all prayer is prayer to the giant teeth

Christianity lost the plot when people took “go forth and preach the good news of Christ and make disciples” to mean colonialism and religious intolerance and control and shame

Listening to God implies that God speaks. This may put some people off. They have had no clarion calls like the ones which came to Samuel or to Saul. Friends usually refer to something less dramatic, more subtle: a sense of Presence; of the Inward Christ, the Inward Teacher or Guide. I doubt if anyone here has not felt over and over again a persistent inner tugging, an inner stirring or prompting, a sudden rapture or welling up of thankfulness, a comforting or encouraging which is not yourself speaking to yourself, or conscience (which has its cultural and moral content). There may be no audible voice, but there is a movement in the heart, a sense of Otherness that one is aware of.

It is impossible to overemphasize the paradox represented by every hierophany, even the most elementary. By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone; apparently (or, more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.

Before they took Eve out of him, Adam was something both. He was Adam but he was also Eve. “Male and female He created them.” He was both then. Even if it was only one rib of Adam that was Eve, how could Adam have ignored such a part of himself? How could all of womanhood have been stored in one man’s rib and he not notice? He had no concept that she would one day be somebody else. That womanhood was his. His originally. His at the formation of man. A grain of womanhood, inside his chest. A man seeded with a feminine side so powerful it would grow the vast diversity of women. There’s no way he didn’t notice. There’s no way he didn’t see that seed, that rib, as part of who he was. After all, he was made in God’s image then.

doves and pigeons being basically identical scientifically speaking is so important to me.

For me, the spirituality of subtraction is the foundation of Quaker simplicity: to order my life so that I have the space and freedom to hear, listen, and respond willingly to the One who speaks to my condition. It goes by different names at different times and places: the via negativa, apophatic spirituality, single-pointed awareness, and others. Always the great goal is to make room for the One who speaks.