Mature folks with
deep life experiences will understand its power.
The devout are not faithful, for the most part, because they read about God in a book, or have never got beyond a slavish innocent reliance on what their elders told them, but out of
deep life experience.
Not exact matches
«I highly recommend setting aside some time for a Think Week if you're looking to go
deep in a particular area, facing a big decision and / or
experiencing a
life transition,» Schlafman concludes, stressing that you shouldn't feel wedded to any particular duration or location.
The incident tore at
deep wounds that were both specific to Ferguson, Missouri, where Brown
lived with his mother, but also spoke to the
experience of being black, young, and vulnerable in America.
HAWAI'I Magazine seeks to bring Hawai`i's beauty, places, culture, food, people and stories to
life in a way that makes the visitors»
experience deeper, richer and more authentic.
She easily connects with audiences, and isn't afraid to go
deep with people and draw upon on
life experiences and business expertise to drive the message home.
Hallett has extensive
experience in the
life insurance space, with
deep relationships within our partner carriers.
The authors put the case this way: «Think about the
deepest joy you
experience in
life — it doesn't typically come from thinking about how great you are.
His songs seem to emerge from
lives lived knee -
deep in the guts and grime of everyday
experience.
Never in any ordinary, non-mystical believer's
life is there a
deeper experience of being gripped and converted, as Jonah turned around and returned to his mission.
We decided that we were going to do our best to model for others how to grieve: how to
experience deep sadness and loss; trust God; worship God; find beauty in
life again.
Everything we read in the Bible surely has to absorbed and considered in line with our
experience of God — for those of us who have travelled with God for a long time this
experience (I hope) bears out a loving, caring, intimately involved Father whose example in the
life of Jesus is all about love — tough, body - taking - the - brunt - of - whatever -
life - throws, with the
deeper soul fixed to God's promises of what lies beyond.
There is little appreciation for the nature of conversion as an ongoing process made up of many steps forward and backward along the way; or, for marriage as only one option among a couple, or even a few, equally viable, equally «holy» alternatives for
living out one's God - given vocation... I don't have to dig too
deep into my own
experience to recognize the hang - ups that this glorification of marriage and a one - time conversion
experience can foster.
Sports superiority is obviously a light example, but on the
deepest religious questions about
life, we are bound to
experience similar disagreements, aren't we?
If this quality of relationships is
experienced, to some degree, part of the time, then a
deep - level religious attitude toward persons and
life will be caught by the children and reaffirmed in the adults.
These were the sorts of verses that many self - righteous and judgmental Christians quoted at me when I was
experiencing some of the
deep pain and struggles in my
life.
The symbols, concepts, images, stories and myths of Christian origin, which remain deeply embedded in the fabric of western culture, will continue to offer the raw material from which people form their understanding of
life, develop their capacity for spirituality and
experience satisfaction at the
deepest levels.
Submitting himself almost as a pilgrim to the common
experience of immigrants to Israel, he succeeded in mastering the Hebrew culture, and more gradually in cultivating a
deep familiarity with Israeli academic and intellectual
life.
I agree with you that our society does seem to recognise «
deep down... that family
life is good, beautiful and true» and it is certainly my
experience that «there is something special and uncompromising about the Catholic vision of the family».
If, however, instead of correct belief about God's self - revelation in Christ,
experience of the
living God present by the power of the Spirit in Jesus Christ is at the heart of Christian fellowship, then the Christian community becomes a circle of friends who strengthen each other in their search for
deeper awareness of divine reality and love.
What is happening is that
deeper levels of human
experience and new styles of personal
life are given public expression.
They had inculcated a
deep sense of sin and a conscious need of personal salvation; they had overpassed national and racial lines and had made religious faith a matter of individual conviction; they had emphasized faith in immortality and the need of assurance concerning it; they had bound their devotees together in mystical societies of brethren fired with propagandist zeal; and they had accentuated the interior nature of religious
experience in terms of an, indwelling Presence, through whom human
life could be «deicized.»
This belief grows out of a profound
experience of the worth of existence, a
deep - seated affirmation of
life as worthwhile.
Not everybody can personally undergo what John Howard Griffin did, and wrote about in Black Like Me: take medication to darken the skin, and shave the head, so as to be able to approximate the
experience of a black
living in the
Deep South for seven weeks.
Yes, he was in the midst of his struggle to dedicate his
life to the
living God, in the passionate storm of his
deepest love relationship, and in utter despair as he
experienced Germany's ruin at the end of the First World War.
He shares his story in the book, explaining how he struggled with
living according to the Gospel as a gay person, and how he
experiences deep loneliness and shame in nearly all of his relationships.
And our nature being thus rooted in failure, is it any wonder that theologians should have held it to be essential, and thought that only through the personal
experience of humiliation which it engenders the
deeper sense of
life's significance is reached?
But if it is such we must remember always that our Christian ancestors were using what for them was the best available wording to express their, and our,
deepest conviction when we are true to the continuing witness of
experience of
life in Christ.
Experiences of grief — or even experiences of extreme joy or ecstasy — shatter the willing suspension of our doubts and raise questions about the deeper meanin
Experiences of grief — or even
experiences of extreme joy or ecstasy — shatter the willing suspension of our doubts and raise questions about the deeper meanin
experiences of extreme joy or ecstasy — shatter the willing suspension of our doubts and raise questions about the
deeper meanings of
life.
It is obvious to me that I altered my brain significantly after years of intense /
deep prayer and meditation and that as a result of these contributory
experiences I was a high - functioning schizophrenic for a good portion of my
life — there were things going on in my biology which predisposed me to being a depressive and a high - functioning schizophrenic but engaging in intense /
deep prayer and meditation was only exacerbating this problem by altering my state of consciousness which precipitated the psychotic symptoms and psychic phenomena which I
experienced.
