We punish the body and strip the earth. And we do it in pursuit of a so-called holiness that smacks of the bogus, that denies the gifts of God, that makes us marauders on the earth.
It is a pathetic moment in the history of the human condition when the outside world tells us who and what we are – and we start to believe it ourselves. Then, bent over from the weight of the negativity, we start to wither on the outside...
Hospitality is simply love on the loose.
The Christmas season is a gift in itself. It releases us from the priorities of ordinary time and gives us the right to party more and pray more and love more.
The message we have internalized is clear – we are what we do and what we own, not what we are inside ourselves. Where it counts!
Find the thing that stirs your heart and make room for it.
No one finds time for prayer. You either take time for it or you don’t get it.
Life is not meant to be a burden. Life is not a problem to be solved. It is a blessing to be celebrated.
We must now surrender to the obligation to understand and to care. We must surrender ourselves to becoming conscious, thinking members of the human race. We must put down the temptation to powerlessness and surrender to the questions of the moment.
Never confuse desire with vision. Desire has to do with what we want. Vision has to do with what we need.
The vision of a culture lies in what becomes its major institutions, in what it remembers as its most impacting events, in who it sees as its heroes.
Temptations are part of life, part of growing up. We grapple with them often – in some instances for our lifetime – before we come to realize that it is not so much the victory as it is the struggle that is holy.
Real failure comes when we consider ourselves good enough at something to be able to repeat it rather than to develop it. “Success is dangerous,” the painter Pablo Picasso said. “One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.”
Learning to celebrate joy is one of the great practices of the spiritual life.
Getting to know ourselves and learning to control ourselves are the two great tasks of life. Don’t make up strange and exotic ‘penances.’ Simply say no to yourself once a day, and you will be on the road to sanctity for the rest of your life.
To be a presence of perpetual thanksgiving may be the ultimate goal of life. The thankful person is the one for whom life is simply one long exercise in the sacred.
To be contemplative we must become converted to the consciousness that makes us one with the universe, in tune with the cosmic voice of God.
Hope is what sits by the window and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there isn’t an ounce of proof in tonight’s black, black sky that it can possibly come.
Benedictine spirituality is a consistent one: live life normally, live life thouhtfully, live life profouncly, live life well. Never neglect and never exaggerate. It is a lesson that a world full of cults and fads and workaholics and short courses in difficult subjects needs dearly to learn.
Awareness of the sacred in life is what holds our world together, and the lack of awareness of the sacred is what is tearing it apart.