Carter Heyward Quotations

Love is a choice -- not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile.

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.

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

Lovers re-create the world.

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

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

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

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."

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.

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.

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

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

If we are to live with our feet on the ground, in touch with reality, we must help one another accept the fact that we who are christian are heirs to a body-despising, woman-fearing, sexually repressive religious tradition. If we are to continue as members of the church, we must challenge and transform it at the root. What is required is more than simply a "reformation." I am speaking of revolutionary transformation. Nothing less will do.

the very minute we think we 'have' God, God will surprise us. As we search in fire and earthquakes, God will be in the still small voice. As we listen in silent meditation, God will be shouting protests in the street. God is warning us that we had best not try to find our security in any well-defined concept or category of what is Godly - for the minute we believe we are into God, God is off again and calling us forth into some unknown place.

Love is a choice — not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guide. Love is a conversion to humanity — a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life.

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.

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 ...

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

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.

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.

She was tired in her body and soul of the indignities of being black in America. She was weary of the excuses and violence. She was sick and tired of racism.

Those who believe something can't be done shouldn't interfere with those who are doing it.