GERALD VANN

If you say that the history of the Church is a long succession of scandals, you are telling the truth, though if that is all you say, you are distorting the truth.

To help all created things, that is the measure of all our responsibility; to be helped by all, that is the measure of our hope.

The person who knows a great deal about things but has never learnt to see, tends to be assertive; those who have once lost their hearts to a blade of grass or a glowworm and sensed God's omnipresence within them are at least on the road to reverence.

Nothing is more depressing and more illogical than aggressive Christianity.

How terrible when people are led to believe, or left to believe, that once they are in love they have nothing to do but live happily ever after, they have nothing further to learn.

If you see things as in eternity, you are less a prey to the pain of their passing, and so you can learn the more easily not to clutch at them as they pass... you learn to be reverent and not proudly possessive.

Some people think that prayer just means asking for things, and if they fail to receive exactly what they asked for, they think the whole thing is a fraud.

Worship is not part of the Christian life, it is the Christian life

If you say that the history of the Church is a long succession of scandals, you are telling the truth, though if that is all you say, you are distorting the truth.

To help all created things, that is the measure of all our responsibility; to be helped by all, that is the measure of our hope.

Some people think that prayer just means asking for things, and if they fail to receive exactly what they asked for, they think the whole thing is a fraud.

Nothing is more depressing and more illogical than aggressive Christianity.

Worship is not part of the Christian life, it is the Christian life

How terrible when people are led to believe, or left to believe, that once they are in love they have nothing to do but live happily ever after, they have nothing further to learn.

If you see things as in eternity, you are less a prey to the pain of their passing, and so you can learn the more easily not to clutch at them as they pass... you learn to be reverent and not proudly possessive.

The person who knows a great deal about things but has never learnt to see, tends to be assertive; those who have once lost their hearts to a blade of grass or a glowworm and sensed God's omnipresence within them are at least on the road to reverence.