Unless one bleaches the debate of its
living doctrinal substance — and the Rav explicitly states that requiring men of faith to bracket their
deepest experiences constitutes unacceptable censorship — it inevitably raises questions about atonement, justification, faith and works, and so on.
William A. Johnson believes that the search for transcendence is prompted by the desire for a «
deeper and more profound meaning of
life and for a sensitizing and intensification of human
experience» (The Search for Transcendence [Harper - Colophon, «974]» p. 1).
Those who look for a
deeper understanding of god and or spirituality and or
life itself in their religious participation — and do not find the knowledge they seek there — will continue to look until they find what it is that best meets their notion or
experience of a
deeper connection to
life as it is and can be — finding it within and within just like all others.
It is far more a hope than an attainment; for most people it is unreal and frustrating; for all, its
deepest experience lies beyond this earthly
life.
We may admit that most guilt feelings which disturb the
deeper level of the soul are misplaced, that they are a holdover in mature
life from
experiences in childhood which are irrelevant to the moral
experience of the adult.
It is important to note that these themes not only mark a
life that succeeds in being faithful — which is what it is all about — but these are also the ingredients we need in our
lives in order to achieve a
deep sense of satisfaction and meaning, to
experience joy in the wonders of the world, and — dare I say it?
The stories are usually about famous people or the enduring stuff of universal
experience, but they can not satisfy the congregation's
deepest longing, which is to explore its own
life before God in as concrete a fashion as possible.
If this inward
experience is
deep and genuine, his
life is marked outwardly by an unselfish concern for others and desire to help them in any way that is possible, by courage in making hard moral decisions, by an integrity which goes much
deeper than conventional honesty in the eyes of the law.
The kind of phenomenological method which is often advocated is of a non-metaphysical type; that is, it is interested in description, in terms of how
living religion, as a matter of
deepest intuitive observation, effectively operates in human
experience in the world where men
live.
«In speaking here of knowledge, the Bible indicates the
deepest essence of the reality of married
life... Becoming «one flesh», the man and the woman
experience in a particular way the meaning of their body.
The emphasis on religious
experience means also that in seeking to commend Christianity to others I have tried to start from people's often half - glimpsed awareness of a
deeper dimension to
life.
I speak with no wisdom beyond the
experiences of my
life as they have interacted with my upbringing, my education, and my
deepest commitments.
Such «religious intuitions» are the «somewhat exceptional elements of our conscious
experience» that Whitehead seeks to elucidate as evidence for God's consequent
experience of the world.9 Only a
living person
experiencing a whole series of divine aims, sensitive to the way in which these shift, grow, and develop in response to our changing circumstances can become aware of their source as dynamic and personal, meeting our needs and concerns.10 Jesus, full of the Spirit, knew God personally in this intimate way, until these aims were taken from him in the hour of his
deepest need, when he
experienced being forsaken by God on the cross.
One minister wrote of his loneliness as a clergyman: «I have driven in the dark in my little silver Accord on more than one occasion, realizing that there is no one within 50 miles of where I
live with whom I can share my
deepest pain or joy, no place where I can
experience the quiet exultation and peace of complete acceptance.»
Indeed one might say that liturgical worship by and large speaks not so much to the conscious attention of its participants as to those profound and almost unconsciously
experienced areas of human
life where men
live in terms of feeling - tone, of unutterable emotion, and of profound subconscious relationships, with an almost intuitive awareness of the «more» which is
deep down in the structure of reality.
In summary, the virtues of organized religions include but are by no means limited to the following: they give their adherents something solid against which to rebel; they allow one to see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants; they insist on the primacy of
lived experience; they work against illusion and historical insularity; they point to the power of the collective and the merits of
deep diversity; and they are capable of the kind of mobilization that can transform the world.
I would not for a minute wish to deny that we are too often motivated by an obsessive desire for power and control, and dominated by a narrow and calculating rationality which can not even acknowledge the
deeper values of human
life and
experience, and that such attitudes may contribute to the coming of one form or another of global catastrophe.
In describing and accounting for the
lives of the Religious Right, which we define simply as religious conservatives with a considerable involvement in political activity, the book and the series tell the story primarily by focusing on leading episodes in the movement's history, including, but not limited to, the groundwork laid by Billy Graham in his relationships with presidents and other prominent political leaders; the resistance of evangelical and other Protestants to the candidacy of the Roman Catholic John F. Kennedy; the rise of what has been called the New Right out of the ashes of Barry Goldwater's defeat in 1964; a battle over sex education in Anaheim, California, in the mid-1960's; a prolonged cultural war over textbooks in West Virginia in the early 1970's — and that is a battle that has been fought less violently in community after community all over the country; the thrill conservative Christians felt over the election of a «born - again» Christian to the Presidency in 1976 and the subsequent disappointment they
experienced when they found out that Jimmy Carter was, of all things, a Democrat; the rise of the Moral Majority and its infatuation with Ronald Reagan; the difficulty the Religious Right has had in dealing with abortion, homosexuality and AIDS; Pat Robertson's bid for the presidency and his subsequent launching of the Christian Coalition; efforts by Dr. James Dobson and Gary Bauer to win a «civil war of values» by changing the culture at a
deeper level than is represented by winning elections; and, finally, by addressing crucial questions about the appropriate relationship between religion and politics or, as we usually put it, between church and state.
Yet we must admit that through their work we have learned to take very seriously the total biblical story, reading with
deeper insight the truths which are there stated not in propositions but in the events of history and in the response made to those events in the
experience of men and women immersed in the ordinary affairs of daily
life.
Yet humanity has a
deep allergy to this connection and its challenges and it is only when we
experience the full force of being connected first to God that His spirit flows into us in a new way and enables us to
live Love's way.