Mystery Of Faith Quotes & Sayings

The first holy truth in God 101 is that men and women of true faith have always had to accept the mystery of God's identity and love and ways. I hate that, but it's the truth. — Anne Lamott

Religion teaches that faith and transformation are the only ways of drawing near to God. Faith shows us that we are never alone. Transformation helps us to love the mystery. — Paulo Coelho

I own that it is a good deal of a mystery to me how judges, of all persons in the world, should put their faith in dicta. A brief experience on the bench was enough to reveal to me all sorts of cracks and crevices and loopholes in my own opinions when picked up a few months after delivery and reread with due contrition. — Benjamin N. Cardozo

Christ subjected himself to the law of the seed in the earth, to the law of rest and growth. He was "one of the children of the year," growing through rest, secret in his mothers womb, receiving the warmth of the sun through her, living the life of dependence, helplessness, littleness, darkness, and silence which, by a mystery of the Eternal Law, is the life of natural growth. — Caryll Houselander

Theology starts with a crisis, the very crisis of reality itself. The crisis is the fact that you live, that you have a life to live. ... The crisis is the very mystery of our existence and the yearning for there to be some kind of meaning to it. — Andrew Root

In my more lucid moments I know that God is right here, right now; that God is the luminous mystery at the heart of creation and that God is here in the joys and sorrows of the world. And I try to see God in everything and treat all life with reverence. — Sy Safransky

....let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end........Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith. — Robert Harris

Fear is an unavoidable element of the mortal condition. Creation in all its ravishing beauty, with its infinite baroque embellishments and subtle charms, with all the wonders that it offers from both the Maker and the made, with all its velvet mystery and with all the joy we receive from those we love here, so enchants us lack we lack the imagination, less than the faith, to envision an even more dazzling world beyond, and therefore even if we believe, we cling tenaciously to this existence, to sweet familiarity, fearful that all conceivable paradises will prove wanting by comparison. — Dean Koontz

Eusebius strongly challenges believers of all times on their approach to the events of history and of the Church in particular. He also challenges us: what is our attitude with regard to the Church's experiences? Is it the attitude of those who are interested in it merely out of curiosity, or even in search of something sensational or shocking at all costs? Or is it an attitude full of love and open to the mystery of those who know - through faith - that they can trace in the history of the Church those signs of God's love and the great works of salvation wrought by him? — Pope Benedict XVI

Words written fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, can have as much of this power today as ever they had it then to come alive for us and in us and to make us more alive within ourselves. That, I suppose, is the final mystery as well as the final power of words: That not even across great distances of time and space do they ever lose their capacity for becoming incarnate. And when these words tell of virtue and nobility, when they move closer to that truth and gentleness of spirit by which we become fully human, the reading of them is sacramental; and a library is as holy a place as any temple is holy because through the words which are treasured in it the Word itself becomes flesh again and again and dwells among us and within us, full of grace and truth.
Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember, in an essay called The Speaking and Writing of Words. — Frederick Buechner

I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus? — Madeleine L'Engle

The blood dried on his good hand, he passed his palm over her hair. It curled about his wrist and sprung back into displace as the breeze fluttered by. In the firelight, it was golden like the dandelions of which she'd spoken. The ones that had grown along the Franklin riverbank in late summer. The ones he had lost any faith in since he'd committed his first murder there. — V.S. Carnes

WHATEVER TAKES US to our edge, to our outer limits, leads us to the heart of life's mystery, and there we find faith. — Sharon Salzberg

How strange a scene is this in which we are such shifting figures, pictures, shadows. The mystery of our existence
I have no faith in any attempted explanation of it. It is all a dark, unfathomed profound. — Rutherford B. Hayes

Oments of transport, and of comfort, and of a bracing vastness of possibility. That was all there for me sometimes when I plunged my mind into the Bible's puzzles; and it was always there in the music of church. I wouldn't have said it this way then. But I would feel all the cells in my body as I sang hymns that connected my little life with the grandeur of the cosmos, the Christian drama across space and time. This was my earliest experience of breath and body, mind and spirit soaring together, alive to both mystery and reality, in kinship with others both familiar and unknown. That's one way I'd define the feeling of faith now. — Krista Tippett

