Every time you reject yourself, you idealize others.
The spiritual life is a reaching out to our innermost self, to our fellow human and to our God.
Our tendency is to run from the painful realities or try to change them as soon as possible. But cure without care makes us into rulers, controllers, manipulators.
Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going?-are not questions with an answer but questions that open us up to new questions which lead us deeper into the unshakeable mystery of existence.
One way to express the spiritual crisis of our time is to say that most of us have an address but cannot be found there.
It is not easy to enter into the silence and reach beyond the many boisterous and demanding voices of our world and to discover there the small intimate voice saying: ‘You are my Belived Child, on you my favor rests.’
Intimacy is not a happy medium. It is a way of being in which the tension between distance and closeness is dissolved and a new horizon appears. Intimacy is beyond fear.
In solitude we become aware that we were together before we came together and that life is not a creation of our will but rather an obedient response to the reality of our being united.
When we learn to move through suffering, rather than avoid it, then we greet it differently. We become willing to let it teach us. We even begin to see how God can use it for some larger end.
Peacemaking is a full-time vocation that includes each member of God’s people.
Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the Beloved.
I always try to turn my personal struggles into something helpful for others.
Is my growing old making me any closer to Christ? Am I only getting older or am I getting more godly?
The only feelings that do not heal are the ones you hide.
The difference between rich and poor is not that the rich sin is more than the poor, that the rich find it easier to call sin a virtue.
It is very hard to stay in touch with our true identity because those who want our money, our time, and our energy profit more from our insecurity and fears than from our inner freedom.
The tragedy of our lives is that, while we suffer from the wounds afflicted on us by those who love us, we cannot avoid wounding those we want to love.
We must ask ourselves how many times others would benefit more from our silence than from our words.
Joy and laughter are the gifts of living in the presence of God and trusting that tomorrow is not worth worrying about.
Prayer is the beginning and the end, the source and the fruit, the core and the content, the basis and the goal of all peacemaking.