Quotes about Transformation

Francis of Assisi was a master of making room for the new and letting go of that which was tired or empty.

humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living.

you never think yourself into a new way of living. You invariably live yourself into a new way of thinking.

To finally surrender ourselves to healing, we must have three spaces opened within us—and all at the same time: our opinionated head, our closed-down heart, and our defensive and defended body. That is the work of spirituality—and it is work.

Privatized salvation never accumulates into corporate change because it attracts and legitimates individualists to begin with.

As my father, Saint Francis, put it, "If you have once faced the great death, the second death can do you no harm.

unlearning, letting go, surrendering, serving others, and not the language of self-development—which often lurks behind our popular notions of "salvation.

In the Franciscan school, God did not need to be paid in order to love and forgive God's own creation for its failures. Love cannot be bought by some "necessary sacrifice"; if it could, it would not and could not work its transformative effects.

experience as "mercy, within mercy, within mercy."6 There's always a lot of anxiety and insecurity in letting go of your current images of yourselves and your images of God.

We are glad when someone survives, and that surely took some courage and effort. But what are you going to do with your now resurrected life? That is the heroic question.

One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. —CARL JUNG, THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE

it is very surprising to me that so many Christians who read the Scriptures do not see this. Yet maybe they cannot answer a second call because they have not yet completed the first task. Unless you build your first house well, you will never leave it. To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.