Priest Sierra Simone Quotes

Whatever happens after this, I just want you to know that this was worth it. You were worth it. You were worth everything.

God is bigger than our sins. God wants you as you are—stumbling, sinning, confused.

Find whatever love is left in your life and hold on to it tightly. And one day, things will have gotten less gray, less dull.

The pain of one-sided love, of knowing that I had loved her more than she had loved me

Si vis amari, ama," you tell me. If you wish to be loved, love.

if this was what love was, then I didn’t know how anyone could bear the weight of it.

A man and a woman wanting each other is by far one of the least sinful things I've seen

a cold, self-righteous prig, who goes regularly to church, may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute.

One day, you might find that you have a life again. A life that makes you happy.

Could a vow be not all the way broken? Could a sin be not all the way committed?

I cared about her as a person, as a soul, and I wanted to fuck her, and that was the recipe for something much worse than carnal sin. It was a recipe for falling in love.

God dwelled in sex and marriage just as much as He dwelled in celibacy and service,

There was life after fucking up, after all, even for those who lived without fucking.

I want to build a tower around you, and then build a castle around that tower, and then dig a moat around that castle, and then I want to guard you like a dragon. Burn anyone who tries to hurt you into ash and then scorch those ashes a second time.

I want the memories to be worth the sins.

She was indeed the perfect package on the surface…but below it, I sensed she was so much more. Messy and passionate and raw and creative—a cyclone forced into an eggshell.

Sometimes the best decisions were the ones with the most short-term unhappiness

Is there no way to be both completely woman and completely good?

Is it weird to pray during sex? Maybe it is, but sometimes it happens. I’ve tried to accept that it’s who I am—a man who loves God, and who loves fucking, that I can be dirty and holy all in the same moment.

The thing about falling in love is that by the time you realize it’s happened, it’s already too late.

I know how to make sin feel like heaven.

Memories aren’t meant to be torments, Brother Patrick,” Brother Connor says in a too-casual voice, the one that means he’s guessed what I’m thinking about. “They are gifts.

I want you to know that the idea of deserving something you want is only ever going to be an incomplete qualification. You’re far more likely to remember the reasons you shouldn’t have something you want than the reasons you should, and you’re far more likely to let shame steer you than joy.

No, most people don’t guess, do they? That sometimes the people who laugh the loudest and reach for life the hardest are the ones closest to darkness.

Sean, faith and belief are the practices of committing a life in the face of no answers. God is and always will be outside of human comprehension.

Her eyelashes made me hard. That was a new benchmark for me, I had to admit.

I thought, this is what it’s like to be torn apart for love. This is what it means to be reborn.

was the only halo I ever wanted again, a circle of wicked wants and devilish delights.

Do we focus on pruning out all evil, or do we focus on growing love?

Worry is a sin, even I know that, yet I am more than just a lily of the field. I’m a lily that’s been plucked from the ground and laid at your feet. When it comes to you, I’m rootless and helpless and at your mercy for sunshine and water. And I’m not even supposed to be yours. How can I not worry?

God, I wanted to marry this woman or collar her or cage her; I wanted to own her, make her, take her; I wanted us on this old carpet forever, with her hair coming undone and her nipples hard and her naughty pussy milking my dick for everything it was worth.

God is bigger than our sins. God wants you as you are—stumbling, sinning, confused. All He asks of us is love—love for Him, love for others, and love for ourselves. He asks us to lay down our lives—not to live like ascetics, devoid of any pleasure or joy, but to give Him our lives so that he may increase our joy and increase our love.

she was the kind of woman who couldn’t live without meaning, powerful and real meaning, in her life.

Reasons why I should tell Zenny I love her right now: 1. I love her. 2. She needs to know. 3. She likes the honest guy thing. 4. An old nun told me to. Reasons why I should wait to tell her: 1. She’s bent over a sink.

