The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.

Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others. (Igjugarjuk)

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).

The concept of time shuts off eternity.

If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way.

The passage of the mythological hero may be over ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward--into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world.

The actual point in question, throughout the centuries of Christian persecution, has never been faith in God, but faith in the Bible as the word of God, and in the Church (this Church or that) as the interpreter of that word.