Meg

“Religion has torn a lot of people to pieces. Whenever it has embarked on a quest for purity, crusaded for certainty, strived for survival, religion has done so at a great cost, asking so many humans to ignore their conscience, to pretend to believe things they don't really believe, to squeeze into ill-fitting gender roles and cultural norms, to snuff out desires and squander talents, to live one way during the week and another on Sunday morning, to sacrifice sons and daughters on the altar of conformity, to feign certainty, to fake happiness, to strive for perfection, to look the other way in the presence of injustice - indeed, to renounce some aspect of their very humanity.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Wholehearted Faith

“Acknowledging uncertainty doesn't make a person less faithful; it just makes her more honest. Admitting how much we don't know doesn't make a person less faithful; it just makes him more candid - and perhaps more curious. Anne Lamott has chronicled the meanderings of the heart as well as anyone, and as she famously puts it, " The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Wholehearted Faith

“I always wondered why survivors understood other survivors so well. Why, even if the details of our attacks vary, survivors can lock eyes and get it without having to explain. Perhaps it is not the particulars of the assault itself that we have in common, but the moment after; the first time you are left alone. Something slipping out of you. Where did I go. What was taken. It is terror swallowed inside silence. An unclipping from the world where up was up and down was down.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name

“To love oneself well is to regard one’s place in the world with candor and grace, grounded in a humble realization of one’s strengths as well as a clear-eyed understanding of one’s weaknesses. To love oneself well is to be able to distinguish between what one wants and what one needs. To love oneself well means not to diminish the beautiful creature that God made nor to cultivate an outsize image of that same person.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Wholehearted Faith