I can't crack her faith the way her love cracks me. I can't carve away her connection with God the same way she's carved a gap into my heart that she refuses to fill

I don't know if everything will be okay . It may not be. You may think you are the lowest point now and then look up one day and see that its gotten so much worse.

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate I do…for I have the desire to do what is right, but I cannot carry it out. What a wretched man I am.

Productivity is never the point, the outcome is never the point. The doing is the point.

Sometimes our deepest happinesses start with regret.

I don’t know what you call it when you fuck someone’s ass raw, Father Bell, but that’s what I call it.

I wanted to show her all of my burdens and have her lift them from me with her clever mind and her elegant compassion.

As always, she had both of us under control when she surrendered her control to me.

I’d seen enough grief as a priest to know that people never really moved on, at least not in the linear, segmented way our culture expected people to.

Belief is this. Praying when you don't feel like it, when you don't know who or what is listening; it's doing the actions with the trust that something about it matters. That something about it makes you more human, a better human, a human able to love and trust and hope in a world where those things are hard. That is belief. That is the point of prayer. Not logging a wish list inside a cosmic ledger, not bartering for transactional services. You do it for the change around you; to the point of it is...itself. Nothing more and nothing less.

The path to God has become binary: you find God as a monastic or clergy, or you find God as a layperson. There is precious little in between. Oblation comes close but is still only one thread when there used to be an entire tapestry.

There was a beat of perfect completeness, a moment where I felt as if I could pluck each and every atom out of the air, where magic and God and something sweetly beyond complete understanding was real, completely real.

It’s called theodicy. When people try to explain how God can still be good when bad things happen.

I'm still furious with God over what happened to Lizzy. But I realized being furious with Him is not the same thing as wanting Him out of my life.

My little lamb,” I whispered. “You are so very, very wet right now.

I knew he was still in love with you, but I thought it was in the way we always romanticize our pasts, you know? That it wasn’t you he was still in love with, but that version of himself and that time in his life.

This was love, this was sacrifice, the opposite of sin, and maybe it was fucked up to feel like God was here with us in the back room of a strip club, but I did, like He was bearing witness to this moment where Poppy opened herself to the worst of me and erased it with her love, just like God did for us sinners every moment of every day.

Almost every variation of Christianity had been in the business of suppressing sex and its enjoyment, but suppressed desires didn’t just disappear. They festered. They created guilt and shame and, in the worst cases, deviancy.

You’re as intoxicating quiet as you are laughing. And you’re as beautiful serious as you are silly. And you are altogether more potent like this, more powerful, more stirring, and maybe it’s because silliness and contemplation are so much the same thing. Maybe it’s because no matter what you’re doing, you’re reminding me that I’m here and alive and that there’s more to living than work. That sometimes we can sleep in or play or pray and have nothing to show for it.

Was it truly so terrible for a man of God to have sex? The Protestants had been doing it for half a millennium and they seemed no more hell-bound than the Catholics for it. And was it so wrong to want both? I wanted to lead this church, I wanted to help people find God. But dammit, I wanted Poppy too, and I didn’t think it was fair that I had to choose.

I kissed her until it felt like we’d exchanged something—a promise maybe or a covenant or a piece of our souls. And when I finally pulled away, it was as if I pulled away reborn, a new man. A baptism by kiss rather than a baptism by water.

That sometimes the people who laugh the loudest and reach for life the hardest are the ones closest to darkness.

I miss her like a physical pain. Missing her is a cancer and it's stealing my cells and breaking my bones. It's eating me alive.

One and a half inches of damnation, and all I could think about was sinking deeper into hell.

Even in the dim basement light, she looked unreal, too rare and too lovely to gaze at for longer than a few seconds without pain.

This is what laying down a cross feels like. This is what taking up a new life feels like…it feels like Poppy Danforth.

In a way, it’s easier to dwell on sin and guilt than it is to dwell on love and forgiveness—especially

The most selfless people, the most driven people, they need permission to take care of themselves; they need someone who will put them first because they won't do it for themselves.

Biblical metaphors for God include a laboring woman, a breastfeeding mother, even a mother hen. And man and woman were both created in God’s image, were they not? Why use Him and not Her? In fact, why even say God instead of Goddess? Both Him and Her are not enough to contain the fullness of God, who is outside the construct of gender, who is so much more than the human mind can conceive.

Some people think it’s a bad idea, trying to justify God’s goodness, because it distracts us from what’s important. It tangles us up in intellectual knots, when intellection isn’t the point. We have philosophy for that. Religion is for ritual, for practice. For moral action.

There is something wonderful about slow, languorous lovemaking, about tracing over someone’s body with loitering fingers and lips. The kind of sex that remits revelations which might sound infinitesimal to anyone else—the existence of a small scar, perhaps, or a few crisp hairs at the top of a foot—but that are life-changing in their discovery.

I shouldn’t put you over my lap and spank your ass for being a brazen little slut and coming here without a bra,” I growled in her ear. “I shouldn’t twist ropes around your wrists and ankles until your cunt is exposed and then screw you until you can’t walk anymore. I shouldn’t flip you over and fuck your ass until your eyes water. I shouldn’t drive you down to the strip club and fuck you in the back room, so that you’ll forget all about Sterling and the only name you’ll remember to say is mine.” I lightly bit her nipple again. “Or God’s.

Franciscan friar Richard Rohr says that there are two kinds of time, at least according to the ancient Greeks. There is chronos—or chronological, ordered time—and then there is kairos. Kairos is subjective, qualitative. Deep Time is what Rohr calls it. A fullness, he says. The moments when the dots of our lives connect.

Life is a spiral. As long as we lived, we would keep moving forward. But on a spiral path, getting closer to your destination meant periodically passing the same things—emotions, issues, character flaws—over and over again, the way a person walking up a spiral staircase would continually find himself facing north every ten steps or so.

So which Jesus is right? What rubric should we use when we’re confronted by challenge and change? Do we focus on pruning out all evil, or do we focus on growing love?

Paul the Apostle says that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.

About the answers. It’s because every time I leave, I have more questions.

After I’d locked the door again, I stood over her and pulled at my collar, trying to take it off. “No,” she said, her pupils large and dark. “Leave it on.

I know God and I feel God more keenly and more deeply because of you.

Her voice was sexy. Her laugh was even sexier. But neither held a candle to her.

Nothing felt real, nothing felt intimate or close or true—it all seemed like a terrible movie of my life that I was being forced to watch from hundreds of feet away.

Was it truly so terrible for a man of God to have sex? The Protestants had been doing it for half a millennium and they seemed no more hell-bound than the Catholics for it.

The difference between envy and jealousy is subtle but distinct, once you know the flavors and contours of both.

Being unhappy or doubtful isn't a sin

We weren't ashamed to enjoy food and alcohol in moderation - why were we so afraid of sex?

Stay the fuck still, or I’m going to come before I want to, and if that happens, then I will take you over my knee and spank your ass until you learn how to listen,” I said sternly.

Well, I do feel like I should mention that I think virginity in general is an arbitrary construct designed by men as a system of control and fear. And it’s heteronormative. And limiting, because why do certain sexual acts preserve virginity and some destroy it? What if I fucked a dildo every night, but I hadn’t fucked a man? Why doesn’t anal sex count? And what if I was with someone and penetration wasn’t an option, for any number of biological or emotional or identity reasons—would that make our sex less somehow? I’d be a virgin forever?

She saw me as safe, and why shouldn’t she? I was a man of the cloth, after all, bound by God to be a caregiver of his flock. Of course, she would assume that she could tease me, touch me, without bothering my priestly composure. How could she know what her words and voice did to me? How could she know that her hand was currently searing its outline onto my chest?

Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me. Even Jesus had said those words. Not that they had worked out so well for him… Why was God so willing to leave bad cups all over the place?

