That is our vocation: to convert the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced.
The world is evil only when you become its slave.
Jesus didn’t say, ‘Blessed are those who care for the poor.’ He said, ‘Blessed are we where we are poor, where we are broken.’ It is there that God loves us deeply and pulls us into deeper communion with himself.
Precisely where I feel my poverty is where I discover God’s blessing.
A prayerful life is not a life in which we say many prayers, but a life in which nothing, absolutely nothing, is done, said, or understood independently of him who is the origin and purpose of our existence.
The world is waiting for new saints, ecstatic men and women who are so deeply rooted in the love of God that they are free to imagine a new international order.
Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.
The journey from teaching about love to allowing myself to be loved proved much longer than I realised.
The fruits of your labors may be reaped two generations from now. Trust, even when you don’t see the results.
Friendship has always belonged to the core of my spiritual journey.
God is a God of the present. God is always in the moment, be that moment hard or easy, joyful and painful.
When you recognize the festive and the still moments as moments of prayer, then you gradually realize that to pray is to live.
Theological formation is the gradual and often painful discovery of God’s incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.
The more we touch the intimate love of God which creates, sustains, and guides us, the more we recognize the multitude of fruits that come forth from that love.
The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it.
In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.
In 1970 I felt so lonely that I could not give; now I feel so joyful that giving seems easy. I hope that the day will come when the memory of my present joy will give me the strength to keep giving even when loneliness gnaws at my heart.
We have to keep asking ourselves: ‘What does it all mean? What is God trying to tell us? How are we called to live in the midst of all this?’ Without such questions our lives become numb and flat.
The art of living is to enjoy what we can see and not complain about what remains in the dark.
The great teachers are always those who can live the tension. They are not criticizing everybody, they’re not complaining. They give young people a vision.