Unlike Rosa, I can see no divine purpose behind the tangle of this existence, no ordering hand. It is all a mystery, or more accurately, a mess. There are no heroes or villains, no saviors or demons or angels. Only those who have died and those of us who, for whatever reason, have survived. None of this will keep me from believing in God. I believe in Him, I just don't know that I will ever have faith in Him. — Brady Udall

Families who lovingly accept the difficult trial of a child with special needs are greatly to be admired. They render the Church and society an invaluable witness of faithfulness to the gift of life. In these situations, the family can discover, together with the Christian community, new approaches, new ways of acting, a different way of understanding and identifying with others, by welcoming and caring for the mystery of the frailty of human life. People with disabilities are a gift for the family and an opportunity to grow in love, mutual aid and unity ... If the family, in the light of the faith, accepts the presence of persons with special needs, they will be able to recognize and ensure the quality and value of every human life, with its proper needs, rights and opportunities. — Pope Francis

He struggled with himself, too. I saw it
I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself. — Joseph Conrad

Mystery is a birthright of theology and faith, but you often do find religious people grasping for answers that shut things down and narrow what is possible. — Krista Tippett

Faith and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hands on the door-latch they die outside. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Eternal Trinity ... mystery deep as the sea, You could give me no greater gift than the gift of Yourself. For You are a fire ever burning and never consumed, which itself consumes all the selfish love that fills my being ... — St. Catherine Of Siena

Being a scientist requires having faith in uncertainty, finding pleasure in mystery, and learning to cultivate doubt. There is no surer way to screw up an experiment than to be certain of its outcome. — Stuart Firestein

One of the things I reject in our cultural divisions is the clash between faith and reason, and I would say the same about mystery and intellect. They are somehow mysteriously akin to each other. — Krista Tippett

Is it not an amazing thing, that men shall attempt to investigate the mystery of the redemption, when, at the same time that it is propounded to us as an article of faith solely, we are told that "the very angels have desired to pry into it in vain"? — Laurence Sterne

We can land on the "right" side of a controversy and keep that personified mystery of evil, called the devil, happy. So long as we cede the territory he is trying to occupy: that this moral concern deserves our attention more than all others, that one's position on this question determines one's belonging to or leaving a faith community. When we do this - and it is standard practice in many churches today - we stigmatize an entire group of people. We're not just singling "the issue" out. We are singling people out. This pleases the hater of humanity and grieves humanity's lover. — Ken Wilson

Imagination is glorious riches of mystery. — Lailah Gifty Akita

In the study of this membrane [the retina] I for the first time felt my faith in Darwinism (hypothesis of natural selection) weakened, being amazed and confounded by the supreme constructive ingenuity revealed not only in the retina and in the dioptric apparatus of the vertebrates but even in the meanest insect eye ... I felt more profoundly than in any other subject of study the shuddering sensation of the unfathomable mystery of life. — Santiago Ramon Y Cajal

Any man who is capable of being offended or insulted after the age of forty is either immature or a damned hypocrite." (Senator) — Leonard Holton

I think I'd be a million times more successful and more iconic if I was a singer in the '40s. I'd be allowed a level of mystery, and I think I'd suit that decade. — Paloma Faith

There is a power in the soul, quite separate from the intellect, which sweeps away or recognizes the marvelous, by which God is felt. Faith stands serenely far above the reach of the atheism of science. It does not rest on the wonderful, but on the eternal wisdom and goodness of God. The revelation of the Son was to proclaim a Father, not a mystery. No science can sweep away the everlasting love which the heart feels, and which the intellect does not even pretend to judge or recognize. — Frederick William Robertson

God reproduces and lives out His image in millions of ordinary people like us. It is a supreme mystery. We are called to bear that image as a Body because any one of us taken individually would present an incomplete image, one partly false and always distorted, like a single glass chip hacked from a mirror. But collectively, in all our diversity, we can come together as a community of believers to restore the image of God in the world. (In His Image, Philip Yancey and Dr. Paul Brand, p. 40) — Philip Yancey

There is a trick to this mystery of faith, I think. It is not a difficult concept, but in practice, it's harder than charging hell with water pistols. — Seth Haines

Poetry resists academic pretension, just as the mystery of religious faith evaporates on contact with dogma. — Patrick White

Many believe that the Vatican withheld important parts of the Third Secret, perhaps because its contents were too dangerous to reveal... — Peter J. Tanous

Why God should want and need us is a mystery. But it is true: otherwise he would not have created us and life would ultimately have no meaning for us. It is good to remember that in God the is a constancy, a consistency of attitude which never changes, irrespective of what we are or how we act: he never changes in is wanting us or needing us. — Basil Hume

I want neither a terrorist spirituality that keeps me in a perpetual state of fright about being in right relationship with my heavenly Father nor a sappy spirituality that portrays God as such a benign teddy bear that there is no aberrant behavior or desire of mine that he will not condone. I want a relationship with the Abba of Jesus, who is infinitely compassionate with my brokenness and at the same time an awesome, incomprehensible, and unwieldy Mystery. — Brennan Manning

What he'd like to say is that he's lived it, if not the entire breadth and depth of the Christian faith then certainly the central thrust of it. The mystery, the awe, that huge sadness and grief. Oh my people. — Ben Fountain

It is unclear from any modern critique of religion that anyone is in a position to disprove the reality of religious mystery expressed in the ancients' texts, even if we probe that mystery. Modern affirmations of such faith as well as denials of it are acts of faith. Yet these critiques of religion bring us closer to understanding the human side of divine-human relations. And this is what believers and nonbelievers, believing and unbelieving theologians and historians of religion share: a desire to understand the human side of the equation in religious traditions. — Mark S. Smith

Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty. — Brene Brown

Faith is required of thee, and a sincere life, not loftiness of intellect, nor deepness in the mysteries of God. — Thomas A Kempis

Because of our selfishness and inclination toward personal comfort and convenience, we'd rather not have to deal with constant change and uncertainty. We have difficulty reconciling the goodness of God with the mystery of his ways. — Chris Hodges

There is no way that we can understand it all. So the heart's response to that mystery is faith - a trust in the fundamental orderliness of the universe. — Ajahn Amaro

We must open our eyes to admire God who hides and at the same time reveals himself in things and introduces us into the realms of mystery ... we must be pure and simple like children, capable of admiring, being astonished, of marveling, and being enchanted by the divine gestures of love and closeness we witness. — Pope John Paul II

If I have the gift of the prophecy, and can fathom all mystery's and knowledge, and if I have faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. — Anonymous

In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. It is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid. — Andrew Sullivan

I understand what the Greeks meant by this: Love is an act of faith and its face should always be covered in mystery. Every moment should be lived with feeling and emotion because if we try to decipher it and understand it, the magic disappears. — Paulo Coelho

I'm really an inner spirit that only makes itself known through the music. A lot of people think I'm an introvert, or quiet and moody. I've even heard some people say that there's a certain mystery or darkness about me. I'm not that way. I'm just really into what I do. — Faith Evans

To truly live by faith, one must be willing to live in the tension of not knowing. Not understanding certain things. Not having all the answers. A person must walk humbly, bearing the mystery of a God who far surpasses any human capacity to fully define Him. — Jamie George

The Church is enamored with skilled orators and performers working the stage like a choreographed Broadway play. Others profess to talk about how Jesus ministry was mere story telling like through parables and that is why it was so effective. It is though there is some magical incantation, if we just repeat then things will happen. It is like the current modernity movement in the church, dumb it down that is the problem. If we just take away the mystery and otherness of God then we will know and see God, really? — Jonah Books

Our Father which art in heaven!' To appreciate this word of adoration aright, I must remember that none of the saints had in Scripture ever ventured to address God as their Father. The invocation places us at once in the centre of the wonderful revelation the Son came to make of His Father as our Father too. It comprehends the mystery of redemption - Christ delivering us from the curse that we might become the children of God. The mystery of regeneration - the Spirit in the new birth giving us the new life. And the mystery of faith - ere yet the redemption is accomplished or understood, the word is given on the lips of the disciples to prepare them for the blessed experience still to come. The words are the key to the whole prayer, to all prayer. It — Andrew Murray

Faith is not knowledge of what the mystery of the universe is, but the conviction that there is a mystery, and that it is greater than us. — David Wolpe

Whatever may be the mysteries of life and death, there is one mystery which the cross of Christ reveals to us, and that is the infinite and absolute goodness of God. Let all the rest remain a mystery so long as the mystery of the cross of Christ gives us faith for all the rest. — Charles Kingsley

I could feel Monika nudging me furiously at this point, but I refused to look at her. I wasn't feeling particularly reverent about my mother's deadness, or about the vicar, but I do despise that ghastly, 'You've got to laugh, haven't you?' approach to religious occasions. As a young man, I often goaded my believing friends with crudely logical questions about God. But as the years have passed, I have found myself hankering more and more for a little cosy voodoo in my life. Increasingly, I regard my atheism as a regrettable limitation. It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather, a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mystery: a species, in fact, of neurosis. There is no chance of my being converted, of course - it is far too late for that. But I wish it wasn't. — Zoe Heller

One can understand nothing of Christ without the mystery of the Trinity, nothing of the Church without faith in the divinity and humanity of Christ, nothing of the sacraments without the bridal mystery between Christian life without Christian faith. Thus, the present sermons revolve around the same center
the inexhaustible mystery of the one indivisible faith. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

THEOSOPHY, n. An ancient faith having all the certitude of religion and all the mystery of science. — Ambrose Bierce

Pico Iyer: And at some point, I thought, well, I've been really lucky to see many, many places. Now, the great adventure is the inner world, now that I've spent a lot of time gathering emotions, impressions, and experiences. Now, I just want to sit still for years on end, really, charting that inner landscape because I think anybody who travels knows that you're not really doing so in order to move around - you're traveling in order to be moved. And really what you're seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you're sleepwalking through your daily life. I thought, there's this great undiscovered terrain that Henry David Thoreau and Thomas Merton and Emily Dickinson fearlessly investigated, and I want to follow in their footsteps. — Krista Tippett

Our faith, therefore, is not in the words of the Bible. That would be fundamentalism. Our faith is in a person. Our faith is in the Lord who is revealing himself to us. He is the Word who is calling us into personal dialogue. Fundamentalism is a slavish idealization of words which inevitably leads to a rigid, closed-minded, dead-ended approach to the Bible. The Word calls us into a personal dialogue which, in many respects, is like Jacob's wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32: 23-33). Only there, in that sort of personal involvement, do we come face-to-face with the mystery that is God. — Richard Rohr

The sense of mystery must always be, for mystery means being guided by obedience to Someone Who knows more than I do. — Oswald Chambers

Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread. — George Santayana

The mystery of life is certainly the most persistent problem ever placed before the thought of man. There is no doubt that from the time humanity began to think it has occupied itself with the problem of its origin and its future which undoubtedly is the problem of life. The inability of science to solve it is absolute. This would be truly frightening were it not for faith. — Guglielmo Marconi

Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden nostalgia for God which a lover of beauty like Saint Augustine could express in incomparable terms: 'Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you!'. — Pope John Paul II

The world needs more than just itself. Amid the dreariness, people do not need a distraction that will in the end become dreary itself; they are asking for mystery, even if they do not realize this themselves. They need the sign of the wholly Other, the living Word of God, entering into this our age in unadulterated trustworthiness and dynamism. — Pope Benedict XVI

