Quotes about Eternity

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.

God did not just start talking to us with the Bible or the church or the prophets. Do we really think that God had nothing at all to say for 13.7 billion years, and started speaking only in the latest nanosecond of geological time? Did all history prior to our sacred texts provide no basis for truth or authority? Of course not. The radiance of the Divine Presence has been glowing and expanding since the beginning of time, before there were any human eyes to see or know about it.

The problem is solved. Now go and utterly enjoy all remaining days. Not only is it "Always Advent," but every day can now be Christmas because the one we thought we were just waiting for has come once and for all.

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.

Love is the one eternal thing and takes away your foundational fear of death. This is very good stuff.

Only with a notion of the Preexisting Christ can we recover where this Jesus was "coming from" and where he is leading us—which is precisely into the "bosom of the Trinity" (John 1:18). "I shall return to take you with me, so that where I am you also may be" (John 14:3), the Christ has promised. That might just be the best and most succinct description of salvation there is in the whole New Testament.

Thomas Merton, say it, as he so often does: "A door opens in the center of our being, and we seem to fall through it into immense depths, which although they are infinite—are still accessible to us. All eternity seems to have become ours in this one placid and breathless contact.

love, not death, is the eternal thing.

The concern was about getting the beginning right, and then life and eternity would take care of themselves. We have been preoccupied with getting the end right, for some reason.

The pressed clay or "dust" of Adam has then become the immortal diamond that is Christ.

It's heaven all the way to heaven. And it's hell all the way to hell. Not later, but now.

What was God up to in those first moments of creation? Was God totally invisible before the universe began? Or is there even such a thing as "before"? Why did God create at all? What was God's purpose in creating? Is the universe itself eternal? Or is the universe a creation in time as we know it—like Jesus himself?