Amos Smith > Quotes

“Faith cannot be about absolute certainty in the letters of the Bible and wrath against those who don’t comply (Ephesians 2:15). It has to be about overwhelming trust in God’s love,6 which as the apostle Paul confirms, is beyond the letter of law and narrow legalistic interpretations.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots

“As Bill Coffin put it, “We worship the Word made flesh, not the Word made words.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots

“If Jesus is at once God and human, that means that as believers we cannot refer to Jesus as God without qualifying that:"God in human form.”
― Amos Smith

“The same Bible verse may say something entirely different to you from what it does to me, based on our individual contexts. In other words, scripture is not monolithic. When we approach it prayerfully, it is personal.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“When we take our social role too seriously the first thing we lose is our sense of humor.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots

“Another way to think about Centering Prayer is training the mind to become free from distractions so it can “rest in God.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“Christianity’s job, in the words of George Fox, is to live in the “power, life, light, seed and wisdom, by which we may take away the occasion of wars.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots

“The body of Christ has no arms and feet, but ours. In other words, God needs us as much as we need God.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“I have been a skeptic all my life, and it took me a long time to affirm the Seed of Christ through actual experience. Like scientists, I ultimately trust experience….”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“Many Quakers embody the dynamic of contemplation and activism. Inward-focused contemplation compliments outward-focused missions to prisons, polluted rivers, and plastic-bloated seas.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“The Alexandrian Mystics’ emphasis on silent prayer gave their teachings interior depth missing from Western theology today.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“Jesus was contemplative and activist, mystic and prophet, Spirit and form, God and human, absolute and relative, Creator and creature, existing for eternity and existing in time.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“Anger at injustice is a hallmark of the prophets. We have the responsibility to speak the truth. If we don’t witness to the crudeness and brutality of our society, which disregards the homeless, poor, hungry, and dispossessed, who will?”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots

“God transcends and encompasses conservatism and liberalism, certainty and doubt, simplicity and complexity, Divinity and humanity, crucifixion and resurrection.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots

“Many came to Jesus expecting him to solve their problems. Instead he helped them to connect to their own faith and their own wisdom.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“God says to us “Some things won’t get done unless you do them.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“I worship a God who is as broad as the outer limits of the expanding universe and as tiny as a mustard seed.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“The Alexandrian Mystics taught that Jesus’ divinity with a capital D and his humanity with a lower case h are always in dynamic tension and can never be separated.”
― Amos Smith

“Jesus always existed. At the same time Jesus was begotten (made human). This is the perplexing and elusive mystic core of Christian faith.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“Throughout the parables the paradoxical teachings continue: Give to receive. Die to live. Lose to win.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“Now is our ultimate priority. Everything else can wait. Now requires that we neglect all pressing demands and attend to what is most important, this precious moment in its infinite possibilities and potential.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“Theology at its best doesn’t seek to solve, but to behold.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“Patient endurance and self-discipline mean we submit to the present moment as it is, not as we would like it to be.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“The spirit of the Gospels is the all inclusive love of Jesus, which jumps off the pages.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“I intuitively knew what Quakers have always known: that silence is God’s primary love language.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“From the perspective of Christianity’s Desert Tradition, prayer is the most vital aspect of faith. Without prayer and experiences of the infinite, Christianity loses its guts.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“We need precise words for Jesus. Otherwise, Christian theology is built on a foundation of sand.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“God is mystery, surpassing the senses and all knowledge, and yet God is at the core of our being.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“When it comes to his Divinity, Jesus is equal with God. When it comes to his humanity, Jesus is subordinate to God.”
― Amos Smith, Healing the Divide: Recovering Christianity's Mystic Roots

“We might think that the deeper we dig into our own being, the further we travel from God; that’s one way Christianity has regarded the inner self, as a source of sin and separation from God. Quakers, however—and other holistic mystics through the ages—believe that at the deepest level of our beings lies Kelly’s Last Rock, the preexistent Word of John’s Gospel (John 1:1–5). Mental and emotional commotion obscure this bedrock, but someone practiced in disciplined silence spends more and more time absorbed in this Ground of Our Being.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers