“If you have understood, then what you have understood is not God.” (St. Augustine)
“No matter how hard I try to say something true about God, the reality of God will eclipse my best words.” (Barbara Brown Taylor)
“The parts of the Christian story that had drawn me into the Church were not the believing parts but the beholding parts. . . While I understood both why and how the early church had decided to wrap those mysteries in protective layers of orthodox belief, the beliefs never seized my heart the way the mysteries did.” (Barbara Brown Taylor)
“This darkness and this cloud is always between you and God, no matter what you do, and it prevents you from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your reason and from experiencing him in sweetness of love in your affection. So set yourself to rest in this darkness as long as you can, always crying out after him whom you love. For if you are to experience him or to see him at all, insofar as it is possible here, it must always be in this cloud and in this darkness.” (Anonymous author of “The Cloud of Unknowing”)
“I was moved, for the most part without any inkling of it, closer and closer to a feeling for that Mystery out of which the church arose in the first place until, finally, the Mystery itself came to have a face for me, and the face it came to have for me was the face of Christ.” (Frederick Buechner)
“If it is true that God exceeds all our efforts to contain God, then is it too big a stretch to declare that dumbfoundedness is what all Christians have most in common? Or that coming together to confess all that we do not know is at least as sacred an activity as declaring what we think we do know?” (Barbara Brown Taylor)
“Father, Son, and Holy Spirit mean that the mystery beyond us, the mystery among us, and the mystery within us are all the same mystery.” (Frederick Buechner)
