Corenna > Corenna's Quotes

“This is my body. Broken. This is my blood. Drained. Eat. Drink. Do this in remembrance of me.
It is queer and beautiful that some of us belong to a God who tells us to consume his body and blood in remembrance. What do the body and blood have to do with memory? How do they connect us to the story of liberation? It means something that the Euacharist, this lasting ritual of the presence and memory of God, is a physical nourishment as much as it is spiritual. I once went to a church that gave everyone a whole slice of bread and they actually buttered it. It felt wrong, but they had something so right. I love that we don't just bow to the bread, we eat it—the body of God entering our bodies.
And I think God's supposed to taste good.
That we have managed to regurgitate a Christian spirituality that is anything less than bodily glory, agony, healing, and restoration is our tragedy. I don't think it an accident that we are made to remember God through an act that nourishes us in our own bodies. I've heard much of bodily sacrifice, of taking
up a cross, of dying and dying again. But I need to hear of resurrection—of the bodily love of receiving the Eucharist.
You want to tell me to love God? Ask me when I've last eaten. Come now, you want me to tell you a prayer? You'll find it in the blood beating from heart to head to toe and home again.
Don't ask me of salvation, Listen to the hum of my chest as I now fall asleep. I cannot see the face of God by rejecting my own.”
― Cole aurthor Riley

“Reconciliation is so elusive because so few ever occupy a state of sincere remorse. If we are to be reconciled, the offender must become disturbed by the state of their soul—a contrition that births apology not for the sake of its own forgiveness but to honour the dignity that was once at risk.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“The most common one-liner in the Bible is, "Do not be afraid." Someone counted, and it occurs 365 times.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“When you get your,'Who am I?', question right, all of your,'What should I do?' questions tend to take care of themselves”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“The ego hates losing – even to God.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo – even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“Church practice has been more influenced by Plato than by Jesus. We invariably prefer the universal synthesis, the answer that settles all the dust and resolves every question even when it is not entirely true over the mercy and grace of God.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“Grace must and will edge you forward. “God has no grandchildren. God only has children,” as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“The Holy Spirit is that aspect of God that works largely from within and “secretly,” at “the deepest levels of our desiring,” as so many of the mystics have said.”
― Richard Rohr, AARP Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“More than anything else, the Spirit keeps us connected and safely inside an already existing flow, if we but allow it. We never “create” or earn the Spirit; we discover this inner abiding as we learn to draw upon our deepest inner life.”
― Richard Rohr, AARP Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“This Holy Spirit guiding all of us from home and toward home is also described in John's Gospel as an “advocate” (“a defense attorney,” as paraclete literally means, John 14:16), who will “teach us” and “remind us,” as if some part of us already knew but still needed an inner buzz or alarm clock to wake us up.”
― Richard Rohr, AARP Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“... but it's your existence I love you for, mainly. Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead