Christian Mystics Quotes

“O Love, divine Love, why do You lay siege to me?
In a frenzy of love for me, You find no rest.

From five sides You move against me,
Hearing, sight, taste, touch, and scent.
To come out is to be caught; I cannot hide from You.

If I come out through sight I see Love
Painted in every form and color,
Inviting me to come to You, to dwell in You.

If I leave through the door of hearing,
What I hear points only to You, Lord;
I cannot escape Love through this gage.

If I come out through taste, every flavor proclaims:
"Love, divine Love, hungering Love!
You have caught me on Your hook, for you want to reign in me."

If I leave through the door of scent
I sense You in all creation; You have caught me
And wounded me through that fragrance.

If I come out through the sense of touch
I find Your lineaments in every creature;
To try to flee from You is madness.

Love, I flee from You, afraid to give You my heart:
I see that You make me one with You,
I cease to be me and can no longer find myself.

If I see evil in a man or defect or temptation,
You fuse me with him, and make me suffer;
O Love without limits, who is it You love?

It is You, O Crucified Christ,
Who take possession of me,
Drawing me out of the sea to the shore;

There I suffer to see Your wounded heart.
Why did You endure the pain?
So that I might be healed.”
― Jacopone Da Todi, The God-Madness

“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

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

“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

“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

“Gnosticism is undeniably pre-Christian, with both Jewish and gentile roots. The wisdom of Solomon already contained Gnostic elements and prototypes for the Jesus of the Gospels...God stops being the Lord of righteous deed and becomes the Good One...A clear pre-Christian Gnosticism can be distilled from the epistles of Paul. Paul is recklessly misunderstood by those who try to read anything Historical Jesus-ish into it. The conversion of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles is a mere forgery from various Tanakh passages... [The epistles] are from Christian mystics of the middle of the second century. Paul is thus the strongest witness against the Historical Jesus hypothesis...John's Gnostic origin is more evident than that of the synoptics. Its acceptance proves that even the Church wasn't concerned with historical facts at all.”
― Arthur Drews

“Silence, is the mother of prayer, a return from the captivity of sin, unconscious success in virtue, a continuous ascension to heaven.”
― St. John Climacus

“La oss derfor lide uten håp om en eneste varig glede i dette livet siden vi, mine brødre, allerede er i helvete.”
― August Strindberg, Inferno

“Not every christian is a good human, but every good human is a christian.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mukemmel Musalman: Kafir Biraz, Peygamber Biraz

“Churches don't hold divinity, human hearts do.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Good Scientist: When Science and Service Combine

“However it—or the kind of extreme individualistic epistemology it embraces—can lead historians to an overly skeptical approach particularly to those sources that were intended to recount and inform events of the past, that is, testimony in this restricted sense. Particularly in Gospels scholarship there is an attitude abroad that approaches the sources with fundamental skepticism, rather than trust, and therefore requires that anything the sources claim be accepted only if historians can independently verify it…..”
― Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

“Equally, it does not mean that Christian beliefs cause more distortion than other ideological beliefs. This emerged with particular clarity in engaging with the opinion that Jesus did not exist. This view is demonstrably false. It is fuelled by a regrettable form of atheist prejudice, which holds all the main primary sources, and Christian people, in contempt. This is not merely worse than the American Jesus Seminar, it is no better than Christian fundamentalism. It simply has different prejudices.”
― Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian's Account of his Life and Teaching

“Marking a cross on yourself ain't divinity, crossing out the self for others is real divinity.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Dervish Advaitam: Gospel of Sacred Feminines and Holy Fathers

“It is love thy neighbor, not worship thy bishop, or serve thy vatican.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather

“You write an "I", that is you. Now cross it out, and there is Christ (+). Anybody who crosses themselves out in love for others, becomes a living Christ. Anybody who wipes themselves out in serving others, becomes a living Buddha. Anybody who lays themselves down to lift up others, becomes the epitome of divinity absolute. And that, my friend, is Religion 101 - it's Theology 101 - and above all, it is Life 101.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Divane Dynamite: Only truth in the cosmos is love

“Ascending higher, we say…
not definable,
not nameable,
not knowable,
not dark, not light,
not untrue, not true,
not affirmable, not deniable,
for
while we affirm or deny of those orders of beings
that are akin to Him
we neither affirm nor deny Him
that is beyond
all affirmation as unique universal Cause and
all negation as simple preeminent Cause,
free of all and
to all transcendent.
(from The Mystical Theology)”
― Pseudo Dionysius