Thomas Keating advises people over and over again not to look for the fruits of this prayer in their subjective experience of it.  Centering Prayer is not about accessing sublime states of consciousness or having mystical experiences.  The fruits of this prayer are seen in daily life.  They express themselves in your ability to be a bit more present in your life, more flexible and forgiving with those you live and work with, more honest and comfortable in your own being.  These are the real signs that the inner depths have been touched and have begun to set in motion their transformative work.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 14

[The sacred word] is not a "special" word....It is simply a place-holder, the finger pointing at the moon of your intention...

After a while you begin to discover yet another added benefit of this sacred word: It will sometimes pop up even when you are not in Centering Prayer--right int he middle of your busy life--to bring you back to center when you find yourself getting agitated or ungrounded.  I can't recall the number of times I've been caught in traffic jams or airport security lines, my blood pressure escalating rapidly, only to have my word sweetly bubble up from the depths to remind me that every moment I'm actually here, I'm in the presence of God.

...the word itself is neutral.  It's your intention that makes it sacred.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 26-27

Whatever your mind serves you up is just fine.  If you sink immediately into such depths of stillness that when the bowl bell is rung at the end of twenty minutes, it seems like only a minute, great!  You've had an easy and blessed time of it.  If every minute feels like twenty and you've been bedeviled by thoughts more prolific than the heads of Medusa, but still you've been doing your best to let them go and return to the openness, great!  You've gotten a good aerobic workout of your "muscle" of surrender.

...For the moment it's enough simply to reiterate Thomas Keating's reassurance that "the only thing you can do wrong in this prayer is to get up and walk out."  To sit there and quietly continue to do the practice, even if you perceive your efforts as totally unsuccessful, is, in his words, to know what it means to "consent to the presence and action of God within us" in whatever for it comes.  The power of this prayer lies in the consent.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 24-25

I sometimes call Centering Prayer "boot camp in Gethsemane," for it practices over and over, thought by thought, the basic gesture of Jesus' night of struggle in the garden: "Not my will be done, Oh Lord, but thine."

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 24

In one of the very earliest training workshops, led by Thomas Keating, a nun tried out her first twenty-minute taste of Centering Prayer and then lamented, "Oh, Father Thomas, I'm such a failure at this prayer.  In twenty minutes, I've had ten thousand thoughts."
"How lovely!" Responded Thomas Keating without missing a beat.  "Ten thousand opportunities to return to God!"

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 23-24

Meditation rests on the wager that if you can simply break the tyranny of ordinary awareness, the rest will begin to unfold itself.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 16

If we could picture our plight, then, in this unusual state of our being, which spiritual masters from time immemorial have described as "sleep," we could say that each one of us has a Mary deep within us, glued to the feet of the Master.  There are incredible luminous depths within in which we know how to listen and to whom we are listening.  But the clarity of our listening is obscured because out on the periphery we also have a Martha who thinks that the whole world is riding on her back and drowns out the inner music with her constant barrage of "I need," "I want," "Pay attention to me,"

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 15

At the center of our being is an innermost point of truth which shares not only the likeness, but perhaps even the substance of God's own being.  And yet, following the bent of Christian tradition, he makes it absolutely clear that access to this center is not at our command; it is entered only through the gateway of our complete poverty and nothingness.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Payer and Inner Awakening, pg. 14

In its final formulation by the Prophet, Mormonism...is generous, open, and expansive. Whether it is so in its embodiment in the world depends on the willingness of individual Latter-day Saints to continue their prophet's reformation by reforming Mormonism as it exists in their personal faith and lives...Mormonism will 'revolutionize and civilize the world' no faster than individual Mormons receive erstwhile enemies and strangers as friends and brothers and sisters. Mormonism will...build a heaven on earth no faster and more effectively than individual Mormons shoulder this responsibility themselves

Dom Bradley, "The Grand Fundamental Principles of Mormonism: Joseph Smith's Unfinished Reformation," Sunstone Issue 141, 2006

