Quotes by Lionel Blue

• On the way to work good-hearted young girls sometimes offer me their seats, which I accept and bless them in return, a transaction satisfying to all concerned.
• Old friends die on you, and they're irreplaceable. You become dependent.
• My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston.
• My mother enjoyed old age, and because of her I've begun to enjoy parts of it too. So far I've had it good and am crumbling nicely.
• It's more fun to watch without joining in.
• It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat.
• It is not possible to unknow what you do know - the result of that is fanaticism.
• I was not comfortable worshipping another Jew.
• I was not allowed a physical lover. Falling in love with Love was the best I could get.
• In speaking of Jesus, I must speak about Christianity because I do not think it possible or profitable to divide the two.
• Praying privately in churches, I began to discover that heaven was my true home and also that it was here and now, woven into this life.
• So many plusses, so many minuses.
• I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.
• The real evidence for Jesus and Christianity is in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practicing Christians.
• Some of the parables of the Kingdom made wonderful sense, but the exclusivity in the New Testament put me off.
• The real evidence is not practically speaking in scholarship but in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practising Christians. Their lives are the proofs of their beliefs.
• The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.
• To change, to convert? Why bother?
• To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn't wish my teens and 20s on my enemies.
• What would I have done if I'd been put to the test? Would I have risked my own life for people I hardly knew? Probably, I would have looked the other way at best or become another apologist for evil at worst.
• Someone gave me a New Testament. I had never before read it systematically. Some parts made sense, some parts shocked me.
• For a Christian, Jesus is the unique and only way that God has fully revealed himself. For a Jew this cannot be.
• The Christian use of religion as a personal love affair both shocked me, and attracted me.
• At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming.
• Because of my Marxism, I was not into myths or miracles, whether it was the virgin birth, the physical resurrection or casting out demons from an epileptic.
• Christianity had two faces which bewildered me - two pictures which didn't fit.
• Discrimination against Jews can be read in Thomas Aquinas, and insults against Jews in Martin Luther.
• Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.
• For a devotee or lover, the being, worshipped or loved, will always be the only one for her or him.
• For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.
• Good things come, and I'm not just referring to riding the buses.
• I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.
• During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.
• I recovered my infant Judaism, but in a reformist version.
• I am pleased now that I have lived in a gay as well as a religious ghetto, though it hasn't been very comfortable. Taken together, their limitations cancel each other out and I have seen the world more kindly and more honestly.
• I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls.
• I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.
• I have begun to sympathetically understand Paul, though I don't like him much.
• I found that when I did something for the sake of heaven, heaven happened. These things changed my life. I owe them to my encounter with Christianity.
• I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism, then this encounter, deeper than any theology, may happen.
• I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul's plusses.
• I still go to a Christian priory for retreats.