Quotes about Reconciliation

The best way to have the last word is to apologize.

When we speak quietly one to another things somehow get settled.

I once punched a bloke in the face for saying 'Hawk the Slayer' was rubbish, when what I should have said 'Dad, you're wrong.'

Whatever else we may say about it, the atonement fulfills the Jewish principle that only one who has been hurt can forgive. At Calvary, God chose to be hurt.

In my lifelong study of the Bible I have looked for an overarching theme, a summary statement of what the whole sprawling book is about. I have settled on this: "God gets his family back." From the first book to the last the Bible tells of wayward children and the tortuous lengths to which God will go to bring them home. Indeed, the entire biblical drama ends with a huge family reunion in the book of Revelation.

recall Gandhi's remark that if you take the principle "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" to its logical conclusion, eventually the whole world will go blind and toothless.

I could no more pray the Our Father, I could no longer call myself a Christian, if I refuse to forgive. Humanly speaking, I cannot do it, but God will give us his strength!

Jesus' death, he said, broke down the temple barriers, dismantling the dividing walls of hostility that had separated categories of people. Grace found a way.

A cease-fire between human beings depends upon a cease-fire with God.

The only hope for the future lay in an all-embracing attitude of forgiveness of the peoples who had been our enemies.

Ungrace causes cracks to fissure open between mother and daughter, father and son, brother and sister, between scientists, and prisoners, and tribes, and races. Left alone, cracks widen, and for the resulting chasms of ungrace there is only one remedy: the frail rope-bridge of forgiveness.

Along with Chesterton, I've had to take my place among those who acknowledge that we are what is wrong with the world. What is my snobbishness toward my childhood church, for instance, but an inverted form of the harsh judgment it showed me?