Our vision of others is distorted, because we see them only through the refracted image of ourselves. We play at love, but perform it immaturely, childishly. Paul doesn’t really explain how being able to “know, even as we are known” is related to enduring charity. But in that moment of really seeing Dwayne, I started to understand that once we see each other, we love readily, even inevitably. And real love–Christ’s–comes, undeserved and even unbidden, as a gift of clear sight. Because charity is a gift of God, and not an act of will, it bears all things–even human contradiction; it can come to us even in anger, disgust, or fear, as the infant Christ came to a dark, forgotten corner to dwell among the beasts and his beastly and beloved human kin.

Kristine Haglund, www.bycommonconsent.com, "To See Face to Face"

You might picture [spiritual awareness] as a kind of interior compass whose magnetic north is always fixed on God.  It's thre, it's as much a part of what hold you in life as your breathing or your heartbeat.  And its purpose, just like a compass, is for orientation.

...spiritual awareness perceives through an intuitive grasp of the whole and an innate sense of belonging.  It's something like sounding the note G on the piano and instantly hearing the D and the B that surround it to make it a chord.  and since spiritual awareness is perception based on harmony, the sense of selfhood arising out of it is not plagued by that sense of isolation and anxiety that dominates life at the ordinary level of awareness.

If we have within us a compass pointing to the magnetic north of God, does this mean taht God dwells within us, as the center of our being?...Caustously, the answer to this question is "yes."  I say "cautiously" because Christian theology makes very clear that the human being is not god and that ht einnermost core of our being is not itself divine.  And yet theology has always upheld the reality of our own divine being become more and more mysteriously interwoven.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, pg. 12

Like most of the great spiritual masters of our universe, Jesus taught from the conviction that we human beings are victims of a tragic case of mistaken identity.  The person I normally take myself to be--that busy, anxious little "I" so preoccupied with its goals,fear, desire, and issues--is never even remotely the whole of who I am, and to seek the fulfillment of my life at this level means to miss out on the bigger life.  This is why, according to his teaching, the one who tries to keep his "life" (i.e., the small one) will lose it, and the one who is willing to lose it will find the real thing.  Beneath the surface there is a deeper and vastly more authentic Self, but its presence is usually veiled by the clamor of the smaller "I" with its insatiable needs and demands.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, pg. 10

Intentional silence almost always feels like work.  It doesn't come naturally to most people, and there is in fact considerable resistance raised from the mind itself: "You mean I just sit there and make my mind a blank?"  Then the inner talking begins in earnest, and you ask yourself, "How can this be prayer?  How can God give me my imagination, reason, and feelings and then expect me not to use them?"  "Where do 'I' go to if I stop thinking?"  "Is it safe?"

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, pg. 8-9

Silence is God's first language.

-John of the Cross

quoted in Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, pg. 7

What goes on in those silent depths during the time of Centering Prayer is no one's business, not even your own; it is between your innermost being and God; that place where, as St. Augustine once said, "God is closer to your soul than you are yourself."  your own subjective experience of the prayer may be that nothing happened--except for the more or less continuous motion of letting go of thoughts.  But in the depths of your being, in fact, plenty has been going on, and things are quietly but firmly being rearranged.

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, pg. 6

The law of moral agency, of choice and consequence, does not require that we entirely bear the burden of our own choices made in this life because those choices are always made under circumstances that are less than perfect.  Our accountability is thus always partial, incomplete.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 92

What can it mean, that Christ's blood was spilt for our sins, that "by his bruises we are healed"?  Perhaps His perfect love means His identification with human suffering is so complete, that in one fell vision He comprehended the depth and range and terror of all our individual pain.  Perhaps it is the almost irresistible power of His superabundant love manifest in His choice to suffer what He suffered, that transforms the sinner's heart.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 90

The great healing of the universe is centered on the breach in our relationship with our God.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 90

Heaven is not a club we enter.  Heaven is a state we attain...we acquire Heaven in accordance with a growing capacity to receive it...heaven depends on our attaining a particular mode of being, a character and mind and will that are the product of life-long choosing.  Conforming to celestial law, we become celestial persons. "That which is governed by the law is also preserved by law and perfected and sanctified by the same (D&C 88:34-35)" in the language of scripture.  Salvation, in this light, is the imitation of Christ--or, to make the concept clearer, the imitating of Christ.  One is only merciful to the extent one extends mercy.  One is only honest to the extent one practices honesty.  One is only truthful to the extent one speaks truthfully, and so on.  That is why, all good intentions and Christ's grace notwithstanding, whosoever chooses "to abide in sin,...cannot be sanctified by law, neither by mercy."  heaven is a condition and a sanctified nature toward which all godly striving tends; it is not a place to be found by walking through the right door with a heavenly hall pass.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 88-89

...all this talk about punishment and rewards, about justice and merit an deserts, can be wrongheaded and misleading.  We are not in some contest to rack up points.  We will not someday wait with bated breath to see what prize or pain is meted out by a great dispenser of trophies.  We cannot so trivialize life that we make of it a coliseum where we wage moral combat like spiritual gladiators, for a presiding Authority on high to save or damn according to our performance.  Where would be the purpose in all of that?  He might take the measure of our souls at any moment and deal with us accordingly, saving Himself, not to mention us, a great deal of trouble.

How much more meaningful is a life designed for spiritual formation, rather than spiritual evaluation.  All tests evaluate, and life is no exception.  But the most meaningful and productive tests are those that assess with an eye to improvement, that measure in order to remedy, and that improve and prepare us for the next stage in an upward process of advancement. For these reasons, all talk of heaven that operates in terms of earning rather than becoming is misguided.  Such ideas misconstrue the nature of God, His grace, and the salvation He offers.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 87

We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out.  That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character...What we are worshipping we are becoming.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

quoted in Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 87

Only by choosing the good and experiencing its fruit do we learn to savor and embrace the good.  Similarly, only by choosing the evil and living through its consequences do we learn what evil is and why it deserves to be rejected.  Or as Julian saw, "So pain endures for a time.  Its role is to purge us, make us know ourselves, and it drives us to the Lord."  Ther in lies the "needfulness" of sin, the part it has to play.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 84

We find ourselves in a universe pervaded by laws that define the relationship of action and consequence. Some are manmade: speed and you get a ticket; rob and you go to jail; break curfew and you're grounded.  Some are physical: let go of a rock and it drops; expose potassium to air and it forms hydrogen gas; mix baking soda and vinegar and you get a frothing pot worthy of the witch's concoction in Shakespeare's Macbeth.  And some laws are moral: nurturing hatred cankers the soul; practicing kindness and forbearance develops serenity.

Parents and police officers alert us to the first category.  Physicians and chemists may give us fluency in the second.  But nothing short of trial and error will convert us to the unyielding strictures of the third.  To be adept at the first entails outward behavior.  Mastering the second challenges our mind.  but to live in harmony with the moral law of the universe requires body and soul, heart and mind, the will and the affections of the undivided self.  This is the meaning of Jesus' words that living the highest and holiest law; loving God, requires "all your heart, and...all your soul, and...all your mind."

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 84

Commandments are the expression of those eternal laws that will lead us to  a condition of optimal joyfulness.  They are the beacon lights of greater realities that define the cosmic streams in which we swim.  Operating in harmony with those realities, as a swimmer who works with the current rather than against it, empowers and liberates us to fill the measure of our creation. 

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 83

What is always at stake in any decision we make is what that choice turns us into.  We may suffer the unfortunate consequences of other peoples' choices.  People may honor or abuse us, harm or nourish us. But for the most part, it is our own choices that shape our identity.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 81

Sin is not an arbitrary category that God imposes.  And it is not synonymous with simple error or misjudgement.  This is a truth, like others we are examining, that is best revealed in the searchlight of honest introspection.  We know the difference between regret and remorse.  We regret giving erroneous directions that get the stranger lost.  We feel remorse for the slander deliberately spoken.  We regret an action that leads to harm.  We feel remorse for choosing that action to inflict harm.  Legitimate guilt, the kind we cannot explain away or therapeutically resolve, involves more than bad judgment or human error.  The degree of guilt we experience is proportional to the deliberateness with which we cause hurt.  Herein lies the clue to the meaning of sin, and the way beyond it.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 80

God is invested in our lives and happiness, because He chooses to be a Father to us.  His concern with human sin is with the pain and suffering it produces.  Sympathy and sorrow, not anger and vengeance, are th emotions we must look to in order to plumb the nature of the divine response to sin. 

...Sin is pain, and the intensity of His response to sin is commensurate with the intensity of that pain He knows sin will entail, and in which He has already chosen to share.  For He is the God who weeps.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 79

"A...paradox is evident in the prophet's admonition, that we "feast upon [Christ's] love; for ye may, if your minds are firm, forever."  Why should we need firm minds to feast upon love?  Like all gifts, love can be hard to recieve.  As children we welcome presents and affection with the same ready heart and hand, but we tend to lose knack as we grow older and more self-sufficient.  Love may be a heavy burden because of pride; we want to be self-made men and women, paying our own way, and are ashamed of our need.  Perhaps we are made to see our own littleness, by the great chasm that opens up between our merit and the gift.  Or perhaps we are genuinely ill ast ease, as one who knows at what great cost the gift has come.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 74-75

Our task is to school our appetites, not suppress them, to make them work in concert with a will that disciplines the spirit as much as the flesh.  For desire has both spiritual and bodily expression, and our life is a journey to purify both.  Along the way, we discipline and honor the body, even as we aspire to perfect the soul, finding in the end that the body and spirit, fitly framed together, do indeed provide the deepest joy.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 72

The fact that Christ chose children as a model for moral goodness means socialization, not incarnation, is the source of our ills. 

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 72

The narrative that develops is of a universal condemnation.  The entire human race is lost, fallen, damned, waiting and hoping for rescue, for salvation. 

Surely this is a perverse vision and a slander upon God.  It suggests His plan was derailed before it got off the ground, that He is a brilliant repairman but a poor designer. God's creation of the human race begins in catastrophe and is in need of salvaging. 

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 64

"Call  a life worse," [Plato] said, "if it leads a soul to become more unjust,and better if it leads the soul to become more just."

We have no way of knowing, of course, why some are born in health and affluence, while others enter broken bodies or broken homes, or emerge into a realm of war or hunger. So we cannot give definite meaning to our place in the world, or to our neighbor's.  But Plato's reflections should give us pause and invite both humility and hope.  Humility because if we chose our lot in life there is every reason to suspect merit, and not disfavor, is behind disadvantaged birth.  A blighted life may have been the more courageous choice--at least it was for Plato.  Though the first act of the play was obscure its hidden details make any judgments in this second act so much foolish speculation.  So how can we feel pride in our own blessedness, or condescension at another's misfortune?  And Plato's reflections should give us hope, because his myth reminds us that suffering can be sanctifying, that pain is not punishment, and that the path to virtue is fraught with opposition.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 60-61

...birth is ascent, not fall, and life's purpose is educative, not punitive.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 60

Eve's and Adam's decision to eat the fruit of the tree, and thus forsake their paradise, may be an allegory for--or perhaps a counterpart to--our own decision to accept the conditions of mortality, in exchange for a heavenly paradise.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 57

...Birth into this world represents a step forward in an eternal process of development and growth, not a descent or regression from a primal goodness.  God's work is therefore first and foremost educative and constructive, not reparative. 

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 52

Our lives are more like a canvas on which we paint, than a script we need to learn--though the illusion of the latter appeals to us by its lower risk.  It is easier to learn a part than create a work of art.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 50

Guilt, the legitimate remorse we feel for a deliberate decision to do wtrong, is all the proof we need that arguments about determinism and predestination are a philosopher's game.  Guilt is how we know we are free to choose.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 49

Legitimate guilt is to the spirit what the sharp protest of a twisted ankle is to the foot: its purpose is to hurt enough to stop you from crippling yourself further.  Its function is to prevent more pain, not expand it.  This kind of guilt comes from the light and beckons us to follow; its counterfeit takes us only deeper into the darkness of despair.  for, as William law wrote, "Christ never was, nor can be, in any creature but purely as a spirit of love."

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 49

My impression is that, informed and animated by a thoughtful faith in a wider horizon, the veil quite properly funnels the bulk of our attention to the here and now; on the time, people, problems, and opportunities of this day, this moment.  Despite glimpses of eternal purposes that come as gifts and hopes, my life unfolds in tremendous, all-but-complete ignorance of our mysterious universe.  There is no proving God to others.  Ultimate reality is not something we know; it is something in which we put our trust...The veil is not a curse or cause for existential lament;.  It is necessary to our stage of progression as beings.  While we search, listen, and pray for comfort and direction beyond our sphere, the veil--the necessary epistemic distance from this "beyond"--affords us freedom for independent action not possible if we could literally and readily see God smiling or frowning at each move.  And freedom independently to discern and choose between good and evil (morality) and good and bad (quality) is at the core of our purpose, as the powerful mythos of God suggests.

-Philip Barlow

quoted in Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 47

The woman of the parable who lost her coin gives...a clue, for she "would not have found it if she had not remembered it...It was lost only to the eyes; it was preserved in memory."  So it must be with
God, he reasons.  "How shall I find You if I am without memory of You?"  We can only seek what we have known, and knowledge of God, then, must be memory of God.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 39

Paul wrote a beautiful hymn to charity, which the King James translators rendered in part, "For now we see through a glass darkly."  By "glass" they meant a looking glass, a mirror.  The original actually reads, "We see in a mirror dimly" (NRSV).  In other words, we are the mystery yet to be revealed.  It is our own identity that we must struggle to discern, before we can rightly perceive our place in the cosmos and our relation to the Divine.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 38

Grattitude is an illogical response to a world that never had us in mind as an audience; but it is the fitting tribute to an original Creator who ancicipated our joy and participates fully in it.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 15

Darwin was sure that even those spectacles of nature that overwhelm us by their beauty, from the peacock's tail to the fragrance of an English rose, serve not man's purpose but their own, which is survival and reproducibility.  If anything in nature could be found that had been "created for beauty in the eyes of man" rather than the good of its possessor, it would be "absolutely fatal" to his theory.  In other words, maple leaves in autumn do not  suddenly transform into stained glass pendants, illuminated by a setting sun, in order to satisfy a human longing for beauty.  Their scarlet, ochre, and golden colors emerge as chlorophyll production shuts down, in preparation for sacrificing the leaves that are vulnerable to winter cold, and ensuring the survival of the tree.  but he tree survives, while our vision is ravished.  The peacock's display attracts a hen, and it nourishes the human eye.  the flower's fragrance entices a pollinator, but it also intoxicates the gardener.  In the "while," in that "and," in that "but it also," we find the giftedness of life.

Therein lies the most telling sign of a vast superabundance.  Nature's purposes and God's purposes are not in competition but work in tandem.  If the first works by blind necessity, the second works by generosity.  And in recognizing the giftedness, we turn from appreciation to gratitude; from admiration for the world's efficiency and order, to love of its beauty and grandeur.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 36

If God, like us, is susceptible to immense pain, He is, like us, the greater in His capacity for happiness.  The presence of such pain serves the larger purposes of God's master plan, which is to maximize the human capacity for joy, or in other words, "to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man."  He can no more foster those ends in the absence of suffering and evil than one could find the traction to run or the breath to sing in the vacuum of space. God does not instigate pain or suffering, but He can weave it into his purposes.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 33

To have an endless empathy, [Christ] would have to know a terror and abandonment and hopelessness beyond human conceiving, such that not mortal tongue could say, you don't know what I have known, you haven't been where I have been.  Exactly how this would be possible, who can say, but that is what He would have to experience.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 28

In one Talmudic text, the passage made famous by Handel's Messiah is markedly recast to suggest that God, burdened by the sins of the world, appeals to His people to console Him, not the other way around.  "Comfort me, comfort me, my people, " the text reads.  As early as the days of Noah, the pain of humankind "grieved him to his heart."  In this connection, it is significant that the God of the Old Testament asks His people to "Make me a sanctuary, so that I may dwell among them."  In other words, the temple Solomon builds, like the tabernacle in the wilderness, is God's sanctuary and place of refuse, not ours.  For a being as good and pure as God to enter into this realm of darkness and depravity must be exquisitely painful on every level.  His love impels Him to visit His people in their distress, and the temple is His shield and refuge from the full onslaught of worldly pain and evil.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 26

A God without body or parts is conceivable.  But a God without passions would engender in our hearts neither love nor interest.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 25

God's pain is as infinite as his love.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 25

Adam and Eve became more, not less, like God insofar as they came to see the same moral distinctions He did.  This was precisely what He confirms, saying Adam and Eve have "become like one of us, knowing good and evil."  In all the centuries of Christian hand-wringing and breast beating that have followed int he wake of the Adamic decision, this fact seems to have disappeared entirely.  Humankind and God now share a common moral awareness, a common capacity to judge between right and wrong, a common capacity for love.

We are continuing with tragic and devastating exceptions, on the trajectory inaugurated by Adam and Eve, becoming ever more like god, as we become ever more adept at discerning good and evil, and nourishing the wellsprings of human love.  And in so doing, we grow more capable of discerning a kind and merciful God among His many counterfeits.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 20

The question is, have we good reason to believe we are even in the same ballpark as God when it comes to the values we hold dear?  The idea that God's thoughts are not our thoughts, His ways not our ways, has been used as a cudgel to beat into abject submission any who question a Deity's right to save whom He will and damn whom He will, to bless or curse as He chooses, to have His own heavenly notions about what is good and right.
In actual fact, it makes little sense to recognize in our conscience a reliable guide to what is virtuous, lovely, and praiseworthy in the world where god has placed us, while suggesting He inhabits a different moral universe...As the character in Elie Wiesel's play, The Trial of God, protests, if our truth "is not His as well, then He's worse than I thought.  Then it would mean that He gave us the taste, the passion of truth without telling us that this truth is not true."

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 19

Any God whose only response to pain and suffering is to inflict more pain and suffering, is not aGod Ivan [of the Brothers Karamazov] can worship....if gods such as Moloch, or the God of some Christians, exist, they do not deserve our reverence or our love.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 18

But sovereigns, like fathers, can have rightful authority to govern or direct us, with no claim whatwoever on our love--let alone adoration.  We cannot prove God exists, and certainly cannot prove that any god who exists is kind and merciful rather than cruel or indifferent.  But we can say that only the first type of god is one we would want to worship. We reject out of hand any suggestion that mere cosmic authorship or raw power whould itself call forth our loyalty or devotion.

...We do not concede that a god who creates us, or the entire universe for that matter, is beyond reproach or question by virtue of his power alone.  We certainly do not accord earthly parents unchallenged perrogatives over their own children, even if they sire, rear, and nourish them.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 15

Augustine reported approvingly that when asked what God was doing before creation, a churchman replied, "getting hell ready for those who pry too deep!"

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 14