Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of "Christian" countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I'm afraid.

It seems we are suffering from a very narrow and self serving reading of the Gospel right now.

Faith is not for overcoming obstacles; it is for experiencing them—all the way through!

God comes to you disguised as your life.

Much of the work of midlife is to tell the difference between those who are dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you.

Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.

Who is telling us about the false self today? Who is even equipped tell us? Many clergy have not figured this out for themselves, since even ministry can be a career decision or an attraction to "religion" more than the result of an encounter with God or themselves. Formal religious status can maintain the false self rather effectively, especially if there are a lot of social payoffs like special respect, titles, salaries, a good self image, or nice costumes. It is no accident that the religious "Pharisees" became the symbolic bad guys in the Jesus story.