Tis faith alone that vividly and certainly comprehends the deep mysteries of our religion. — Michel De Montaigne

For a stalk to grow or a flower to open there must be time that cannot be forced; nine months must go by for the birth of a human child; to write a book or compose music often years must be dedicated to patient research ... To find the mystery there must be patience, interior purification, silence, waiting ... — Pope John Paul II

I recall the passage in the letter to the Hebrews in which we are reminded that Christ has already done everything for us. It speaks of the Christ who "offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins" (Hebrews 10:12). And yet the church teaches, and our experience of faith confirms, that Christ continues to be with us and to pray for us. The paradox may be unraveled, I think, if we remember that when human beings try to "do everything at once and for all and be through with it," we court acedia, self-destruction and death. Such power is reserved for God, who alone can turn what is "already done" into something that is ongoing and ever present. It is a quotidian mystery. — Kathleen Norris

Carrying my babies was a marvelous mystery, lives growing unseen except by the slow swelling of my belly. Death is an even greater mystery ... The God I cry out to in anguish or joy can neither be proved nor disapproved. The hope I have that death is not the end of all our questions can neither be proved nor disproved. — Madeleine L'Engle

I'm helped by a gentle notion from Buddhist psychology, that there are "near enemies" to every great virtue - reactions that come from a place of care in us, and which feel right and good, but which subtly take us down an ineffectual path. Sorrow is a near enemy to compassion and to love. It is borne of sensitivity and feels like empathy. But it can paralyze and turn us back inside with a sense that we can't possibly make a difference. The wise Buddhist anthropologist and teacher Roshi Joan Halifax calls this a "pathological empathy" of our age. In the face of magnitudes of pain in the world that come to us in pictures immediate and raw, many of us care too much and see no evident place for our care to go. But compassion goes about finding the work that can be done. Love can't help but stay present — Krista Tippett

Barth was the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion ... but he set in its place the positivist doctrine of revelation which says in effect, 'Take it or leave it': Virgin Birth, Trinity or anything else, everything which is an equally significant and necessary part of the whole, which latter has to be swallowed as a whole or not at all. That is not in accordance with the Bible. There are degrees of perception and degrees of significance, i.e. a secret discipline must be re-established whereby the mysteries of the Christian faith are preserved from profanation. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Simon had been sent by Barabbas to find out if the Nazarene was a fellow revolutionary, a self-proclaimed messiah, or something else. Simon's heart had been strangely moved by this stranger and he was still trying to figure him out. But the Rabbi remained a mystery to him. The centurion had asked him to heal his servant and Jesus replied that he had not seen such great faith in all of Israel. That was shocking enough, to attribute such goodness to a filthy, unclean stranger to the covenant. But then he said that many such people would come to the feast of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom - in other words, Israelites - would be thrown into the outer darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. As an Essene scribe at Qumran, Simon had spent his whole life in rituals of cleanness and separation. — Brian Godawa

God works this unspeakable mystery of entire sanctification in your life and mine. People try to seek the experience of entire sanctification in ways other than God's way; but the wonderful Spirit of God will remove confusion and enable us to see that the only means to obtain the experience of entire sanctification by faith is the grace of God. — Oswald Chambers

Scientists ofttimes have the greatest faith in a higher power. The more they dig into, establish facts and figures, the more they marvel about the mystery of it all. — Malcolm Forbes

So how do theists respond to arguments like this? [The Argument from Evil] They say there is a reason for evil, but it is a mystery. Well, let me tell you this: I'm actually one hundred feet tall even though I only appear to be six feet tall. You ask me for proof of this. I have a simple answer: it's a mystery. Just accept my word for it on faith. And that's just the logic theists use in their discussions of evil. — Quentin Smith

But intellect can also reject what has happened. That is what is meant by having faith or not having faith. If you feel that what cannot be explained by the intellect does not exist, then you are a "nonbeliever." Then you will continue in this lower existence of the intellect, tethered to it. Then you disallow mystery, then you disallow intuition to speak to you. — Osho

