Hope Against Darkness Quotes

“Jesus clearly taught orthopraxy (right behavior) much more than orthodoxy (right ideas).”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“The best and most convincing disguise for fear is virtue itself, or godliness. Then it never looks like fear. For fear to survive, it must look like reason, prudence, common-sense, intelligence, the need for social order, morality, religion, obedience, justice or even spirituality. It always works. What better way to veil vengeance than to call it justice? What better way to cover greed than to call it responsible stewardship? Only people who have moved beyond ego and controlling of all outcomes, only those practiced at letting go, see fear for the impostor that it is. To be trapped inside of your small ego is always to be afraid.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“Jesus neither played the victim nor created victims.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“It takes a long time to purify the experience of dysfunctional family life, abuse, manipulation, shaming, negative attitudes toward anything, totalitarian attitudes or judgmental attitudes. They’re only purified in desperate and dark situations where the old god doesn’t work any more, the old self and old attitudes don’t work anymore. As Saint John of the Cross described, our gods must each die till we find the true God. Or as Meister Eckhart put it, “I pray to God to rid me of God.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“Even a small indicator of God is still an indicator of God—and therefore an indicator of reason, meaning and final joy. A little bit of God goes a long way.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“Either you see God in Everything or you have lost the basis for seeing God in Anything. Once the dualistic mind takes over, the ego is back into a “pick, choose and decide” game, which is the beginning of exclusionary, punishing and even violent religion.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“The word change normally refers to new beginnings. But transformation, the mystery we’re examining, more often happens not when something new begins but when something old falls apart. The pain of something old falling apart—chaos—invites the soul to listen at a deeper level.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“I know that every age has had its pain, but spirituality in its best sense is about what you do with your pain. We do not know what to do with it any more. The “machine” that transformed our pain into something better seems to have disappeared. In a culture with no Transcendent Center, there is no one to hand pain over to. In a culture with no cross/resurrection image, there is no meaning to our suffering. When a people no longer knows that God is, God is good, God can be trusted and God is on your side, we frankly have very serious problems. Our pain is going to go shooting in all directions, none of them good. That’s where we are today. I remember a woman once came to me”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“The dualistic mind seemingly has a preference for knowing things by comparison. The price we pay for our dualistic mind is that one side of the comparison is always idealized and the other demonized, or at least minimized. There is little room for balance or honesty, much less love. Wisdom, however, is always holding the “rational” and the “romantic” together: Aristotle and Plato, Aquinas and Bonaventure, Freud and Jung, saint and sinner, Spirit and senses. In fact, you could say that the greater opposites you can hold together, the greater soul you usually have. By temperament, most of us prefer one side to the other. Holding to one side or another frees us from the tension and the anxiety. Only a few dare to hold the irresolvable tension in the middle. It is the “folly” of the cross, where you cannot “prove” you are right, but only “hang” between the good and the bad thieves of every issue, paying the price for their reconciliation (see Luke 23:39 ff.). The”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“The Bible seems to always be saying that this journey is indeed a journey, a journey always initiated and concluded by God, and a journey of transformation much more than mere education about anything. We would sooner have textbooks, I think. Then the journey would remain a spectator sport, as much religion often seems to be. The education model elicits a low level of commitment and investment, even if it keeps people obedient and orthodox. The transformation model risks people knowing and sharing “the One Spirit that was given us all to drink” (1 Corinthians 12:13). So sad that we have preferred conformity and group loyalty over real change! But chaos”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“The wonder of the resurrection stories in the Gospels is that Jesus has no punitive attitude toward the authorities or his cowardly followers, and that the followers themselves never call for any kind of holy war against those who killed their leader. Something new has clearly transpired in history. This is not the common and expected story line. All Jesus does is breathe forgiveness.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“Salvation is most commonly sin overcome in the biblical tradition, not just sin avoided.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“We had the right idea about being whole, but the trouble is that we thought we could do it independently and within our private personality.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“seeking its significance through the approval of others, will never finally ground us. Because the next day I have to say again: “What do I do today to be important, to be significant, to be thought well of?”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“If you don’t get forgiveness, you’re missing the whole mystery. You are still living in a world of meritocracy,”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“God is “within all things but not enclosed; outside all things, but not excluded; above all things, but not aloof; below all things, but not debased”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“He knew that there was power in being a somebody, but that there was truth in being a nobody.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“When the great seers arise, their lives always confuse the rest of us. They seem to change all the rules, look in different directions for joy and find love in the most unexpected”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“The pain of something old falling apart—chaos—invites the soul to listen at a deeper level. It invites, and sometimes forces the soul to go to a new place because the old place is falling apart. Most of us would never go to new places in any other way.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“If religion does not give us that sense of belonging to a sacred world of meaning, it is pretty useless.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“Don’t waste any time dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys. Hold them both together in your own soul—where they are anyway—and you will have held together the whole world. You will have overcome the great divide—in one place of spacious compassion.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“Instead of our spilling blood to get to God we have God spilling blood to get to us! Pray on that for a week. It’s enough to transform you.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“Moderns believed that things would only get better and better. This worldview took many surrogate forms, but in general is what we know as the modern world. It formed all of us deeply, especially in the West. It told us that education, reason and science would make the world a better place. But then the Holocaust happened in the very country that was perhaps the most educated, logical and reason-loving in the world.”
― John Feister, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety

“Seventy times seven" is a medicine for a healing community, not for a community with all the answers beforehand and all the appropriate punishments afterwards.”
― Richard Rohr, Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety