Quotes about Growth

Shadow work is humiliating work, but properly so. If you do not eat such humiliations with regularity and make friends with … all those who reveal to you and convict you of your own denied faults…, you will certainly remain in the first half of life forever.

Going somewhere good means having to go through and with the bad, and being unable to hold ourselves above it or apart from it.

In this negative frame, the quickest ticket to heaven, enlightenment, or salvation is "unworthiness" itself, or at least a willingness to face our own smallness and incapacity.

If you realize that there is a further journey, you might do the warm-up act quite differently, which would better prepare you for what follows.

for Action and Contemplation puts it this way: "The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better." I

Without an evolutionary worldview, Christianity does not really understand, much less foster, growth or change. Nor does it know how to respect and support where history is heading.

You surrender your need to control your partner, and finally the relationship blossoms. Yet each time it is a choice—and each time it is a kind of dying.

Of course, clergy cannot talk about a further journey if they have not gone on it themselves.

This needed work is indeed "spiritual warfare," as the desert monks called it, since it takes conscious and sustained struggle to be aware of the shadow self—which only takes ever more subtle disguises the "holier" you get.

Far too many people just keep doing repair work on the container itself and never "throw their nets into the deep" (John 21:6)

So God, life, and destiny have to loosen the loyal soldier's grasp on your soul, which up to now has felt like the only "you" that you know and the only authority that there is. Our loyal solider normally begins to be discharged somewhere between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-five, if it happens at all; before that it is usually mere rebellion or iconoclasm.

but I do believe that the only way out of deep sadness is to go with it and through it.