Clare Pierson

“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness that is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our mind or the brutalities of our own will. . . . It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. —Thomas Merton Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”
― Ilio Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love

“The greatest obstacle to religion today does not come so much from atheists but from the neo-foundationalists whose fundamental tenets of religion claim ontological certainty. These are the religious fundamentalists whose certainty of divine truths based on the inerrancy of scripture creates division. Their grip on God strips the world of the divine mystery. The only way to overcome this (paradoxical) religious atheism is to let go of God.”
― Ilio Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love

“Raimon Panikkar said that when theology is divorced from cosmology, we no longer have a living God but an idea of God. God becomes a thought that can be accepted or rejected rather than the experience of divine ultimacy. Because theology has not developed in tandem with science (or science in tandem with theology) since the Middle Ages, we have an enormous gap between the transcendent dimension of human existence (the religious dimension) and the meaning of physical reality as science understands it (the material dimension).”
― Ilio Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love

“Evolution tells us that nature is not a closed, causal system of events but a complex series of fluid, dynamic, interlocking, and communicative relationships.”
― Ilio Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love