Evelyn Underhill Quotes
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The heart outstrips the clumsy senses, and sees - perhaps for an instant, perhaps for long periods of bliss - an undistorted and more veritable world.
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This is the secret of joy. We shall no longer strive for our own way; but commit ourselves, easily and simply, to God's way, acquiesce in His will, and in so doing find our peace.
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The direction and constancy of the will is what really matters, & intellect & feeling are only important in so far as they contribute to that.
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Spiritual achievement costs much, though never as much as it is worth.
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Saints are the great teachers of the loving-kindness and fascination with God.
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The life, beauty and meaning of the whole created order, from the tomtit to the Milky Way, refers back to the Absolute Life and Beauty of its Creator: and so lived, every bit has spiritual significance.
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The world of religion is no longer a concrete fact proposed for our acceptance and adoration. It is an unfathomable universe which engulfs us, and which lives its own majestic uncomprehended life: and we discover that our careful maps and cherished definitions bear little relation to its unmeasured reality.
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God is much in the difficult home problems as in the times of quiet and prayer.
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If we ask of the saints how they achieved spiritual effectiveness, they are only able to reply that, insofar as they did it themselves, they did it by love and prayer.
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Worship is the one, total adoring response of man to the one Eternal God.
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The mystic cannot wholly do without symbol and image, inadequate to his vision though they must always be: for his experience must be expressed if it is to be communicated, and its actuality is inexpressible except in some hint or parallel which will stimulate the dormant intuition of the reader.
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Love is creative. It does not flow along the easy paths, spending itself in the attractive. It cuts new channels, goes where it is needed.
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I do not think reading the mystics would hurt you myself: you say you must avoid books which deal with 'feelings' - but the mystics don't deal with feelings but with love which is a very different thing. You have too many 'feelings,' but not nearly enough love.
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If by losing the spirit of prayer, you mean losing the heavenly sensations of deep devotion, I am afraid that does not matter a scrap.
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Try to arrange things so that you can have a reasonable bit of quiet every day.
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Much is now being said about evangelism; but before we get effective evangelism, we have to get effective evangelists. Evangelism is useless unless it is the work of one devoted to God, willing and glad to suffer all things for God, penetrated by the attractiveness of God. New machinery, adaptations and adjustments, are not the first need... but more devoted, adoring, sacrificial souls.
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Man's will and God's grace rise and fall together.
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Grace is God himself, his loving energy at work within his church and within our souls.
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It is immediately apparent, however, that this sense-world, this seemingly real external universe - though it may be useful and valid in other respects - cannot be the external world, but only the Self's projected picture of it ... The evidence of the senses, then, cannot be accepted as evidence of the nature of ultimate reality; useful servants, they are dangerous guides.
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In my relations with my father, which are difficult and where I'm often met by coolness and indifference, I am constantly tempted to be cold and indifferent. Yet I know that this is a test if I could take it rightly.
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The note we end on is and must be the note of inexhaustible possibility and hope.
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Christianity is a religion which concerns us as we are here and now, creatures of body and soul. We do not "follow the footsteps of his most holy life" by the exercise of a trained religious imagination, but by treading the firm, rough earth, up hill and down dale.
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As the genuine religious impulse becomes dominant, adoration more and more takes charge. 'I come to seek God because I need Him', may be an adequate formula for prayer. 'I come to adore His splendour, and fling myself and all that I have at His feet', is the only possible formula for worship.
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There is no place in my soul, no corner of my character, where God is not.