Godliness, as well as the doctrine of our faith, is a mystery. — William Gurnall

Everyone works in the service of man. We doctors work directly on man himself ... The great mystery of man is Jesus: 'He who visits a sick person, helps me,' Jesus said ... Just as the priest can touch Jesus, so do we touch Jesus in the bodies of our patients ... We have opportunities to do good that the priest doesn't have. Our mission is not finished when medicines are no longer of use. We must bring the soul to God; our word has some authority ... Catholic doctors are so necessary! — Gianna Beretta Molla

Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He
went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He
took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith. — Colum McCann

Those three means are Mystery, Miracle, and Prophecy. The first two are incompatible with true religion, and the third ought always to be suspected.
As mystery answered all general purposes, miracle followed as an occasional auxiliary. The former served to bewilder the mind, the latter to puzzle the senses. The one was the lingo, the other the legerdemain.
As Mystery and Miracle took charge of the past and the present, Prophecy took charge of the future, and rounded the tenses of faith. — Thomas Paine

How do we receive the highest mystery of Divine love to us ? the mystery of the Christian faith? With our mind, heart and life; with our free will? Are all the three powers of our souls penetrated by holy faith, as were the souls of the saints? The kingdom of heaven 'is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened' (Lk. 13:21). The three measures are the three powers of the soul. — John Of Kronstadt

It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, the meaning of our lives, or the absence of meaning. These are basic and extremely simple aspects of existence, but our limitations prevent us from responding in an unequivocal way and for that reason we generate an emotional response, as a defense mechanism. It's pure biology. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

We too often forget that faith is a matter of questioning and struggle before it becomes one of certitude and peace. You have to doubt and reject everything else in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after you have begun to believe, your faith itself must be tested and purified. Christianity is not merely a set of forgone conclusions. Faith tends to be defeated by the burning presence of God in mystery, and seeks refuge from him, flying to comfortable social forms and safe convictions in which purification is no longer an inner battle but a matter of outward gesture. — Thomas Merton

We injure mysteries, which are matters of faith, by any attempt at explanation in order to make them matters of reason. Could they be explained, they would cease to be mysteries; and it has been well said that a thing is not necessarily against reason because it happens to be above it. — Charles Caleb Colton

Remember that in ascending to the Father You could not leave us orphans; And in making yourself a prisoner on earth You knew to veil all your divine rays. But the shadow of your veil is luminous and pure. Living Bread of faith, Celestial Food, O mystery of love! My daily Bread, Jesus, is You! ... Jesus, it is you who, despite the blasphemies Of the enemies of the Sacrament of love, It is you who want to show how much you love me, Since you make your dwelling in my heart. O Bread of the exiled! Holy and Divine Host, It is no longer I who live, but I live on your life — Therese Of Lisieux

A scientist's life, the author says, is indeed conflictual, formed by battles, defeats, and victories: but the adversary is always and only the unknown, the problem to be solved, the mystery to be clarified. It is never a matter of civil war; even though of different opinions, or of different political leanings, scientists dispute each other, they compete, but they do not battle: they are bound together by a strong alliance, by the common faith "in the validity of Maxwell's or Boltzmann's equations," and by the common acceptance of Darwinism and the molecular structure of DNA. — Primo Levi

Now you see only the mystery of this great sorrow; then you shall see how the threatening enemy was swept away in the wild night of fear and grief.
Now you look only at the loss; then you shall see how it struck at the evil that had begun to rivet its fetters upon you.
Now you shrink from the howling winds and muttering thunders; then you shall see how they beat back the waters of destruction, and opened up your way to the goodly land of promise. — Mark Guy Pearse

O my God, Trinity whom I adore, help me forget myself entirely so to establish myself in you, unmovable and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity. May nothing be able to trouble my peace or make me leave you, O my unchanging God, but may each minute bring me more deeply into your mystery! Grant my soul peace. Make it your heaven, your beloved dwelling and the place of your rest. May I never abandon you there, but may I be there, whole and entire, completely vigilant in my faith, entirely adoring, and wholly given over to your creative action.102 — Pope John Paul II

It's describing the mystery of faith. I think it describes how difficult it is to believe in God's presence even when we can't see Him, even when we feel so alone and need His presence. — Suzanne Elizabeth Anderson

While reason is puzzling itself about mystery, faith is turning it to daily bread, and feeding on it thankfully in her heart of hearts. — Frederic Dan Huntington

In the isolation of his clear, cold intellect, the sceptic abides in a glacial and spectral universe. No glow from the affections lights up the frost and shadow of the grave. He feels no prophecy in the thrill of the human heart-in the incompleteness of nature. He believes merely in things tangible, and sees only in the daytime. He will not confess the authenticity of that paler light of faith which was meant to shine when the sunshine of reason falls short, and the firmament of mystery is over our heads. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Faith leaned closer, inches from his face, her loips a hands breadth from his. She shook her head side to side a bit faster than the average metronome and waggled a finger back and forth. "They not going to find out though, are they?
He stared into merry eyes almost as dark as his coffee. The devil was a woman and Faith one of her most beautiful minions. — Chris Karlsen

The brilliance of contemplated beauty opens the spirit to the mystery of God. — Angelo Sodano

Oh, sometimes I like to put the sand of doubt into the oyster of my faith. (Br. Cadfael) — Ellis Peters

A genuine faith resolves the mystery of life by the mystery of God. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before Protestantism had anything to protest and before Catholicism called itself catholic; a faith that stretched back to the beginnings of Christianity, when it was Greek and not Latin, and which, without an Aquinas to reify it, had remained shrouded in the smoke of tradition and mystery whence it began. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. — Sam Harris

Life should be full of- Compassion, Peace, Companionship, Honor, Love, Honesty, Joy, Rapture, Euphoria, Friendship, Family, Spiritual Enrichment, Enlightenment, Trust, Truth, Loyalty, Passion, Cultural Enrichment, Unity, Serenity, Zen, Wonder, Respect, Beauty of All Kinds, Balance of all Creation, Philosophy, Adventure, Art, Happiness, Bliss, Serendipity, Kismet, Fantasy, Positivity, Yin, Yang, Color, Variety, Excitement, Sharing, Fun, Sound, Paradise, Magick, Tenderness, Strength, Devotion, Courage, Conviction, Responsibility, Wisdom, Justice, Satisfaction, Fulfillment, Purpose, Mystery, Healing, Learning, Virtue, History, Creativity, Imagination, Receptiveness and Faith. For through these things you are One with your Creator. — Solange Nicole

To abandon all, to strip one's self of all, in order to seek and follow Jesus Christ naked to Bethlehem where He was born, naked to the hall where He was scourged, and naked to Calvary where He died on the cross, is so great a mystery that neither the thing nor the knowledge of it, is given to any but through faith in the Son of God. — John Wesley

Praying, we usually ask too much. I know I do. Sometimes we even demand. I think I am learning to ask enough for the moment
not for the whole year, utterly veiled in mystery; not even for the week, the month ahead; but just for today.
Jesus said it all when He told us to pray: 'Give us this day our daily bread.'
That bread is not only material, it is spiritual; in asking for it, we ask for a sufficiency of strength, courage, hope and light. Enough courage for the step ahead
not for the further miles. Enough strength for the immediate task or ordeal. Enough material gain to enable us to meet our daily obligations. Enough light to see the path
right before our feet. — Faith Baldwin

Love is an act of faith & its face should always be covered in mystery. Every moment should be lived with feeling & emotion because if we try to decipher it & understand it, the magic disappears."

A Novella, The Coffee and The Cola, Published 2016. — Kapil Muzumdar

And as he sat upon the Mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, 'Tell us, when shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world? — Peter J. Tanous

Struggle is a prerequisite to surrender. — Jen Pollock Michel