“Creating and holding space for discernment is profoundly counter-cultural work. We live in a culture that too often regards us as empty vessels to be filled with someone else’s knowledge, someone else’s agenda, someone else’s truth… Spiritual discernment is about trusting the fact that all of us are made in God’s image and all of us have access to God’s call for our lives.”
“To you who are seekers, to you, young and old who have toiled all night and caught nothing, but who want to launch out into the deeps and let down your nets for a draught, I want to speak as simply, as tenderly, as clearly as I can. For God can be found.”
“We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt.”
“If we are sensitive, we find that everything that happens to us, good or bad, can help us to build a vision of the meaning of life. We can be helped to be sensitive by reading the Bible and being open to experience of nature, music, books, painting, sport or whatever our particular interest may be. It is in and through all things that we hear God speaking to us. But I do not think I am alone in my certainty that it’s in my relationships with people that the deepest religious truths are most vividly disclosed.”
“Mind the light of God in your consciences, which will show you all deceit; dwelling in it, guides out of the many things into one spirit, which cannot lie, nor deceive. Those who are guided by it, are one.”
“Inner silence, calming the agitations of our hearts and minds, letting go of all that is stubborn and grasping, is essentially an expression of the love of truth. To be dispassionate, not to let one’s own needs or prejudices or emotions color one’s actions, is essentially to put truth before everything else. To love truth in this way is to love God, who is Truth. Thus the practice of inner silence is the same as the love of God.”
O Spirit of that early day, /
So pure and strong and true, /
Be with us in the narrow way /
Our faithful fathers knew. /
Give strength the evil to forsake, /
The cross of Truth to bear, /
And love and reverent fear to make /
Our daily lives a prayer!
“Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts. Trust them as the leadings of God whose Light shows us our darkness and brings us to new life.”
“To see the failings of our friends, and think hard of them, without opening that which we ought to open, and still carry a face of friendship, this tends to undermine the foundation of true unity.”
“The spirit of Christ, by which we are guided, is not changeable, so as once to command us from a thing as evil and again to move unto it; and we do certainly know, and so testify to the world, that the spirit of Christ, which leads us into all Truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ, nor for the kingdoms of this world.”
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