Images of God

$3 Worth of God

I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please, not enough to explode my soul or disturb my sleep, but just enough to equal a cup of warm milk or a snooze in the sunshine. I don’t want enough of him to make me love a black man or pick beets with a migrant. I want ecstasy, not transformation; I want warmth of the womb, not a new birth. I want a pound of the Eternal in a paper sack. I would like to buy $3 worth of God, please.

- Wilbur Rees
Quoted in Leadership, Vol. 4, No. 1
 

The Imprint of God’s Fingers

It is not you who shapes God, it is God who shapes you. If then you are the work of God, await the hand of the artist Who does all things in due season. Offer God your heart, soft and tractable, And keep the form in which the artist has fashioned you. Let your clay be moist, Lest you grow hard and lose the imprint of God’s fingers.

- Irenaeus
Quoted in Shalem News (www.shalem.org)
 

All of our actions either affirm or deny God's image in others.

Isabel Anders
 

The Holy Whisper

Life is meant to be lived from a Center, a divine Center. Each one of us can live such a life of amazing power and peace and serenity, of integration and confidence and simplified multiplicity, on one condition—that is, if we really want to. There is a divine Abyss within us all, a holy Infinite Center, a Heart, a Life who speaks in us and through us to the world. We have all heard this holy whisper at times.

- Thomas R. Kelly
A Testament of Devotion
 

Gentle God

God is breathing gently, God never hurries, Is never anxious or pressing, God just waits, Breathing gently upon us With great tenderness Until we look to God - And, knowingly, Nod.

- Edwina Gateley
I Hear a Seed Growing
 

Rowing Toward God

It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making the thick darkness a swaddling band for the sea, God ‘set bars and doors’ and said, ‘Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.’ But have we come even that far? Have we rowed out to the thick darkness, or are we all playing pinochle in the bottom of the boat?

- Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
 

Only One Bench

Holiness occurs in the course of life—or never. You simply open to God here and now. In other words, you don’t view life from two different benches, separating life into where God is and where God is not. There is only one bench, one view. All is holy.

- Sue Monk Kidd
God’s Joyful Surprise
 

Holy Spirit

Holy Spirit, giving life to all life, moving all creatures, root of all things, washing them clean, wiping out their mistakes, healing their wounds, you are our true life, luminous, wonderful, awakening the heart from its ancient sleep.

- Hildegard of Bingen translated by Stephen Mitchell