When I say I believe in God, God is not God’s name. God is our name for that which cannot be named or known.
Forrest Church (Unitarian Universalist, author, theologian, minister)
Belief lives in the mind. It is a cognitive, intellectual dimension of religion, made up of ideas. Faith is deeper. It is a profound, existential sense of trust. Faith lives at the mysterious spiritual center of our being.
Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar, Fluent in Faith: A Unitarian Universalist Embrace of Religious Language (Unitarian Universalist, educator, minister)
Birth if from the mystery of night into the greater mystery of day
Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies (Brahmo Samaj, nationalist, reformer, author, poet)
Little more than one thing seems certain, and that is, we are, here, enveloped in a world of mystery, and can do no better perhaps, than gratefully to accept what little light we can gather, and wait patiently the promised period when we shall see as we are seen, and know as we are known.
Moses Ballou, “The Resurrection,” Universalist Quarterly (1847) p. 270 (Universalist, minister)
It is curious to note the old sea-margins of human thought. Each subsiding century reveals some new mystery; we build where monsters used to hide themselves
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Unitarian, poet)
Love is an endless mystery, for it has nothing else to explain it.
Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies (Brahmo Samaj, poet, playwright, reformer)
Must love be ever treated with profaneness as a mere illusion? or with coarseness as a mere impulse? or with fear as a mere disease? or with shame as a mere weakness? or with levity as a mere accident? whereas it is a great mystery and a great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality, and happiness, — mysterious, universal, inevitable as death.
Harriet Martineau (Unitarian, journalist, author, reformer)
Mysterious Presence, Source of all —
The world without, the soul within,
Fountain of life, O hear our call
And pour Thy living waters in!
Seth Curtis Beach (Unitarian, minister, author)
We are a mystery, but a living mystery. The most alive thing about us is what we are when thought breaks off and our minds can go no further – for that is where our yearning begins, our inconsolable yearning, and the loneliness that begets compassion, the forlornness that prepares the heart for love.
A. Powell Davies, “Where Can Truth Be Found?” Without Apology. Skinner House, 1998: 26. (Unitarian, minister, social reformer)
A stone upon my hand contains a treasury of secrets.
Raindrops splashing on my cheek will ever bring surprise.
Trees swaying in the wind express the mystery of life.
Carl J. Nelson, Snow in April (1996) (Unitarian Universalist, minister)
