personal connection with the divine Quotes

Prayer is not learned in a classroom but in the closet.

We learn to pray by praying. One can devote countless hours to examining the experiences of others, but nothing penetrates the human heart as does a personal fervent prayer and its heaven sent response.

And the purpose of our creation, in which all our subsidiary purposes fit, is to be in a personal relationship to God, in communion with him, in love, by choice, the creature before the Creator.

God is a feeling experience and not a believing experience. If your religion is a believing experience ... then that's not truly God.

....If you are guided toward a faith, use it as a stepping stone to God, not as a barrier between yourself and God's other children or as a tower to hold you aloft from others. If you are not guided toward a faith (or even if you are) seek God in the silence - seek within.

I wouldn't say that I'm overly religious, but I have a pretty good relationship with my spiritual being.

My spiritual life is an interesting thing. It's pretty private. I was raised Catholic in the Baptist Bible belt, so my spirituality was challenged and very much a private thing and it continues to be.

the biggest threat to the religious experience may well come from organized religion itself.

What is religion? I want to remove the chaff from the grain. For me it is not what it is for the common people. If you take away certain social customs, they think you have taken away religion. For me it means purifying it.

Prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness.

We are driven to confess that we actually care more for religion than we do for religious theories and ideas: and in merely making that distinction between religion and its doctrine-elements, have we not already relegated the latter to an external and subordinate position? Have we not asserted that "religion itself" has some other essence or constitution than mere idea or thought?

Help" is a prayer that is always answered. It doesn't matter how you pray--with your head bowed in silence, or crying out in grief, or dancing. Churches are good for prayer, but so are garages and cars and mountains and showers and dance floors. Years ago I wrote an essay that began, "Some people think that God is in the details, but I have come to believe that God is in the bathroom.

I think there's a lot that's beautiful about religion and very inspiring, obviously, but I do think that God needs to be rescued from religion actually.

Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.

Worship isn't an event to attend & watch. It's a lifestyle to be lived.

The life of prayer is so great and various there is something in it for everyone. It is like a garden which grows everything, from alpines to potatoes.