Quotes about Discovery

Each generation has to appropriate its deepest beliefs for itself. We used to say it this way: "God has no grandchildren." Each generation must itself be realigned with God and discover the mystery for itself.

It seems that in the spiritual world, we do not really find something until we first lose it, ignore it, miss it, long for it, choose it, and personally find it again--but now on a new level.

In the end, we do not so much reclaim what we have lost as discover a significantly new self in and through the process. Until we are led to the limits of our present game plan and find it insufficient, we will not search out or find the real source, the deep well, or the constantly flowing stream.

To pray is to build your own house. To pray is to discover that Someone else is within your house. To pray is to recognize that it is not your house at all.

God has no grandchildren. God only has children," as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself. If not, we just react to the previous generation, and often overreact. Or we conform, and often overconform. Neither is a positive or creative way to move forward.

To have a spiritual life is to recognize early on that there is always a similarity and coherence between the seer and the seen, the seekers and what they are capable of finding. You will seek only what you have partially already discovered and seen within yourself as desirable. Spiritual cognition is invariably re-cognition.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it. So

Am I willing to walk into the wilds of my interior life without knowing what I'll find?

In Paul's story we find the archetypal spiritual pattern, wherein people move from what they thought they always knew to what they now fully recognize. The pattern reveals itself earlier in the Torah when Jacob "wakes from his sleep" on the rock at Bethel and says, in effect, "I found it, but it was here all the time! This is the very gate of heaven" (Genesis 28:16—17).

The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find "the pearl of great price" that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell.

From eighteen to fifty-five was the unfolding. Then, when it happened at fifty-five, they knew what they were born for. When that moment comes, it is great and it is all synchronicity. We know then that grace is at work and we are not manufacturing our own lives.