on God

“Love, in a world where carpenters get resurrected, anything is possible.”
Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katherine Hepburn) in “The Lion in Winter” (Avco Embassy Pictures, 1968)

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), quoted in the independent documentary film “God in the Box”, screened at the Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis, 2011

I think that if ever a mortal heard the voice of God it would be in a garden at the cool of the day.
F. Frankfort Moore, A Garden of Peace

Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned.
Clive Staples Lewis

He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples.  They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.  Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore.
Isaiah 2:4 (TNIV) (also Micah 4:3)

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
Micah 6:8 (NRSV)

The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.
Numbers 6:24-26

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
Mahatma Ghandi

If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.
Jewish proverb

The hero takes up the challenge that is offered, and immediately the gods rush to his side to help.
Joseph Campbell

The rivers are full of crocodile nasties, and He who made kittens put snakes in the grass.  He’s a lover of life but a player of pawns…
Jethro Tull, “Bungle in the Jungle” (War Child, 1974)

People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

When I forget how talented God is, I look to the sea.
Whoopi Goldberg

Many an atheist is a believer without knowing it just as many a believer is an atheist without knowing it. You can sincerely believe there is no God and live as though there is. You can sincerely believe there is a God and live as though there isn’t.
Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC’s of Faith (2004)

God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.
St. Augustine, Enchiridion: On Faith, Hope, and Love, VIII.27

Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?  … On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions.  Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?  The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning.  It is madness to wear ladies straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.  Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.  For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole”, in Teaching a Stone to Talk (HarperCollins, 1982)

God has it right, and the rest of us are just guessing.
Rich Mullins, Indiana singer and songwriter

O, taste and see that the Lord is good.
Psalm 34.8, Valaam Chant (traditional Russian) sung by the Choir of Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, San Francisco

God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity, that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him.  God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars.  It is a life with God that demands these things.
Experience has taught the race that if knowledge of God is the end, then these habits of life are not the means but the condition in which the means operates. You do not have to do these things; not at all.  God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot.  You do not have to do these things – unless you want to know God.  They work on you, not on him.
You do not have to sit outside in the dark.  If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary.  But the stars neither require or demand it.
Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole”, in Teaching a Stone to Talk (HarperCollins, 1982)

… the Bible is saying to us the whole time, don’t think that God is as simple as you are. He’s in places you would never expect him to be. And you know, we lose a bit of that in English translation because, when Moses at the burning bush says to God, “Who are you?” God says to him three words: “Hayah asher hayah.” And those words are mistranslated in English as “I am that which I am.” But in Hebrew, it means “I will be who or how or where I will be,” meaning don’t think you can predict me. I am a God who is going to surprise you. One of the ways God surprises us is by letting a Jew or a Christian discover the trace of God’s presence in a Buddhist monk or a Sikh tradition of hospitality or the graciousness of Hindu life. You know, don’t think we can confine God into our categories. God is bigger than religion.
Lord Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, quoted on Krista Tippett’s “Being” episode “The Dignity of Difference”, November 11, 2010