history and philosophy of science.

Our own silence is necessary if God is to hear us.

Something deeper begins to attract us, and this something deeper is more spacious, alluring, and silent than the tediously dramatic opera scores of inner chatter.

Something is being born of the practice of silence, and this leads us into Silence itself.

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.

Reach beyond your grasp. Your goals should be grand enough to get the best of you.

Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation.

Above all trust in the slow work of God. Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give our Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

Remain true to yourself but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.

The age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth. The more scientifically I regard the world, the less can I see any possible biological future for it except in the active consciousness of its unity.

“Sanctity has to do with gratitude. To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less.”

“Every choice is a thousand renunciations. To choose one thing is to turn one’s back on many others.”

“Faith is not a question of basking in the certainty that there is a God and that God is taking care of us. Many of us are never granted this kind of assurance. Certitude is not the real substance of faith. Faith is a way of seeing things.”

“We prepare to die by pushing ourselves to love less narrowly. In that sense, readying ourselves for death is really an ever-widening entry into life.”

“The incarnation began with Jesus and it has never stopped . . . God takes on flesh so that every home becomes a church, every child becomes the Christ-child, and all food and drink become a sacrament. God’s many faces are now everywhere, in flesh, tempered and turned down, so that our human eyes can see him.”