Holistic Mysticism Quotes

“Now is our ultimate priority. Everything else can wait. Now requires that we neglect all pressing demands and attend to what is most important, this precious moment in its infinite possibilities and potential.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“The same Bible verse may say something entirely different to you from what it does to me, based on our individual contexts. In other words, scripture is not monolithic. When we approach it prayerfully, it is personal.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“I have been a skeptic all my life, and it took me a long time to affirm the Seed of Christ through actual experience. Like scientists, I ultimately trust experience….”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“Many Quakers embody the dynamic of contemplation and activism. Inward-focused contemplation compliments outward-focused missions to prisons, polluted rivers, and plastic-bloated seas.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“I intuitively knew what Quakers have always known: that silence is God’s primary love language.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“Patient endurance and self-discipline mean we submit to the present moment as it is, not as we would like it to be.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“From the perspective of Christianity’s Desert Tradition, prayer is the most vital aspect of faith. Without prayer and experiences of the infinite, Christianity loses its guts.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“We might think that the deeper we dig into our own being, the further we travel from God; that’s one way Christianity has regarded the inner self, as a source of sin and separation from God. Quakers, however—and other holistic mystics through the ages—believe that at the deepest level of our beings lies Kelly’s Last Rock, the preexistent Word of John’s Gospel (John 1:1–5). Mental and emotional commotion obscure this bedrock, but someone practiced in disciplined silence spends more and more time absorbed in this Ground of Our Being.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“From the very beginning of the Quakers, George Fox understood that silence is of God, a powerful catalyst for the soul’s integration and unification.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers

“Daring greatly’ requires nothing less than a cleansing of the heart—or what the Desert Elders called ‘purity of heart.’ My best stab at what they meant by this is what I call wholeheartedness. This means we are ‘all in.’ We no longer hold anything back. We can contrast ‘all in’ with ‘half-hearted.’ Purity of heart is unwavering commitment and resolve, void of duplicity.”
― Amos Smith, Holistic Mysticism: The Integrated Spiritual Path of the Quakers