Waiting Quotes

“There are a lot of times the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.They are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation. There is a bareness that spreads out over the interior landscape of the self, a bareness like tundra, with no sign of life in any direction, no sign of anything beneath the frozen crust of ground, no sign that spring ever intends to come again.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“At the lip of a cliff, I look out over Lake Superior, through the bare branches of birches and the snow-covered branches of aspens and pines. A hard wind blows snow up out of a cavern and over my face. I know this place, I know its seasons - I have hiked these mountains in the summer and walked these winding pathways in the explosion of colour that is a northern fall. And now, the temperature drops well below zero and the deadly cold lake rages below, I feel the stirrings of faith that here, in this place, in my heart, spring will come again.
But first the winter must be waited out. And that waiting has worth.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“There is always reason to care. There is always reason to give. It is what we are here to do.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“When we doubt, we learn to accept that we may not ever know. When we question, we learn to accept that there may be no answer. When we shout our doubt out into the universe, we learn to accept that we may be met with a silence we do not know how to read.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“perhaps our purpose is, for the time being, to be human, to live on this earth and in this human community, to receive something from it, and to give something back.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“Being here, living now, recognizing our smallness, is a spiritual practice. It allows us to be at peace with our humanity. It humbles us and grants us permission to fumble, and not know, and fail, and also to take pleasure in the small triumphs of our days.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“At times it may seem worse - harder, at least - to live through the despair of this loss without the temporary comfort of our addictive behaviour. We cannot drown our sorrows. We must face the fact that we don’t know, really, where we are, how we got here, how long the pain will last, or how to move past it. That uncertainty may be the most painful part of not knowing a God: no one is there to reassure us that a God will take the pain and confusion away. We simply don’t know. And we have no way to numb ourselves or to forget the condition we’re in.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“The spiritual realm is not the ethereal beyond our lived experience. It is our experience, lived fully and well.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“But at that moment—the moment of realization that life as I’d been living it would have to end—I felt devastation unlike any I’d ever known. The barrenness was indescribable. The emptiness that opened up in me seemed to stretch on forever; I could see no end to it, could find no source of comfort in it, could not imagine any way out.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“Waiting through doubt teaches us enormous spiritual strength. It gives us the strength to go on—through struggle, through joy, through recovery, through our daily lives—even though we do not know how to name or describe a power or powers greater than ourselves. And the paradox is this: to accept this not-knowing—to accept doubt, a lack of certainty—is to accept the very nature of life as it is. In accepting doubt, unanswered questions, and unknowing, we accept life on life’s terms.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“When we believe ourselves to be alone, we have no responsibility to this world and are answerable to no one.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“What a child knows about transformation is very little. What an adult knows, I think, is even less. Because a child at least remembers that transformation is possible.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“Every morning I watched the sun rise and read a highly religious little meditation book and tried having a conversation with God. I waited for that sense of the presence of a Higher Power that I’d heard of. I chastised myself for not being open to real spiritual experience. It was one of the loneliest things I’ve ever done.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“Am I ultimately alone? How many of us have asked that question—drunk or sober—when we’ve wondered if there was a God or when we’ve decided that there was none? And the universe reels around us, more vast than we could begin to comprehend and more apparently empty. But it’s only when we overlook the fairly obvious fact that we are human beings on a planet packed with human beings that we can entertain the fairly self-indulgent idea that we are, in fact, alone.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“Steps Six and Seven are often brushed off, especially by the nonbeliever, because they seem to assume a direct relationship with a personal God. But they really are essential, and reconceptualizing them in a way that allows us to reach their spiritual core—the development of a clear moral self—is crucially important to those of us working the Steps in sobriety.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“Whether one believes that transformation is effected by the will of an outer force, or the willingness of an inner self, does not change the reality of transformation as a phenomenon of spiritual experience. All we need to know is that it does occur. We have proof of that; we have our living, breathing, ever-expanding spiritual selves.