Sacred Encounter Quotes

When I was 17, I had an experience that I later learned could be called a 'mystical experience.' It was almost violent. No faces, voices, nothing like that. It is like the world burst and flamed into life all around me. That is not a great image, but it is as good as I will ever do.

How can finite man commune with an infinite God? To both Christians and Jews, God himself has made that possible by irrupting into the temporal world. To Christians, God became man in the Incarnation; to Jews, the God that spoke out of the fire on Mount Sinai gave his Torah.

In the act of worship itself, the experience of liberation becomes a constituent of the community's being . . . It is the power of God's Spirit invading the lives of the people, "building them up where they are torn down and propping them up on every leaning side".

Several people feel I have photographed God. May be.

What I am trying to say is that Jesus who incarnated God 2,000 years ago is mystically present and waiting to be discovered in EVERY person you and I encounter

Looking back over the years, I realize the Bible isn't magic, but it is corrective; it isn't an answer book, it is a living book; it isn't a fix-it book, it is relationship book. When I confront God's word, I am confronted; when I read God's word, it reads me; when I seek God's presence, He seeks me.

I wanted to say, "Hey, Pope Francis," but I cried like a baby. I was reduced to a very humble set of feelings, because it was not about what was said: There's a presence. That was a blessing for myself and my family and everyone there to be a part of that.

One of the most startling discoveries of my life was the realization that the Jesus that I love, the Jesus who died for me on Calvary, that Jesus, is waiting, mystically and wonderfully, in every person I meet. I find Jesus everywhere.

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

I believe in person to person; every person is Christ for me, and since there is only one Jesus, that person is only one person in the world for me at that moment.

Faith is caused by an encounter with something very real but which has extraordinary qualities which intimate the divine; the belief is due to an encounter which specially mirrors some divine quality.

I feel God when I find myself in a situation which spontaneously opens me to the larger reality that exists all around.

In worship, God imparts himself to us.

Prayer is simply coming into the presence of God. Because when you come into the presence of God, even the things you don't have matter a lot less.

I'll die young, but it's like kissing God.

We know the Lord makes His servants bold. The young boy Joseph who saw God the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, in a grove of trees was transformed into a spiritual giant.

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.

Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is made--no matter how indirectly--to numbers, proclamation is then and there made, that religion is not. He that finds God a sweet, enveloping presence, who shall dare to come in?

I want my work to create space where people can meet God, rather than give them something they can "apply" to their daily life.

I've never been one for religion, but yet I've never been what ye could call an unbeliever. What I say is, nothin' don't seem impossible once you've clapped eyes on a whale.

When we see all women as the divine mother and all men as the divine father, everyone you meet is sacred.

If we have never had the experience of taking our commonplace religious shoes off our commonplace religious feet, and getting rid of all the undue familiarity with which we approach God, it is questionable whether we have ever stood in his presence.

In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.

Reading the Bible can be like meeting someone you don't know who, oddly, somehow seems to know you deeply. It's uncanny.

The words were unexpected, but so incisively true. So much of prayer is like that - an encounter with a truth that has sunk to the bottom of the heart, that wants to be found, wants to be spoken, wants to be elevated into the realm of sacredness.