Barking to the Choir Quotes

“What if we ceased to pledge our allegiance to the bottom line and stood, instead, with those who line the bottom?”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Human beings are settlers, but not in the pioneer sense. It is our human occupational hazard to settle for little. We settle for purity and piety when we are being invited to an exquisite holiness. We settle for the fear-driven when love longs to be our engine. We settle for a puny, vindictive God when we are being nudged always closer to this wildly inclusive, larger-than-any-life God. We allow our sense of God to atrophy. We settle for the illusion of separation when we are endlessly asked to enter into kinship with all.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“believe that God protects me from nothing but sustains me in everything.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Our culture is hostile only to the inauthentic living of the gospel. It sniffs out hypocrisy everywhere and knows when Christians aren’t taking seriously, what Jesus took seriously. It is, by and large, hostile to the right things. It actually longs to embrace the gospel of inclusion and nonviolence, of compassionate love and acceptance. Even atheists cherish such a prospect.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“See how they love one another.” Not a bad gauge of health. “There was no needy person among them.” A better metric would be hard to find. There is one line that stopped me in my tracks: “And awe came upon everyone.” It would seem that, quite possibly, the ultimate measure of health in any community might well reside in our ability to stand in awe at what folks have to carry rather than in judgment at how they carry it.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“How can someone take my advantage when I’m giving it?”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Moral outrage is the opposite of God; it only divides and separates what God wants for us, which is to be united in kinship. Moral outrage doesn't lead us to solutions - it keeps us from them. It keeps us from moving forward toward a fuller, more compassionate response to members of our community who belong to us, no matter what they've done.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“But I know, with all the certainty of my being, that Jesus has no interest in my doing this. To just say, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, I'm your biggest fan," causes him to stare at his watch, tap his feet, and order a double Glenlivet on the rocks with a twist. Fandom is of no interest to Jesus. What matters to him is the authentic following of a disciple. We all settle for saying, "Jesus," but Jesus wants us to be in the world who he is.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“For unless love becomes tenderness—the connective tissue of love—it never becomes transformational. The tender doesn’t happen tomorrow . . . only now.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Homeboy receives people; it doesn’t rescue them. In being received rather than rescued, gang members come to find themselves at home in their own skin.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Paradise is not a place that awaits our arrival but a present we arrive at.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Living the gospel, then, is less about “thinking outside the box” than about choosing to live in this ever-widening circle of inclusion.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“The discovery that awaits us is that paradise is contained in the here and now.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Generosity in Buddhism is to be relieved of the “stain of stinginess.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Humility returns the center of gravity to the center. It addresses the ego clinging, which supplies oxygen to our suffering. It calls for a light grasp. For the opposite of clinging is not letting go but cherishing. This is the goal of the practice of humility. That having a “light grasp” on life prepares the way for cherishing what is right in front of us.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Thomas Wolfe, in You Can’t Go Home Again, writes, “To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“God was—and is—in the heartbreak and in the insight born of sadness, and in the arms that wrap around our grief.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Our culture is hostile only to the inauthentic living of the gospel.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Personally, I don’t think he wants so much for us to wave palm fronds at his authority, but rather to locate our own—to be not so astonished at Jesus’s authority but to live astonishingly, inhabiting our own power to live as he would.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Oscar Romero wrote: “A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed—what gospel is that?”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“But the work one does seeks to align our lives with God’s longing for us—that we be happy, joyful, and liberated from all that prevents us from seeing ourselves as God does.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Hafez wrote: Slipping on my shoes, boiling water, toasting bread, buttering the sky, That should be enough contact With God in one day To make everyone “crazy.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“[...] But then he adds quickly, "You know what I do when I'm low on faith?"
I shake my head and lean in. My faith's gas tank has been known to hover at "E", so I wanted to know.
"I stand right here and I look at them mountains," he says. "I stare at the blue sky and white clouds. I breathe in this clean air." He demonstrates all of this. "Then I say to myself, 'God did this.'"
He turns to me, with some emotion and a surfeit of peace. "And I know everything will be all right.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“After all, nothing depends on how things turn out—only on how you see them when they happen.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Moral outrage is the opposite of God;”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Now is always vast and new. Like any practice, it’s not about technique or program. It’s a decision.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Our sense of God always beckons us us to grow, to reimagine something wildly more breathtaking than where our imagination generally takes us.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“We settle for the look of holiness rather than the likes of it.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship

“Hafez gives us this image: “God and I have become like two giant fat people living in a tiny boat. We keep bumping into each other and laughing.” This feels like the pulse of God to me—to be loved like a rock, forever, unchanging, and as solid as can be. We need to let ourselves be bumped into and loved by the Fat Man. God hopes that the laughing will be contagious.”
― Gregory Boyle, Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship