Can I just say, quickly, that this book is changing how I think about things-- in a good way. It is amazingly thought provoking and the writing style and contents are awesome. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is interested in any book on Christian Spirituality.
"And yet the crime the couple committed seems unforgivable. They fell for a trick. Far from a technicality in behavior, their eating of the fruit was a heart-level betrayal between committed friends: God and man. At issue in the tragedy of the Garden is a relational crime. Adam and Eve were not satisfied with their relationship with God, and they wanted to change the dynamic by increasing their own power, a reality that simply wasn't possible, save the fantasy realm whispered to them through the words of the evil one" (83).
"I get this feeling sometimes that after the world ends, when God destroys all our buildings and our flags, we will wish we had seen everybody as equal, that we had eaten dinner with prostitutes, held them in our arms, opened up spare rooms for them and loved them and learned from them. I was just another stupid child in the flow, you know; I didn't know any of these things. I didn't know it didn't matter what a person looked like, how much money they made of whether or not they were cool. I didn't know that cool was just a myth and that one person was just as beautiful and meaningful as another" (104).
"As horrible as it sounds, it would make sense that things of worth are things God loves, and things that don't have worth are things God doesn't love. I mean, I really started wondering if maybe a human is defined by who loves him. I know it sounds terrible, because we have always grown up believing that a person is valuable even if nobody loves them, and I certainly agree with that because God made everybody and the Bible very clearly states He loves everybody. But, as Paul said, if those relations are disturbed, the relations between God and man, then we feel the desire to be loved and respected by other people instead of God, and if we don't get that love and respect, we feel very sad or angry because we know that our glory is at stake, that if there isn't some glory being shone through us by somebody who has authority, we'll be dead inside, like a little light will go out and our souls will feel dark, like nothing can grow there. We'll feel that there is a penalty, by default, for being removed from love" (108).
"People see what they want to see based on what associations are going to help them survive" (112).
"I watched an interview with Mel Gibson recently, about his film The Passion of the Christ. Gibson said it was important for Jesus to look very masculine in the film, and he wanted an actor who was good-looking. And I thought the movie The Passion was quite beautiful, bit I wondered if very many people would go to see it if the guy who played Jesus in the movie were ugly. And that made me wonder how many people would follow Jesus today if, say, He showed up in America looking the way He looked thousands of years ago. I wondered if anybody would want to interview Jesus on television. I'll bet, if Jesus came to America and tried to do television interviews, the only people who would interview Him would be the people on public television, because on public television they are not concerned about associating their television personalities with the commercial endorsement of products" (125).
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