The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life
Terryl L. Givens
Top 10 Best Quotes
“What we choose to embrace, to be responsive to, is the purest reflection of who we are and what we love.”
“As an inmate of a concentration camp, Corrie Ten Boom heard a commotion, and saw a short distance away a prison guard mercilessly beating a female prisoner. “What can we do for these people?” Corrie whispered. “Show them that love is greater,” Betsie replied. In that moment, Corrie realized her sister’s focus was on the prison guard, not the victim she was watching. Betsie saw the world through a different lens. She considered the actions of greatest moral gravity to be the ones we originate, not the ones we suffer.”
“A supreme deity would no more gift us with intellect and expect us to forsake it in moments of bafflement, than He would fashion us eyes to see and bid us shut them to the stars”
“The most terrifying specter that haunts the modern psyche is not death or disease or nuclear annihilation. It is loneliness.”
“Those mortals who operate in the grey area between conviction and incredulity are in a position to choose most meaningfully, and with most meaningful consequences […] Perhaps only a doubter can appreciate the miracle of life without end.”
“We humans have a lamentable tendency to spend more time theorizing the reasons behind human suffering, than working to alleviate human suffering.”
“The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible,” he said. He then made his point with the simple example of a taste for strawberries. “There is no abstract and impersonal proof either that strawberries are good or that they are not good. To the man who likes them they are good, to the man who dislikes them they are not. But the man who likes them has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world in which both must live. . . . The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness he has.”
“The call to faith, in this light, is not some test of a coy god, waiting to see if we "get it right." It is the only summons, issued under the only conditions, which can allow us fully to reveal who we are, what we most love, and what we most devoutly desire. Without constraint, without any form of mental compulsion, the act of belief becomes the freest possible projection of what resides in our hearts...The greatest act of self-revelation occurs when we choose what we will believe, in that space of freedom that exists between knowing that a thing is, and knowing that a thing is not.”
“If we are co-eternal with God, then it is not God's creation of the human out of nothing that defines our essential relationship to him. It is His freely made choice to inaugurate and sustain loving relationships, and our choice to reciprocate, that are at the core of our relationship to the Divine.”
“...God is not exempt from emotional pain...One the contrary, God's pain is as infinite as His love.”
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Book Keywords:
morality, doubt, revelation, suffering, god, seeking, life, grey-areas, choice, faith, inspirational, conviction, spirituality