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“Self-knowledge is the foundation of a practical spirituality, a spirituality that ripples outward from the self into the world.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“We put an extraordinary amount of effort into how we appear, or wish to appear, trying frantically to construct a sense of self out of how we are seen from without. But who are we from within? What makes us who we are? If we stop for a moment and think, Of what do I consist? what is the answer we hear?”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“I do doubt she ever felt so cluttered and noisy and jangled that she put her boot through the ice. As soon as I did it, I could just hear her saying in alarm, “Well. My stars!” But there are days I do feel that way, and I am beginning to know that it is because I hold on. I fight. I resist. It doesn’t even matter what I resist; there is simply something in me that tends to resist things as they are. I have been fighting since I was very small. And I believe that my addiction was a response, in some measure, to the fact that the fight was futile, and I could not tolerate that fact. I couldn’t tolerate the fact that I did not control the world. I could not, or would not, learn to accept it.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“So rather than running from doubt, shutting down our spirits and hearts, or reaching for quick certainty, we can use doubt as a spiritual practice. We can wait. We wait for our tangled emotions to unknot themselves; we wait for our troubled or angry or grieving spirits to let their sorrow go. We wait for the humility to recognize our limitations and our lack of control, for this humility will bring us peace while we wait. We wait for answers; we wait for clarity; we wait for faith to return in its own time. And it will.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“Call it the feeling of love that connects us. Call it the creative force that drives us to transform. Call it our energy. Call it our capacity to give. Call it grace, or even divinity, something that allows for those things to exist within us as individuals and between us each time we connect.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“Step One is, paradoxically, both a crushing end and a beginning.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“We are, by our very human nature, limited in what we can know or do or control or change.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“It is easy to write off childlike faith in the universe and childlike wonder at the world as simply a lack of knowledge about “how life really is.” Well, how is life, really? Do we know—we who have been denying life, life’s beauty and its true challenges, for such a long time? Or did we know better as children, when the whole world seemed to be filled with meaning and possibility, both good and bad?”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“That which stirs within, slows or quickens, goes deep or dies out. When I speak of spirit, I am not speaking of something related to or given by a force outside ourselves. I am speaking of the force that is ourselves. The experience of living in this world, bound by a body, space, and time, woven into the fabric of human history, human connection and human life. This is the force that feels, and thinks and gives us consciousness at all. It is the deepest, most elemental, most integral part of who we are; it is who we are.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“The sense that we are only the sum of our parts—whatever we achieve, however we appear, whatever we own, however we try to prove ourselves—is not a good sense. It's an existential crisis: Do I even exist? If you take away the masks I wear, is there only blank space underneath?”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“Sitting out there on the porch, I laughed. How funny—to think of us turning our clocks this way and that, importantly telling the sun when to rise and when to set, when we would prefer it to be light and when dark.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“The lesson of daily spiritual practice is not a complicated one and requires no special equipment; we are simply learning to love. That, at the end of the day, is where a spiritual practice takes us: out into the world, living in and loving this world of the spirit, here and now.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“The reward is entrance to the “world of the Spirit,” which is to say, entrance to this world, a place at this table, in this human life. I am not much concerned about the existence of a hereafter, a “next” life—this life is what I have, this is where I live, and I believe that my spiritual growth depends upon the work I do here and now. That work amounts to seeing this world clearly, moving through it gently, and learning to love it well.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

“So what are the spiritual principles that we want guiding us as we interact with others? I can think of a few that are, to me, indispensable: Love, agape, the Greek word that means love of all. Generosity: giving all that we have, giving from the bottomless spiritual well. Empathy: another kind of giving, a giving of the open heart. Honesty: a way of giving the true self. Acceptance: giving people the freedom to be who they are. These are only a few of the spiritual principles we now put into practice, and they are ones we continue to practice over time. They deepen our spiritual connection to others and strengthen our own spiritual lives.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power