Carter Heyward Quotes

#1. God reveals herself through our relationships not only to other people but also to other creatures and nature.

Carter Heyward

#2. The only theology worth doing is that which inspires and transforms lives, that which empowers us to participate in creating, liberating, and blessing the world.

Carter Heyward

#3. Lovers re-create the world.

Carter Heyward

#4. We are born in relation, we live in relation, we die in relation. There is, literally, no such human place as simply "inside myself." Nor is any person, creed, ideology, or movement entirely "outside myself."

Carter Heyward

#5. Faith is the new, the mysterious, the surprising. Nobody has ever been there before.

Carter Heyward

#6. To forgive is not to forget, but rather to re-member whatever has been dismembered.

Carter Heyward

#7. For god is nothing other than the eternally creative source of our relational power, our common strength, a god whose movement is to empower, bringing us into our own together, a god whose name in history is love ...

Carter Heyward

#8. Without critical work, political awareness is likely to remain superficial and rhetorical.

Carter Heyward

#9. It's obvious throughout secular and church history that significant legislation follows only after dramatic action.

Carter Heyward

#10. But doubt is a crucial to faith as darkness is to light. Without one, the other has no context and is meaningless. Faith is, by definition, uncertainty. It is full of doubt, steeped in risk. It is about matters not of the known, but of the unknown.

Carter Heyward

#11. I'm a priest, not a priestess. Priestess implies mumbo jumbo and all sorts of pagan goings-on. Those who oppose us would love to call us priestesses. They can call us all the names in the world
it's better than being invisible.

Carter Heyward

#12. If women were in charge, abortion would be a sacrament, an occasion of deep and serious and sacred meaning.

Carter Heyward

#13. The whole inhabited earth is sacred space in which God lives, breathes, and acts.

Carter Heyward

#14. Faith is a process of leaping into the abyss not on the basis of any certainty about where we shall land, but rather on the belief that we shall land.

Carter Heyward

#15. Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward." Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies.

Carter Heyward

#16. To say I love you is to say that you are not mine, but rather your own.

Carter Heyward

#17. In the Spirit which draws us into honest engagement with one another, including those who may be very different from us in various ways, God calls us to wake up and learn how to love and respect one another, period.

Carter Heyward