Sometimes I want to think slowly. Sometimes I want the space to be wrong about something. Sometimes I just want quiet and the absence of . . . I don’t know. Production, I suppose. I want to have meandering thoughts and conversations and words that don’t go anywhere, that don’t always end up having a point.

God, the fucking irony of a sinner loving a nun. It’s agony. I’m dying. And as I’m both alight and aflame with loving her, these splashes of thought keep coming out of nowhere, like raindrops on a sunny day.

I want a good life, and I want passion and romance. But I was raised to see one as a waste and the other as distasteful, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t stop feeling like “Poppy Danforth” has become synonymous with waste and distaste, even though I’ve done everything I possibly can to escape that feeling…

The whole time, I stroked her legs and back and rubbed her clit, I told her what a good girl she was, such a good little slut for letting me fuck her sweet ass, my own obedient little slut, and she belonged to me, wasn’t that right? She only wanted me inside her, she only wanted my dick and my fingers and my mouth.

God is bigger than our sins. God wants you as you are- stumbling, sinning, confused. All He asks of us is love- live for Him, love for others, and love for ourselves. He asks us to lay down our lives- not to live like ascetics, devoid of any pleasure or joy, but to give Him our lives so that he may increase our joy and increase our love.

You may not ever be able brought out of bed in the morning with that security. That moment of okay may never come. All you can do is try to find a new balance, a new starting point. Find whatever love is left in your life and hold on to it tightly. And one day, things will have gotten less gray, less dull. One day, you might find that you have a life again. A life that makes you happy.

You’ve made me want to be better because you are so smart and self-possessed, and when I’m with you, I want to eat up life with great big bites, I want to feed life to you until you’re full. There’s never been anyone like you, and all I’ve ever wanted was to give you everything.

It would be easy to say that I’m only a visitor in his life, but truly, this patient, petulant, vulnerable man is only a visitor in mine.

And it's a stinging thing to note that even as I try my hardest [...] I can't crack her faith the way her love cracks me.

A belief tested by doubt is the strongest belief.

I’m a sinner with a dimpled smile and perfect hair, and I know how to make sin feel like heaven.

Father Bell was here instead. And church was in session.

because now it was only the thin line of my self-control that kept me from bending her over a pew and spanking that creamy white ass for making me hard when I didn’t want to be, for making me think about her naughty mouth when I should be thinking about her eternal soul. I cleared my throat, three years of unflagging discipline the only thing that kept my voice even.

You may not ever be able to get out of bed in the morning with that security. That moment of okay may never come. All you can do is try to find a new balance, a new starting point. Find whatever love is left in your life and hold on to it tightly. And one day, things will have gotten less gray, less dull. One day, you might find that you have a life again. A life that makes you happy.

Once, I’d made the mistake of not trusting. When I found Poppy kissing her ex-boyfriend, I’d assumed the worst and left the scene without even trying to talk to her. She’d done it as a purposeful attempt to drive us apart, unable to bear the guilt of being the catalyst for my schism from the clergy. If I had trusted her, if I had stayed, we could have had another year together. Instead, I’d run away, believing that she was unfaithful, and we’d spent a year miserably apart.

I find that fixed and unambiguous thinking is the mother of many sins. We forget that Christ was heterodox and radical. He was not safe, in his ideas or his passions or his presence, and he demanded everything of his followers, not the least their certainty that they knew all the shapes of right and wrong in their world. And so when I’m searching for a way forward, naively hunting for certainty, I’ve found that God judges me back to where God wants me. Which is in the middle of questions that feel unanswerable. I believe it is there - in the fire and friction of things I’ve been told don’t belong together, of things that I’ve been taught can’t be done - that the true answers lie.

Once upon a time there were as many ways to be holy as there were people, and the space between secular and monastic, between laity and clergy, was filled with all sorts of strange books and crannies. You could have visions, dream dreams, you could be monastic from the four walls of your own house or you could wander the country barefoot and begging. But we’ve lost much of that over the centuries.