The true saint burns grace like a 747 burns fuel on takeoff.
That's what the shaman said. He didn't know what he was up against. He didn't expect the strength and weight and evil intensity of this spirit, this "entity," as he called it. The same way the priest in an exorcism has to take on the spirit.
My dad... was in the military, a drill sergeant, when he was a preacher. You know how some Christians really get into church and become very radical? Imagine him as a radical and a drill sergeant. It was intense.
Our task is to live our personal communion with Christ with such intensity as to make it contagious.
Our church was a very spiritual church, and we were a very chosen people. The body was small, but the spirit was intense and very evident to anyone who passed by or came in.
Men and women who are used of GOD, if I had only a few words to describe them, they are the passionate-weak, they are the violently-desperate.
When you become a Christian, all of a sudden you start to live on this rapture mentality, like tomorrow the world's going to end. You live in that frenzy. We come from the streets, so the mentality was like, 'Yo, dude, what's up? You're not going to tell me I'm not down with God. What's up!'
I'm a religious fanatic? Yes, I am, actually.
When I was little I went to a Baptist Church with my grandmother. My earliest memories were of her falling out in the middle of the floor and they had to cover her with a white sheet. Every time we went to church it was scary. The music would start playing, and then everybody would start running and shouting and hollering and screaming.
People simplify 'Apollonian' into 'mild', and 'calm', and 'cool'. But 'Apollonian' and 'Dionysian' are two sides of one coin--a nun kneeling in her cell, holding perfectly still, can be in ecstacy more frenzied than any priestess of Pan Priapus celebrating the vernal equinox.
Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot form their faces like barbedlightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expressioncould easily be mistaken for ferocity.
He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor.
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
Real zeal is standing still and letting God be a bonfire in you.
The spirit must be felt so intensely that it has power to call others in passing, for it must pass, not stop in the pictures.
One of the things you will notice about the book of Mark is that if you read through it in one setting, you will be breathing hard at the end. Literally, Mark has set up this book in a way that it is almost like several snapshots of Jesus Christ.
Ministers should not pray so loud, and long, as to exhaust the strength. It is not necessary to weary the throat and lungs in prayer. God's ear is ever open to hear the heart-felt petitions of his humble servants, and he does not require them to wear out the organs of speech in addressing him.
Otis Redding, his voice, there was something spiritual and unworldly and at the same time, very deeply connected with the human connection and the way one feels about life in general, love, life, and everything, really.
A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
We have to transpose ourselves into this impressionability of mind, into this sensitivity to tears and spiritual repentance, intothis susceptibility, before we can judge how colorful and intensive life was then.
God requires to be represented by a fiery Church... two things are intolerable to Him-insincerity and lukewarmness.
Some preachers ought to put more fire into their sermons or more sermons into the fire.
It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.
