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Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power QUOTES

Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " Step One is, paradoxically, both a crushing end and a beginning. "

― Marya Hornbacher , Waiting: A Nonbeliever's Higher Power

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " 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

16 " 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

17 " 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

18 " 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

19 " 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

20 " 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