Diana Butler Bass > Quotes

“Christianity did not begin with a confession. It began with an invitation into friendship, into creating a new community, into forming relationships based on love and service.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening

“If we think of belonging only as membership in a club, organization, or church, we miss the point. Belonging is the risk to move beyond the world we know, to venture out on pilgrimage, to accept exile. And it is the risk of being with companions on that journey, God, a spouse, friends, children, mentors, teachers, people who came from the same place we did, people who came from entirely different places, saints and sinners of all sorts, those known to us and those unknown, our secret longings, questions, and fears.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening

“Awe is the gateway to compassion. It is a deep awareness that we are creators, creators who work with the Creator, in an ongoing project of crafting a world. If we do not like the world or are afraid of it, we have had a hand in that. And if we made a mess, we can clean it up and do better. We are what we make.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World-A Spiritual Revolution

“Much to my surprise, church has become a spiritual, even a theological struggle for me. I have found it increasingly difficult to sing hymns that celebrate a hierarchical heavenly realm, to recite creeds that feel disconnected from life, to pray liturgies that emphasize salvation through blood, to listen to sermons that preach an exclusive way to God, to participate in sacraments that exclude others, and to find myself confined to a hard pew in a building with no windows to the world outside. This has not happened because I am angry at the church or God. Rather, it has happened because I was moving around in the world and began to realize how beautifully God was everywhere: in nature and in my neighborhood, in considering the stars and by seeking my roots. It took me five decades to figure it out, but I finally understood. The church is not the only sacred space; the world is profoundly sacred as well. And thus I fell into a gap - the theological ravine between a church still proclaiming conventional theism with its three-tiered universe and the spiritual revolution of God-with-us.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World-A Spiritual Revolution

“The whole message of the Christian scripture is based in the idea of metanoia, the change of heart that happens when we meet God face-to-face. Even a cursory knowledge of history reveals that Christianity is a religion about change. The Christian faith always changes--even when some of its adherents claim that it does not.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church Is Transforming the Faith

“Home is more than a house. It is a sacred location, a place of aspiration and dreams, of learning and habit, of relationships and heart. Home is the geography of our souls.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World-A Spiritual Revolution

“There is, however, something odd about this pattern. Other than joining a political party, it is hard to think of any other sort of community that people join by agreeing to a set of principles. Imagine joining a knitting group. Does anyone go to a knitting group and ask if the knitters believe in knitting or what they hold to be true about knitting? Do people ask for a knitting doctrinal statement? Indeed, if you start knitting by reading a book about knitting or a history of knitting or a theory of knitting, you will very likely never knit.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening

“Sometimes critics decry spirituality as individualism, but they miss the point. Spirituality is personal, yes. To experience God’s spirit, to be lost in wonder, is something profound that we can all know directly and inwardly. That is not a problem. The real problem is that, in the last two centuries, religion has actually allowed itself to become privatized. In the same way that our political and economic concerns contracted from “we” to “me,” so has our sense of God and faith. In many quarters, religion abandoned a prophetic and creative vision for humanity’s common life in favor of an individual quest to get one’s sorry ass to heaven. And, in the process, community became isolated behind the walls of buildings where worship experiences corresponded to members’ tastes and preferences and confirmed their political views.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World-A Spiritual Revolution

“To transform home is to transform the world.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World. A Spiritual Revolution

“We are safer and happier when we care for each other in community, when we do things for each other.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks

“While contemporary Christians tend to equate morality with sexual ethics, our ancestors defined morality as welcoming the stranger. Unlike almost every other contested idea in early Christianity, including the nature of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity, the unanimous witness of the ancient fathers and mothers was that hospitality was the primary Christian virtue.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“But some contemporary believers, such as Lisa Domke, a pastor and mother in Seattle, ground their identity in Christ’s love but a love that goes beyond sentiment or feeling. “I say that I am someone seeking to live in the world with love and humility,” Lisa reports, “following God in the way of Jesus.” Love is the active practice of Christian virtue. As Sky, a Seattle Baptist, relates, “Children know that love is behavior, not romantic words.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“That it is precisely when we recognize our common humanity—when we recognize our own humanity in the face of the other—it is then that we also recognize the face of God.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World-A Spiritual Revolution

“Here in the labyrinth, I struggle to find words to describe what I feel. Up on the mountaintop, I knew the language to describe God: majestic, transcendent, all-powerful, heavenly Father, Lord, and King. In this vocabulary, God remains stubbornly located in a few select places, mostly in external realms above or beyond: heaven, the church, doctrine, or the sacraments. What happens in the labyrinth seems vague, perhaps even theologically elusive.

Like countless others, I have been schooled in vertical theology. Western culture, especially Western Christianity, has imprinted a certain theological template upon the spiritual imagination: God exists far off from the world and does humankind a favor when choosing to draw close. Sermons declared that God’s holiness was foreign to us and sin separated us from God. Yes, humanity was made in God’s image, but we had so messed things up in the Garden of Eden that any trace of God in us was obscured, if not destroyed. Whether conservative or liberal, most American churches teach some form of the idea that God exists in holy isolation, untouched by the messiness of creation, and that we, God’s children, are morally and spiritually filthy, bereft of all goodness, utterly unworthy to stand before the Divine Presence. In its crudest form, the role of religion (whether through revivals, priesthood, ritual, story, sacraments, personal conversion, or morality) is to act as a holy elevator between God above and those muddling around down below in the world.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World-A Spiritual Revolution

“At the same moment when massive global institutions seem to rule the world, there is an equally strong countermovement among regular people to claim personal agency in our own lives. We grow food in backyards. We brew beer. We weave cloth and knit blankets. We shop local. We create our own playlists. We tailor delivery of news and entertainment. In every arena, we customize and personalize our lives, creating material environments to make meaning, express a sense of uniqueness, and engage causes that matter to us and the world. It makes perfect sense that we are making our spiritual lives as well, crafting a new theology. And that God is far more personal and close at hand than once imagined.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World-A Spiritual Revolution

“Gratitude is not about stuff. Gratitude is the emotional response to the surprise of our very existence, to sensing that inner light and realizing the astonishing sacred, social, and scientific events that brought each one of us into being. We cry out like the psalmist, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made!” (Ps. 139:14).”
― Diana Butler Bass, Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks

“Universal hospitality. Welcoming all to God’s table. A river of justice. Or, as the prophet Isaiah envisioned long ago, “They will not hurt or destroy on my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isa. 11:9).”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Where do you live?' is ultimately a sacred question.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World. A Spiritual Revolution

“Whereas militant Christianity triumphs over all, generative Christianity transforms the world through humble service to all. It is not about victory; it is about following Christ in order to seed human community with grace.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Enacting love was a critical aspect of experiencing love. Devotion and ethics intertwined.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Everything is a gift. The degree to which we are awake to this truth is a measure of our gratefulness, and gratefulness is a measure of our aliveness. —DAVID STEINDL-RAST”
― Diana Butler Bass, Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks

“Gratitude is complicated. Feelings of dependence—and interdependence—can be both elusive and resisted, mostly because they are caught up with soul-crushing ideas of obligation and debt. But if gratitude is mutual reliance upon (instead of payback for) shared gifts, we awaken to a profound awareness of our interdependence. Dependence may enslave the soul, but interdependence frees us.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks

“Hospitality is the practice that keeps the church from becoming a club, a members-only society.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“By having a realistic sense of history,” Livingston responded. He insisted that seeing the past on its own terms—not through the romantic gaze of nostalgia—is intrinsic to human flourishing. Nostalgia, he declared, is the enemy of hope. It tricks people into believing that their best days are gone. A more realistic view of history, he insisted, envisions the past as a theater of experience, some good and some bad, and opens up the possibility of growth and change. Our best days are ahead, not behind. Hope for the future.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Spiritual awakening is not ultimately the work of invisible cultural forces. Instead, it is the work of learning to see differently, of prayer, and of conversion. It is something people do.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening

“[T]his impulse toward spiritual intimacy is found not only in the Abrahamic faiths, but in Buddhism, Hinduism, and native religions. Far too many people who understand God in these ways probably do not know how rich the tradition is that speaks of God with us, God in the stars and sunrise, God as the face of their neighbor, God in the act of justice, or God as the wonder of love. The language of divine nearness is the very heart of vibrant faith. Yet it has often been obscured by vertical theologies and elevator institutions, which, I suspect, are far easier to both explain and control. Drawing God within the circle of the world is a messy and sometimes dangerous business.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World-A Spiritual Revolution

“The Samaritans and the Jews were enemies, two tribes caught in an ancient argument about birthright and ethnicity who lived in segregated neighborhoods. By Jesus’s time they were forbidden to have contact with each other, and violent squabbles sometimes erupted. The lawyer, who was a Jew, surely knew of both the informal customs and formal laws separating the two groups. Samaritans and Jews were not good neighbors. Yet Jesus turns the ancient Jewish command to love your neighbor into a story about these hostile groups. The man in the ditch, who is Jewish, is bypassed by those close to him by tribal ties (most likely the priest and the Levite were afraid the thieves were still about in the area and that they might be the next victim) and is eventually rescued by a Samaritan. Thus Jesus enlarges the sphere of neighborhood to include those we deem objectionable.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World-A Spiritual Revolution

“My story can never be your story (that is called colonization—something I hope we are leaving behind). But my story might inform yours, or be like yours, or maybe even add depth or another dimension to yours. If nothing else, sharing our stories might lead to greater understanding, tolerance, appreciation, and perhaps even celebration of our differences.”
― Diana Butler Bass, Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence

“Part of universal hospitality is in the practice of befriending other religious traditions and practices, while remaining deeply grounded. Brent Bill thinks Christians need to engage in “theological hospitality,” that we “should be open and welcoming…instead of starting with the theological differences that divide us.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story

“Thus Christianity becomes a story of accumulated human experience of God that reveals a certain kind of wisdom in the world: To love God and love one’s neighbor constitutes the good life. Love is, as the apostle Paul wrote, the greatest of all things. Without love we are, as the good apostle said flatly, “nothing” (1 Cor. 13). Without love, Christianity is either a pretty bad joke or a twisted political agenda.”
― Diana Butler Bass, A People's History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story